Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400-1700 9004346864, 9789004346864

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Editor
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction
Chapter 1 Alberti’s Commentarium to His First Literary Work: Self-Commentary as Self-Presentation in the Philodoxeos
Chapter 2 Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo’s Marginalia
Chapter 3 Vernacular Self-Commentary during Medieval Early Modernity: Reginald Pecock and Gavin Douglas
Chapter 4 On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approachto the Narrative/Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry
Chapter 5 Self-Commentary on Language in Sixteenth-Century Italian Prefatory Letters
Chapter 6 ‘All Outward and on Show’: Montaigne’s External Glosses
Chapter 7 Companions in Folly: Genre and Poetic Practice in Five Elizabethan Anthologies
Chapter 8 The Journey of the Soul: The Prose Commentaries on His Own Poems by St John of the Cross
Chapter 9 Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Annotation and Self-Exegesis in La Ceppède
Chapter 10 Can a Poet be ‘Master of [his] owne Meaning’? George Chapman and the Paradoxes of Authorship
Chapter 11 Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators
Chapter 12 Self-Criticism, Self-Assessment, and Self-Affirmation: The Case of the (Young) Author in Early Modern Dutch Literature
Chapter 13 Reading the Margins: The Uses of Authorial Side Glosses in Anna Stanisławska’s Transaction (1685)
Chapter 14 Mockery and Erudition: Alessandro Tassoni’s Secchia rapita and Francesco Redi’s Bacco inToscana
Afterword
Index Nominum

Citation preview

Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400–1700

Intersections Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture

General Editor Karl A.E. Enenkel (Chair of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster e-mail: kenen_01@uni_muenster.de) Editorial Board W. van Anrooij (University of Leiden) W. de Boer (Miami University) Chr. Göttler (University of Bern) J.L. de Jong (University of Groningen) W.S. Melion (Emory University) R. Seidel (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) P.J. Smith (University of Leiden) J. Thompson (Queen’s University Belfast) A. Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin) C. Zittel (University of Stuttgart) C. Zwierlein (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg)

VOLUME 62 – 2019

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/inte

Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400–1700 Edited by

Francesco Venturi

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Portrait du Caravage (‘Portrait of Caravaggio’), engraving by Henri Simon Thomassin (1687–1741). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Venturi, Francesco, 1984– editor. Title: Self-commentary in early modern European literature, 1400–1700 /  edited by Francesco Venturi. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: Intersections :  interdisciplinary studies in early modern culture, ISSN 1568-1181 ;  volume 62 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019011295 (print) | LCCN 2019016523 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004396593 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004346864 (hardback : paper) Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. | European  literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN671 (ebook) | LCC PN671 .S45 2019 (print) |  DDC 809/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011295

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1568-1181 ISBN 978-90-04-34686-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-39659-3 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Illustrations viii Notes on the Editor ix Notes on the Contributors x Introduction 1 Francesco Venturi 1 Alberti’s Commentarium to His First Literary Work: Self-Commentary as Self-Presentation in the Philodoxeos 28 Martin McLaughlin 2

Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo’s Marginalia 50 Jeroen De Keyser

3

Vernacular Self-Commentary during Medieval Early Modernity: Reginald Pecock and Gavin Douglas 71 Ian Johnson

4

On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approach to the Narrative/ Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry 99 Federica Pich

5

Self-Commentary on Language in Sixteenth-Century Italian Prefatory Letters 135 Brian Richardson

6

‘All Outward and on Show’: Montaigne’s External Glosses 165 John O’Brien

7

Companions in Folly: Genre and Poetic Practice in Five Elizabethan Anthologies 189 Harriet Archer

8

The Journey of the Soul: The Prose Commentaries on His Own Poems by St John of the Cross 231 Colin P. Thompson

vi

Contents

9

Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Annotation and Self-Exegesis in La Ceppède 263 Russell Ganim

10

Can a Poet be ‘Master of [his] owne Meaning’? George Chapman and the Paradoxes of Authorship 284 Gilles Bertheau

11

Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators 316 Joseph Harris

12

Self-Criticism, Self-Assessment, and Self-Affirmation: The Case of the (Young) Author in Early Modern Dutch Literature 338 Els Stronks

13

Reading the Margins: The Uses of Authorial Side Glosses in Anna Stanisławska’s Transaction (1685) 369 Magdalena Ożarska

14

Mockery and Erudition: Alessandro Tassoni’s Secchia rapita and Francesco Redi’s Bacco in Toscana 395 Carlo Caruso

Afterword 420 Richard Maber Index Nominum 425

Acknowledgements This volume had its origins in a conference with the same title held at Durham University in February 2016, under the aegis of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I would like to thank Carlo Caruso, my postdoctoral mentor at Durham, for his guidance and encouragement. I am also grateful to a number of colleagues in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Department of English Studies for their valuable help and insights, in particular Kathryn Banks, Laura Campbell, Annalisa Cipollone, Jan Clarke, Daniel Derrin, Patrick Gray, Richard Maber, John O’Brien, Marc Schachter, Kimberley Skelton, Luke Sunderland, Dario Tessicini, and Thomas Wynn. Thoughtful comments were also provided by Mishtooni Bose, Gabriele Bucchi, Tom Deneire, Gloria Hernández, Michael Hetherington, Jane Newman, David Oxlade, Paul Smith, and Michael Wyatt. Special thanks should be extended to the anonymous readers for their accurate feedback, and to Stuart Oglethorpe for his careful reading. Over the last year I have greatly benefitted from conversations with Guyda Armstrong, Giacomo Comiati, Simon Gilson, and Federica Pich. The concluding stages of the editing process received the support of the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo.

Illustrations 1.1

Leon Battista Alberti, Philodoxeos Fabula. Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, ms. α. O.7.9 [= Lat. 52], fol. 1 v. By kind permission of Il Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Italy 36 1.2 Leon Battista Alberti, Philodoxeos Fabula. Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, ms. α. O.7.9 [= Lat. 52], fol. 2r. By kind permission of Il Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Italy 37 1.3 Leon Battista Alberti, Philodoxeos Fabula. Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, ms. α. O.7.9 [= Lat. 52], fols. 6v–7r. By kind permission of Il Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Italy 38 1.4 Leon Battista Alberti, “Self-portrait” (c. 1435). Bronze, 20,1 × 13,6 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection 39 6.1 Montaigne, characterisation of Caesar, in Caesar, Commentarii (Antwerp, Christopher Plantin: 1570), shelfmark: XII D 58. By kind permission of BVH (Tours) and the Musée Condé, Chantilly 170 7.1 Edmund Spenser, woodcut illustration to the April eclogue, The Shepheardes Calender (London, Hugh Singleton: 1579), fol. 11 v 198 12.1 (Detail of) the title page of Publius Virgilius Maroos Wercken vertaalt door J. van den Vondel (Amsterdam, Abraham de Wees: 1646). By kind permission of Universiteitsbibliotheek Universiteit Utrecht, sign. MAG: Z QU 28 351 13.1 Anna Stanisławska, Transakcyja albo Opisanie całego życia jednej sieroty przez żałosne treny od tejże samej pisane roku 1685, ed. Ida Kotowa, Polish Writers’ Library Series, No. 85 (Krakow: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1935), VII. Print. Page 137 of the original manuscript 371 13.2 Portrait of Anna Stanisławska, artist unknown, 17th century, National Museum in Warsaw; public domain 378

Notes on the Editor Francesco Venturi is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Oslo and Honorary Fellow at Durham University (UK). He received his doctorate from the University of Siena in 2012 and was subsequently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia, working on two projects funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research (Prin and Firb, 2012–2014). From 2014 to 2016 he was an International Postdoctoral Fellow (Marie Curie Co-fund) and part-time lecturer in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham. Since 2017 he has been a participant in the project “Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, c. 1350–c. 1650”, funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, which brings together scholars from the Universities of Oxford, Leeds, and Manchester. His research has primarily focused on both Renaissance literature and twentieth-century Italian poetry and novels. His monograph on Andrea Zanzotto explored this contemporary poet’s archive and manuscripts (Genesi e storia della ‘trilogia’ di Andrea Zanzotto, 2016); he has also undertaken extensive research on Carlo Emilio Gadda, arguably Italy’s greatest modernist writer. Amongst his forthcoming publications is a critical and annotated edition of the Rime by sixteenth-century poet Annibal Caro.

Notes on the Contributors Harriet Archer is Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of St Andrews. She received her doctorate, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, from the University of Oxford, and subsequently held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Newcastle University (2013–2016). She is the author of Unperfect Histories: The ‘Mirror for Magistrates’, 1559–1610 (Oxford English Monographs: 2017), and the co-editor, with Andrew Hadfield, of the collection of essays ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (2016), and, with Paul Frazer, of a critical edition of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc (forthcoming). Gilles Bertheau is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Tours and a member of the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance. A specialist in George Chapman’s French tragedies, he has recently published the Garnier edition and the first translation of The Tragedy of Chabot Admiral of France / La Tragédie de Chabot, amiral de France (2016). Besides regularly publishing articles and chapters on Chapman and his contemporaries, he has edited and annotated the text of Sir Thomas More by Anthony Munday, William Shakespeare et alii (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: 2008). He has also co-edited two issues of Etudes Epistémè: “Figures du conflit” (2008) and “Aspects du serment en Angleterre (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): histoire, littérature et droit” (2013). Carlo Caruso is Professor of Italian Philology at the University of Siena and Honorary Professor at Durham University. He is the author of Adonis: The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian Renaissance (2013), the editor of The Life of Texts: Evidence in Textual Production, Transmission and Reception (2018), and the co-editor of Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300–1600 (2009) and La filologia in Italia nel Rinascimento (2018). He has published critical editions of Paolo Rolli, Libretti per musica (1993); Paolo Giovio, Ritratti (1999); and Diomede Borghese, Orazioni accademiche (2009). Between 2013 and 2016 he worked on the project “Italian Vernacular Classics and Textual Scholarship, 1270–1870”.

Notes on the Contributors

xi

Jeroen De Keyser is Research Professor of Latin at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and General Editor of Humanistica Lovaniensia. Journal of Neo-Latin Studies. He studied Classics at Ghent, specialised in Renaissance Latin in Florence, and was awarded his doctorate at the University of Turin. His main research interests include the transmission of the Latin and Greek literary tradition in the Italian Renaissance, and the history of rhetoric, Latin epic poetry, historiography, and epistolography, with a special focus on the writings of George Trapezuntius, Antonio Loschi, Francesco Filelfo, Poggio Bracciolini, and Cicero. He has published editions of Filelfo’s Traduzioni da Senofonte e Plutarco (2012), On Exile (2013), Sphortias (2015), and four volumes of Collected Letters (2016). He has recently edited the collection of essays Francesco Filelfo, Man of Letters (2019). Russell Ganim is Professor of French and Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Iowa. He has served as President of the North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature and has been the co-editor of the scholarly annual EMF: Studies in Early Modern France and of the EMF monograph series, EMF Critiques. He is the author of the monograph Renaissance Resonance: Lyric Modality in La Ceppède’s Théorèmes (1998) and has co-edited The Shape of Change: Essays in Early Modern Literature and La Fontaine in Honor of David Lee Rubin (2002), Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (2004), and Origines: Actes du 39e congrès annuel de la North American Society for Seventeenth Century French Literature (2009). Joseph Harris is Reader in Early Modern Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Author of two monographs, Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century France (2005) and Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (2014), he has also edited a special issue of Nottingham French Studies (2008) on Identification before Freud: French Perspectives. He is co-editor, with Julia Prest, of Guilty Pleasures – Theatre, Piety, and Immorality in Seventeenth-Century France (Special Issue of Yale French Studies, 2016). He is currently finishing a project on death in Pierre Corneille and is starting one on misanthropy in early modern Europe.

xii

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Ian Johnson is Reader in English and a member of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of St Andrews. He was Co-Director of the Queen’s Belfast – St Andrews project Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, 1350–1550 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2007–2011). With Alastair Minnis he edited The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume II. The Middle Ages (2005). His more recent books are The Middle English Life of Christ: Academic Discourse, Translation and Vernacular Theology (2013), The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition, edited with Allan Westphall (2013), and The Impact of Latin Culture on Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, edited with Alessandra Petrina (2017). He is currently writing a monograph on the translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae in late medieval England and Scotland. Richard Maber is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the founder (1985) and General Editor of the journal The Seventeenth Century. He is the author of The Poetry of Pierre Le Moyne (1982), Malherbe, Théophile de Viau, and Saint-Amant (1983), and Publishing in the Republic of Letters: The Ménage-Grævius-Wetstein Correspondence, 1679–1692 (2005). He is also the editor of Nouveaux Mondes (1994), La France et L’Europe du Nord au XVIIe siècle (2017), and Managing Time: Literature and Devotion in Early Modern France (with Joanna Barker, 2017). He has published the critical edition of Pierre Le Moyne, Entretiens et lettres poétiques (2012) and is currently preparing Gilles Ménage (1613–1692): Correspondance complète (5 vols.). Martin McLaughlin is an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, where he was Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian. He has published widely on Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present, including the monographs Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance (1995), Italo Calvino (1998), and Leon Battista Alberti. La vita, l’umanesimo, le opere letterarie (2016). He has co-edited several volumes, notably Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 Years (2007), Biographies and Autobiographies in Modern Italy (2007), Dante the Lyric and Ethical Poet. Dante lirico e etico (2010), Authority, Innovation and Early Modern Epistemology: Essays in Honour of Hilary Gatti (2015), and Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’: Traditions, Text and Translations (2017). He has also published translations of works by Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, most recently Italo Calvino, Letters, 1941–1985 (2013).

Notes on the Contributors

xiii

John O’Brien is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University, where he was director of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies between 2013 and 2016. Alongside a longstanding interest in the presence and influence of Greek in the French Renaissance, his research concentrates on Michel de Montaigne and the literature of the French Wars of Religion. He is the author of Anacreon Redivivus (1995), the editor of (Ré)interprétations: etudes sur le seizième siècle (1995), La familia de Montaigne (2001), and the Cambridge Companion to Rabelais (2011), amongst other publications. Following his discovery of a new manuscript of the Servitude Volontaire by La Boétie (1530–1563), he has recently worked on a collaborative book, La Première Circulation de la ‘Servitude Volontaire’ en France et au-delà, to be published by Champion (Paris) in 2019. Magdalena Ożarska is Associate Professor of English Literature at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland. She is the author of three monographs: Meanderings of the English Enlightenment: The Literary Oeuvre of Christopher Smart (2008), Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (2013), and Two Women Writers and their Italian Tours: Mary Shelley’s ‘Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843’ and Łucja Rautenstrauchowa’s ‘In and Beyond the Alps’ (2014). Her research interests include English and Polish women’s self-writing and early novels from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, animal studies, and digital humanities. Federica Pich is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where she obtained her doctorate in 2006. Her research has mainly focused on lyric poetry, Lodovico Ariosto, and the relationship between literature and visual arts in the Renaissance. She is the author of the monograph I poeti davanti al ritratto. Da Petrarca a Marino (2010), and the editor of the annotated anthology Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento (2008, in collaboration with Lina Bolzoni). She has co-edited, with Andrea Torre, Di l’artifitial memoria. Facsimile e trascrizione del ms. 3368 della Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève di Parigi (2017). Her current research project, Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy (c. 1350–c. 1650), is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Brian Richardson is Emeritus Professor of Italian Language at the University of Leeds, a Fellow of the British Academy, and Socio Corrispondente dell’Accademia della Crusca.

xiv

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His research centres on the history of the Italian language and the history of the circulation of texts in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. His publications include Print Culture in Renaissance Italy. The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (1994), Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (1999), Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (2009), and editions of Trattati sull’ortografia del volgare 1524–1526 (1984) and Giovan Francesco Fortunio’s Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua (2001). He is a co-editor of Interactions between Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italian Culture (2016), Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (2016), and Cultural Reception, Translation and Transformation from Medieval to Modern Italy (2017). Els Stronks is Professor of Early Modern Dutch Literature and Culture at Utrecht University. She is the author of three monographs: Stichten of Schitteren: de poëzie van gereformeerde predikanten (1996), Het hart naar boven. Religieuze poëzie in de zeventiende eeuw (1999, with Ton van Strien), and Negotiating Differences: Word, Image and Religion (2011). She has co-edited a number of volumes, including Learned Love: Proceedings of the Emblem Project Utrecht Conference (2007) and Illustrated Religious Texts in the North of Europe, 1500–1800 (2014). She has been leading the Emblem Project Utrecht (EPU), established to digitise and analyse Dutch love emblem books, religious as well as secular, published between 1601 and 1724. She is currently involved in the research project Golden Agents, which aims to unravel the dynamics of the Dutch Republic’s creative industry. Colin Thompson is an Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of three books, each translated into Spanish: The Poet and the Mystic: A Study of the Cántico espiritual of San Juan de la Cruz (1977) and El poeta y el místico (1985); The Strife of Tongues: Fray Luis de León and the Golden Age of Spain (1988) and La lucha de las lenguas: Fray Luis de León y el Siglo de Oro en España (1995); St John of the Cross: Songs in the Night (2002) and Canciones en la noche: Estudio sobre san Juan de la Cruz (2002). He has co-edited The Discerning Eye (1994), Fray Luis de León. Reportata theologica (1996), Culture and Society in Habsburg Spain (2001), and The Spanish Ballad in the Golden Age (2008).

Introduction Francesco Venturi In the prologue to his commentary on his own sonnets, Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent (1449–1492) wrote that the elevated content of his love poems had encouraged him to accompany them with a full explanation of their philosophical and literary substance. At the risk of appearing presumptuous, he viewed himself as the best interpreter of his own texts and thus the only person fully qualified to make them intelligible to the reader: A me non pare presunzione lo interpretare le cose mie, ma più presto tòrre fatica ad altri; e di nessuno è più proprio officio lo interpretare che di colui medesimo che ha scritto, perché nessuno può meglio sapere o elicere la verità del senso suo: come mostra assai chiaramente la confusione che nasce della varietà de’ comenti, nelli quali el più delle volte si segue più tosto la natura propria che l’intenzione vera di chi ha scritto. (It does not seem to me presumption to interpret my own work, but rather eagerness to free others from the task. And I insist that for no one is interpretation a more appropriate office than for that same person who has composed. For no one can better know or elucidate the truth of his meaning. This clearly appears in that confusion which breeds from the variety of comments that, most of the time, follow their own agendas rather than the true intention of the one who has written.)1 Such self-aggrandisement and scepticism about the reader’s comprehension would be challenged by today’s critics, who have questioned the role and primacy of the authorial voice and downgraded the importance of authorial intent in the hermeneutic process. In the early modern period, however, Lorenzo de’ Medici was certainly not alone in his opinions. The Venetian friar Gabriele Fiamma, for example, employed a similar argument against readerly freedom when he explained why he had composed the hefty self-exegetical apparatus 1  The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent: A Commentary on My Own Sonnets, critical text of Il comento by T. Zanato, trans. J. Wyatt Cook, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 129 (Binghamton: 1995) 32–33. On the characteristics of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s extensive self-exegetical prose, and in particular on its considerable debt to the example set by Dante’s Vita Nova and Convivio, see Roush S., Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella, Toronto Italian Studies (Toronto: 2002) 71–95.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_002

2

Venturi

attached to his Rime spirituali (1570). He first stated his desire to forestall any treacherous and heretical interpretations by providing unambiguous explanations of the religious themes in his poems. He then pointed out the intrinsic inability of the commentators to grasp the true meaning of poetic texts: I commentatori de’ poeti vanno con tanta difficultà indovinando la mente degli auttori che molte fiate fanno lor dir cose ch’eglino non pensarono giamai. Il che se volessero far nelle cose mie, senza dubbio potrebbono dare in qualche brutto fallo; conciosia che non si erra in alcun soggetto con maggior pericolo che d’intorno a quei delle sacre lettere, intorno alle quali sono tutti i pensieri miei in queste rime. (Commentators on poets have such difficulty in reading the minds of authors that they frequently make them say things that they had never intended. If they wanted to do this in relation to my writings, they would undoubtedly make some terrible errors; indeed, there are no subjects where one can stray with greater danger than in those of religious texts on which all my thoughts focus in these poems.)2 The assumption of personal responsibility for the elucidation of meaning in one’s own texts, thus claiming the role of commentator as well as that of author, is a significant decision for a writer in any era. It involves a clear demarcation of tasks and establishes two distinct literary personae: on the one hand, an interpreted writer who is analysed, on the other, an interpreting reader or critic who analyses, whilst the output remains that of a single individual. Dante’s founding and highly influential role in the development of selfcommentary in Western literature has long been acknowledged. In his youthful prosimetrum Vita Nova (c. 1295) he assembled a selection of his lyric poems, connecting them with a narrative explaining their genesis (ragioni) and interspersing them with textual analysis indebted to the scholastic practice of 2  Fiamma Gabriele, Rime spirituali (Venice, Franceschi: 1570), fol. a6v (my translation). On the features of Fiamma’s commentary, including the way in which it surrounds and all but engulfs his spiritual poems, see Zaja P., “‘Perch’arda meco del tuo amore il mondo’. Lettura delle ‘Rime spirituali’ di Gabriele Fiamma”, in Ardissino E. – Selmi E. (eds.), Poesia e retorica del sacro tra Cinque e Seicento, Manierismo e barocco 11 (Alessandria: 2009) 235–292; idem, “Natura e funzione del paratesto nelle ‘Rime spirituali’ di Gabriele Fiamma (1570)”, in Bossier Ph. – Scheffer R. (eds.), Soglie testuali. Funzioni del paratesto nel secondo Cinquecento e oltre / Textual Thresholds. Functions of Paratexts in the Late Sixteenth Century and Beyond. Atti della giornata di studi, Università di Groningen, 13 dicembre 2007, Cinquecento. Studi 36 (Rome: 2010) 61–101.

Introduction

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glossing (divisioni). As is evident right from the beginning of the book, the first-person copyist and commentator is none other than the first-person author who had earlier penned the lyric verse. The figures of the auctor, scriptor, and commentator, which had been clearly differentiated by St Bonaventure in a well-known passage of his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences,3 are thus merged into one in the Vita Nova in an innovative and ingenious fashion: In quella parte del libro della mia memoria dinanzi alla quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice Incipit Vita Nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scripte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’asemplare in questo libello, e se non tutte, almeno la loro sententia. (In that part of the book of my memory before which there is little to read is a chapter heading that says ‘Incipit Vita Nova’. Under that heading I find written the words that it is my intention to copy out in this little volume; and if not all of them, at least their basic meaning.)4 Self-commentaries combine authenticity with ambiguity, and thus profoundly differ in their rationale from standard commentaries as we understand them today. Due to the author’s privileged perspective on their own writing, they offer revealing insights and inevitably influence the work’s subsequent reading and interpretation. However, authorial commentaries may serve more than one purpose, easily veering off into self-praise, apologia, or retraction and thus ascribing a skewed meaning to the primary text or superimposing an entirely new articulation. In the early modern age, auto-commentaries gained 3  Minnis A.J., Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: 1988) 94–11; Minnis A.J. – Scott A.B. (eds.), with the assistance of D. Wallace, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition revd. ed (Oxford: 1991) 229. 4  Alighieri Dante, Vita nova, ed. G. Gorni, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotat1 15 (Turin: 1996) I.I; the translation is taken from Ascoli A.R., Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: 2008) 185–186. The critical literature on Dante’s self-exegesis is too vast to cite here. On the self-commentary in the Vita Nova and Convivio, see, for example, Picone M., “Strutture poetiche e prosastiche nella Vita nuova”, Modern Language Notes 92 (1977) 117–129; idem, “La Vita nuova tra autobiografia e tipologia”, in idem (ed.), Dante e le forme dell’allegoresi, Studi danteschi (Ravenna: 1987) 59–69; idem, “La teoria dell’Auctoritas nella Vita nova”, Tenzone 6 (2005) 173–191; Baranski Z.G., “Dante Alighieri: experimentation and (self-)exegesis”, in Minnis A. – Johnson I. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume II: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2005) 561–582; Ascoli A.R., “Auto-commentary: Dividing Dante”, in idem, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: 2008) 175–226. Other studies are referred to by Ascoli, and by Federica Pich in her chapter for this volume.

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prominence and appeared in a multiplicity of novel forms. Behind this growth lay a number of momentous and interconnected processes: the legitimation of vernacular languages across Europe, expansion of the printing industry, the expectations of an increasingly varied and diffuse reading public, the construction of literary canons, and a more rigid codification of literary genres, styles, and models. This volume is the first wide-ranging investigation of self-commentary in the early modern period, spanning the three centuries between 1400 and 1700 and covering the most important areas of cultural production in Europe. Despite being a significant phenomenon in Western culture, self-commentaries have received scant attention, partly because critics have taken an over-cautious approach to authorship after Roland Barthes famously proclaimed ‘the death of the author’ in 1967.5 To redress this deficiency in a comprehensive way, this collection brings together fourteen original chapters by established scholars and experts in the fields of Italian, French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, and Neo-Latin Renaissance literature. A number of crucial and interrelated questions lie at the core of the book. What forms do authorial commentaries take in the early modern period? What specific dynamics are in play when a writer comments on their own text? How do authorial commentaries mimic standard commentaries in the Renaissance? If the intention of commentaries is to facilitate textual comprehension and bridge the gap between a text 5  Barthes R., “The Death of the Author”, Aspen Magazine 5–6 (1967), repr. in idem, Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (New York: 1977) 142–154; “La mort de l’auteur”, Mantéia 5 (1968) 12–17, repr. in idem, Le bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV, Points. Essais 258 (Paris: 1984) 63–69. An appraisal of the debate and critical literature on authorship, subjectivity, and the ‘intentionalist fallacy’ is provided by Burke S., The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: 2010). For discussion of the reception turn in the 1960s and reader-oriented criticism, see in particular Iser W., The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore – London: 1978); Jauss H.R., Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. T. Bahti, introd. P. de Man, Theory and History of Literature 2 (Minneapolis: 1982). Recent studies on authorship in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period include, amongst others, Ascoli A.R., “Worthy of Faith? Authors and Readers in Early Modernity”, in Martin J.J. (ed.), The Renaissance World, Routledge Worlds (London: 2007) 435–451; idem, “The Author in History”, in idem, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author 3–64; Bolens G. – Erne L. (eds.), Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25 (Tübingen: 2011); Enenkel K.A.E., Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur (ca. 1350–ca. 1650). Zur autorisierenden und wissensvermittelnden Funktion von Widmungen, Vorworttexten, Autorporträts und Dedikationsbildern, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 48 (Leiden – Boston: 2014). The analysis of twentieth-century forms of self-commentary in the light of literary theory has been initiated in Ricci R., “Morphologies and Functions of Self-Criticism in Modern Times: Has the Author Come Back?”, Modern Language Notes 118 (January 2003) 116–146.

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and its readership, in what ways is that also true of self-commentaries? What additional motivation and strategies are at work? How do self-commentaries expand the possibilities and locations of textual meaning? How do they generate multiple meanings, and in certain cases even completely depart from the commented text? How do early modern writers position themselves in relation to their classical and vernacular antecedents? How do self-commentaries interact with the primary text and contribute to its reception? The essays in this volume break new ground in pursuit of these questions, examining the range, function, and nature of self-commenting devices in a number of key works. These encompass an array of genres, which include lyric, epic, and celebratory poetry; satirical and heroicomic verse; philosophical, theological, and autobiographical prose; theatrical comedy and tragedy; and translations of Greek and Latin classics. Auto-commentaries are more than an external apparatus; their purpose is to direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. In viewing the writer as the first reader and potentially a very influential and even tendentious interpreter of their own work, the contributions collected here all reflect to a greater or lesser extent on the tension between the author’s intentions and the readers’ response, and offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation.

…

At least from a philological standpoint, a commentary is today conceived of as an auxiliary verbal apparatus aimed at making a text comprehensible and mediating between the author’s temporally or culturally remote context and their modern-day readership. Matters stood quite differently, however, in the early modern period. A vast and growing body of critical work has advanced our understanding of exegetical practices in the Renaissance,6 most notably 6  Buck A. – Herding O. (eds.), Der Kommentar in der Renaissance, Deutsche For­­schungs­ gemeinschaft: Kommission für Humanismusforschung / Mitteilung 1 (Boppard: 1975); Céard J., “Les transformation du genre du commentaire”, in Lafond J. – Stegmann A. (eds.), L’automne de la Renaissance, 1580–1630 (Paris: 1981) 101–115; Grafton A., Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA – London: 1991); Mathieu-Castellani G. – Plaisance M. (eds.), Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire: France/Italie (XIV e–XVIe siècles). Actes du colloque international sur le commentaire (Paris: 1990); Besomi O. – Caruso C. (eds.), Il commento ai testi (Basel – Boston – Berlin: 1992); Jeanneret M., “Renaissance Exegesis”, in Norton G.P. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume III: The Renaissance (Cambridge: 1999) 36–43; Most G.W. (ed.), Commentaries – Kommentare, Aporemata 4 (Göttingen: 1999); Pade M. (ed.), On Renaissance Commentaries, Noctes Neolatinae / Neo-Latin Texts and Studies 4 (Hildesheim – New York:

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with regard to commentaries on the classics7 and on works in the vernacular that were elevated to the canon.8 As Karl Enenkel and Henk Nellen have shown in their focus on Neo-Latin production, early modern running commentaries tend to incorporate matter unrelated to the source text: they are constantly stopping to make space for heavy-handed digressions or personal observations, and often expand to the extent that they become encyclopedic repositories of knowledge across disparate fields.9 In particular cases, the idea of their dependence on, and subordination to, the main work is contradicted by the fact that they could even be referred to without the primary text being read or consulted. In this regard, it should be remembered that the separation of literary creation from scholarship was a lengthy process that was not completed until the nineteenth century. An essential feature of early modern commentaries is thus the blurring of the distinction between the original work and the 2005); Danzi M. – Leporatti R. (eds.), Il poeta e il suo pubblico. Lettura e commento dei testi li­ rici nel Cinquecento, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 482 (Geneva: 2012). Only essential bibliographical references on major branches of research, to provide preliminary orientation for the reader, will be given in the footnotes hereafter. 7  Grafton A., Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Jerome Lecture Series 20 (Ann Arbor: 1997); Gibson R.K. – Shuttleworth Kraus C. (eds.), The Classical Commentary: History, Practices, Theory, Mnemosyne. Supplement 232 (Leiden: 2002); Enenkel K.A.E. – Nellen H. (eds.), Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400–1700), Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia XXXIII (Leuven: 2013); Enenkel K.A.E. (ed.), Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 29 (Leiden – Boston: 2014). 8  Italian vernacular texts were amongst the first to gain a standing comparable to that of the Greek and Latin classics and to attract scholarly scrutiny. For the rich commentary tradition on Dante, and ample bibliographical information, see the following overarching studies: Nasti P. – Rossignoli C. (eds.), Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary, The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature 13 (Notre Dame: 2013); Malato E. – Mazzucchi A. (eds.), Censimento dei Commenti danteschi. 1 I commenti di tradizione manoscritta ( fino al 1480), 2 vols. (Rome: 2011) and 2. I commenti di tradizione a stampa (dal 1477 al 2000) e altri di tradizione manoscritta posteriori al 1480 (Rome: 2014); Gilson S., Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy: Florence, Venice and the ‘Divine Poet’ (Cambridge: 2018). A project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council is currently conducting a thorough investigation on “Petrarch Exegesis and Commentary in Renaissance Italy, c. 1350–c. 1650” (Universities of Oxford, Leeds, and Manchester, 2017–2020); on the same topic, see Belloni G., Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo. Studi sul commento umanistico-rinascimentale al ‘Canzoniere’, Studi sul Petrarca 22 (Padua: 1992); Kennedy W.J., Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY: 1994). On the elevation to canonical status of the sixteenth-century work by Ludovico Ariosto soon after its publication, see Javitch D., Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of ‘Orlando Furioso’ (Princeton: 1991). 9  Enenkel K.A.E. – Nellen H., “Introduction”, in eidem (eds.), Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge 1–76 (8–12).

Introduction

7

commentary that derives from it. Michel Jeanneret, writing about the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has incisively drawn attention to this crucial issue: The borders between the primary and secondary, the separation between commentary’s object and commentary itself, are often fluctuating or nonexistent, so that many traces of commentary appear in unexpected contexts and even in fiction. The gloss will not be confined to an inferior role, but imposes itself as one of the avenues of creation. In commentarius, etymology indicates the presence of comminisci, to feign, invent, imagine, as if to announce the absolute solidarity of reading and writing, of understanding the other and realizing the self.10 The period between 1400 and 1700, taken as a whole, witnessed exponential growth in the production of commentaries; these were added not only to an increasing number of Greek and Latin texts but also to vernacular works that were much closer in time, if not contemporary. Enenkel and Nellen have rightly stressed the difficulty of identifying a linear evolution of the commentary genre over this time span.11 One consistent feature, however, is that the judgement of a text as worthy of commentary implies the recognition or bolstering of its authority, and consequently its elevation to the rank of a classic. After the advent of printing, from the early period of incunabula right through to the end of the seventeenth century, texts of any kind were increasingly unlikely to be published unadorned and with no mediation. Even when commentaries are not present in the form of glosses or explicatory prose, a rich variety of paratexts, including dedications and addresses to the reader, prefaces and rubrics, and illustrations and marginalia, accompany the texts and contain elements geared to steering the reader and wresting control from them of interpretation of the works. The steadily greater accessibility of texts in environments far from those of their original composition also resulted in the expansion and diversification of the reading public. The history of reading has become another flourishing field 10  Jeanneret M., “Commentary on Fiction, Fiction as Commentary”, in Patterson L. – Nichols G.S. (eds.), Commentary as Cultural Artifact. Special Issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 91, 4 (Fall 1992) 909–928 (926). 11  Enenkel K.A.E. – Nellen H., “Introduction”, in eidem (eds.), Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge 59–70. A useful summary can be found in Enenkel K.A.E., “The Neo-Latin Commentary”, in Ford Ph. – Bloemendal J. – Fantazzi C. (eds.), Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Neo-Latin World, The Renaissance Society of America 3 (Leiden – Boston: 2014) vol. 1, 207–216. See also Grafton A., “Commentary”, in Grafton A. – Most G.W. – Settis S. (eds.), The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA – London: 2010) 225–233.

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of study, exploring the ways in which readers actively engaged with texts and thereby shaped the process of cultural production and transmission. The picture that has now emerged for the Renaissance is extremely varied and complex.12 Valuable evidence of the appropriation of works by their readership has included the handwritten notes jotted down in the margins of books, which have attracted considerable scholarly attention since the late 1980s.13 What if we shift the focus towards the author, considering how and to what extent writers made themselves the commentators or annotators of their own texts in the early modern period? Given that a cluster of crucial interwoven phenomena and research fields has been distinguished in relation to commentary in general, what new significance does this acquire if we adopt the author’s perspective? Whereas some valuable contributions have addressed narrowly circumscribed aspects of self-commentary in specific authors or national traditions, a survey of the topic from a pan-European perspective has been lacking.14 Just as commentary is an open genre not subject to exacting regulation, selfcommentary takes many varied forms and is difficult to define. In his introduction to the proceedings of a conference on self-commentary from Dante to the nineteenth century, Gianfranco Folena gives a broad description of 12  Cavallo G. – Chartier R. (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, trans. L.G. Cochrane (Cambridge: 1999); Raven J. – Small H. – Tadmor N. (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: 1996); Andersen J. – Sauer E. (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: 2002); Sharpe K., Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: 2002); Miglietti  S. – Parker S.E. (eds.), Reading Publics in Renaissance Europe 1450–1650. Special Issue of History of European Ideas 45, 3 (2016). 13  Stoddard R., Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, MA: 1985); Alston R.C., Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library (London: 1994); Grafton A., “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and His Books”, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91 (1997) 139–157; Jackson H.J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: 2001); Richardson B., “Inscribed Meanings: Authorial Self-Fashioning and Readers’ Annotations in Sixteenth-Century Italian Printed Books”, in Moulton I. (ed.), Reading and Literacy: In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 8 (Turnhout: 2004) 85–104 (with further bibliography at p. 96, n. 33); Sherman W.H., Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, Material Texts (Philadelphia: 2008). 14  A conference entitled “The Medieval Self-Commentary: A Transnational Perspective” was organised at the University of Geneva on 22–23 July 2014 by Francesca Geymonat, Ian Johnson, and Aglae Pizzone (proceedings in preparation). Within an edited collection with a broader focus on literary criticism and exegetical practices (see n. 6 above), there is a specific section on self-commentary: Mathieu-Castellani – Plaisance (eds.), Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire 83–110.

Introduction

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this phenomenon as ‘the exegesis applied by the author to all levels of their own work’.15 In his view, self-commentary falls within more general categories such as metadiscourse and hypertextuality, and encompasses all the different ways in which an author intervenes to interpret and clarify the meaning or genesis of their work, whether their intention is endorsement or repudiation. By contrast, Sherry Roush, in her enquiry into the narrower form of ‘poetic self-commentary’, offers a more specific definition of this as a ‘unified work of poetry and the poet’s own paraphrase, gloss, or other ostensibly interpretive prose intervention’.16 Self-commentary clearly overlaps with the category of paratexte introduced by Gérard Genette in his seminal study Seuils (1987, rendered in English as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation). Recent critical studies have highlighted the complex collaborative dynamics affecting the packaging of books and the fundamental role of printers and stationers in the textual production involving the creation and manipulation of paratextual materials.17 As a consequence, Genette’s emphasis on the authorial dimension has been generally rejected and paratexts have been more properly seen as ‘a site of contestation and negotiation among authors, publisher/printers, and readership(s)’.18 Nonetheless, for the purpose of dealing with self-commentaries it seems appropriate to refer to Genette’s definition of a ‘paratext’: ‘a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that – whether well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the

15  Folena G., “Premessa”, in Peron G. (ed.), L’autocommento. Atti del xvii Convegno Interuniversitario (Bressanone, 1990) Quaderni del Circolo Filologico-Linguistico Padovano 17 (Padua: 1994) 1–10 (2), repr. in Folena G., Scrittori e scritture. Le occasioni della critica (Bologna: 1997) 310–316. See also Carrai S., “Il commento d’autore”, in Intorno al testo. Tipologie del corredo esegetico e soluzioni editoriali. Atti del Convegno di Urbino: 1–3 ottobre 2001, Pubblicazioni del Centro Pio Rajna. Studi e saggi 2 (Rome: 2003) 223–241. 16  Roush, Hermes’ Lyre 5. 17  Richardson B., Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600, Studies in Publishing and Printing History (Cambridge: 1994); Rose M., Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: 1995); Hirschfeld H., “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship”, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 116 (2001) 609–622; Saenger M., The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot: 2006); Maclean I., Learning and the Market Place: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book, Library of the Written World 9 (Leiden: 2009); Smith H. – Wilson L. (eds.), “Introduction”, in eaedem, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: 2011) 1–14. 18  Marotti A.F., Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: 1995) 222.

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eyes of the author and his allies)’.19 If patently orchestrated by the author or produced under their watchful supervision, certain types of paratext may act as self-commentaries with varying degrees of explicitness or subtlety. Within the vast domain of paratexts, Genette distinguishes certain types on the basis of their location. He uses the term ‘peritext’ for any framing device that accompanies a text within the original book, operating, as it were, in close proximity; ‘epitext’, by contrast, is employed to describe the documents that relate to a given text but lie outside the physical constraints of the book, such as interviews, letters, and archival materials. As Genette’s classification mainly refers to nineteenth-century French works of fiction, it needs adjustment in order to apply to the peculiarities of early modern texts. In addition, those paratexts best suited to serving as self-commentary need to be identified. In this volume, the following diverse forms of self-commentary, by no means an exhaustive taxonomy, come under examination: (a) hybrid, prosimetric works in which poetic texts and commentary alternate; (b) systematic glossarial commentaries; (c) discontinuous notes in manuscripts; (d) prefaces or letters of dedication that function as literary calling cards or deal with specific features of the work; and (e) various elements surrounding the main text that convey metatextual or autobiographical information (such as captions, rubrics introducing poems, and printed marginalia). Particularly noteworthy amongst the epitexts of the Renaissance are the autonomous critical texts, private letters, diaries, and other works that incorporate quotations from the text of reference or return to this by explicating it or subjecting it to additional scrutiny. Before any further discussion of these forms, however, the diachronic breadth and content of each chapter should be briefly set out.

…

This volume is, by and large, structured chronologically and charts a path from Latin humanism through to seventeenth-century literature, thus spanning roughly three centuries and taking into account the shift from manuscript to print culture. In order to avoid an excessively rigid pattern the collection has not been divided into sections: this respects the distinctiveness of each contribution whilst allowing for the identification of diverse connections between the essays. Chapters can be read in varying order and grouped according to 19  Genette G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: 1997; origin.: Seuils, Paris: 1987) 2. See also ibidem 9: ‘by definition, something is not a paratext unless the author or one of his associates accepts responsibility for it, although the degree of responsibility may vary’.

Introduction

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different criteria, for example the literary genres of the main texts (poetry, theatre, etc.) or the morphology of the self-commentary (glosses, prefatory materials, etc.); they can also be assembled around key issues such as self-justification and self-presentation. Inevitably, the complex and multi-faceted topic of selfcommentary in early modern European literature could not be comprehensively discussed, nor could its extensive corpus be fully explored. Whilst the reader will therefore not find all the canonical examples of self-commentary in this book, each chapter offers either primary research on neglected cases or new perspectives on authors who are already well-known. The essays have been selected in order to cover a wide geographical and chronological span, to address various modes of self-commentary from different angles, and to foster new research on the topic. The opening contribution demonstrates how self-commentaries could be intertwined with self-representation and autobiography. Martin McLaughlin (Chapter 1) examines Leon Battista Alberti’s youthful Latin comedy Philodoxeos fabula, whose second redaction (1434) incorporates a prologue with the title Commentarium as well as a summary (Argumentum) and a dedicatory letter to Leonello d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara. The brief, jocular prologue to the first version of the play (1424) had attributed it to Lepidus, supposedly a classical author, but in the subsequent Commentarium Alberti is at pains to assert his authorship and bolster his credentials as a brilliant humanist endowed with an extraordinary knowledge of Latin. Besides conferring an allegorical meaning on the youthful comedy, which contained vulgarities and obscenities, the Commentarium recounts the circumstances of the text’s genesis and gives details of Alberti’s life; it stresses the genius that enabled him, at an early age, to write a play that could pass for a comedy written in antiquity. Strategies of self-promotion are detected by Jeroen De Keyser (Chapter 2) in the prolific letters and works of the Italian humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398– 1481), who was constantly preoccupied with his image as a superior writer with a unique command of Latin and Greek and mastery of a multiplicity of genres. Filelfo took great care with reworking and framing the handwritten copies of his texts that were to circulate in various courts, both within Italy and further afield, being eager to advance himself and highly sensitive to their potential reception. De Keyser suggests a specific classification of the marginal annotations that Filelfo added to his Latin translations of Greek classics (Xenophon in particular), which became an integral element of his works. Such selfexegetical devices offered the reader a degree of orientation and elucidation of the texts, whilst justifying the author’s stylistic and translation choices, subtly boasting of his talents and chastising his rivals.

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More attentive to the creation of proper intertextual connections within his controversial doctrinal oeuvre was Reginald Pecock (c. 1390–c. 1460), Bishop of Chichester. By identifying self-quotations and cross-references within Pecock’s many vernacular treatises, Ian Johnson (Chapter 3) sheds light on his intended creation of an inter-related corpus whose ambitious aim was the presentation of Christian doctrine in English to varied audiences. Within the reiterative flow of the discourse, topics that had already been presented in other works, or in other parts of the same work, are in fact often discussed again and explicated whilst being either condensed or further articulated. In the same chapter, Johnson investigates the self-authorising strategies in play in Gavin Douglas’s Scots translation of the Aeneid (1513), the first complete rendering into a variety of English. Each of the thirteen books (thus including Maffeo Vegio’s continuation) features a reflective verse prologue, touching on different levels of Douglas’s enterprise. On the one hand, he caustically criticises William Caxton’s Eneados and underlines his own fidelity to the original; on the other, he attempts to provide Christian explanations and contextualisation of pagan episodes in the epic poem. Remarkably, in one manuscript the first book is accompanied by marginal glosses which supplement part of Douglas’s prologue in addition to the translated text. In the essays by Federica Pich and Brian Richardson, the focus shifts towards two paratextual forms of commentary often used in the sixteenth century: respectively, rubrics placed on the threshold of poems and prefatory letters introducing volumes of different types. Because of the elusive nature of the lyric genre, which is characterised by omissions and the unsaid, it predictably accrued various forms of self-exegesis during the Renaissance. Pich (Chapter 4) begins her extensive analysis with the influential but rather different archetypes of Dante’s prosimetrum Vita Nova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Taking a historical and genealogical approach, she then tackles different typologies of the prose headings that accompanied Italian poems in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury manuscripts and prints. Rubrics often yield crucial information about the addressers, addressees, and circumstances of stand-alone poems, situating them in time and space and supplying details of events and people that could in no way be inferred from the texts, thus discounting some of the possible alternative interpretations and suggesting new ones. Pich is careful to interpret the interaction between poems and prose captions in the light of the opposition between ‘lyricality’ and ‘narrativity’, and pays due attention to the impact of rubrics on the macrostructure of lyric collections. Prefatory letters, another major form of self-commentary, were a key tool employed by writers to pre-empt possible criticism, to establish their ideal readership, and sometimes to directly address high-ranking individuals, using

Introduction

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the second person, either singular or plural. Richardson (Chapter 5) explores how the heated debate over the use of the vernacular as a written language in sixteenth-century Italy was discussed in the introductory letters both to literary works and to those of a more practical nature. Authors such as Baldassarre Castiglione, Luigi Alamanni, and Alessandro Piccolomini, alongside translators and editors, made use of this liminal space to justify their linguistic choices, either defending or rejecting the use of the Tuscan dialect. In taking a stance in the questione della lingua, as it is known, they all put forward concrete solutions to the theoretical issues discussed in treatises of the time, attempting to sway readers and ultimately encouraging a favourable reading of their works. Michel de Montaigne’s Essais is undoubtedly one of the most personal books of the early modern period and a crucial model for self-analysis, yet it has also been regarded as deriving from the author’s notes and commentaries on numerous books in his library.20 By focusing on Montaigne’s discussion of the figure of Julius Caesar as an agent and symbol of the author, John O’Brien (Chapter 6) demonstrates that introspection is not restricted to the passages of ostensible reflection in which the author uses the first person ( je – moi). Montaigne in fact projected himself into the lives and deeds of classical figures, so much so that his engagement with texts such as Caesar’s Commentarii becomes a particular form of commentary on himself. This interpretation is corroborated by O’Brien’s comparison between Montaigne’s autograph reading notes on a 1570 edition of the Commentarii and the corresponding chapters of the Essais. Glosses in the margins of the former, and in other works too, are incorporated and expanded in the Essais to such an extent that the boundaries between the primary and secondary text fade away, as does the distinction between commentary on one’s self and on others. Self-commentary can become a sort of idiosyncratic anti-commentary, deceiving the reader and ultimately complicating rather than clarifying the text. This trend is a marked characteristic of the hybrid prose-verse compilations of the 1570s scrutinised by Harriet Archer (Chapter 7), who brings together five Elizabethan poets rarely studied as a group: Edmund Spenser, William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, George Whetstone, and Nicholas Breton. In each case, the poems are framed by fictional narratives in which a pseudonymous persona adopts the role of editor and compiler, presenting the verse with a mixture of apparent indifference and serious intent. Although including reflections on metre and form, this playful self-reflexive prose deliberately clouds the origins of the poetic texts and undermines the authority of the writer and the popular 20  Tournon A., Montaigne, la glose et l’essai (Lyon: 1983); Jeanneret M., “Commentary on Fiction, Fiction as Commentary” 924–925.

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genre to which each work purports to belong (such as pastoral eclogue or ghost complaint). Interpreted by Archer with reference to Erasmian irony and the tradition of Menippean satire, self-commentary here subverts literary genealogies by distancing the work from learned traditions and weaving humour and scepticism into both the poetic practice and its potential interpretative discourse. As indicated earlier when referring to Fiamma’s Rime spirituali, the doctrinal content of literary works came under close scrutiny in the repressive climate of the Counter-Reformation. The next two chapters analyse two modes of selfexegesis in Spanish and French religious poetry. Colin Thompson (Chapter 8) examines the mismatch between the lira poems of St John of the Cross (1527– 1591) and the didactical prose, written later, that comments on them. All three poems, ‘Noche oscura’ (‘Dark Night’), ‘Cántico espiritual’ (‘Spiritual Canticle’) and ‘Llama de amor viva’ (‘Living Flame’), are written in a female first-person voice and appear to be secular. However, a different and somewhat puzzling interpretation is proposed by St John’s commentaries, which were intended not for publication but as guidance for a small group of Discalced Carmelites practising mystical prayer. In these commentaries the first person of the poems becomes the third-person ‘alma’ (‘soul’), and all three texts are interpreted purely in terms of the soul’s quest for union with God. As Thompson meticulously demonstrates, the unfinished commentary on ‘Noche oscura’ reads more like a treatise, with only occasional reference to the poetic text; its particular concern is the first line and St John’s most famous image, the dark night of the soul. In contrast, the commentaries on ‘Cántico espiritual’ and ‘Llama de amor viva’ set out a verse-by-verse exposition of the poems that parallels the technique of biblical exegesis of the period. Jean de La Ceppède’s poetic collection Théorèmes (Part I: 1613; Part II: 1622) consists of three books of a hundred sonnets each, which provide a meditative retelling of Christ’s passion and resurrection. It offers a striking array of paratextual materials, including a preface, an Avant-propos and, at the end, tables with names and main themes, to guide and enhance the reader’ intellectual and devotional experience. What are distinctive and unique, however, are the more than 2500 annotations, which are keyed to almost every poem and either give short explanations of words and images or address complex theological questions. Russel Ganim (Chapter 9) concentrates in particular on Annotation 4 of Sonnet I, 1, 37: exceptionally, this accounts for twenty-five pages, and explains Christ’s sweating of blood during his agony at Gethsemane as a human phenomenon by engaging with patristics as well as contemporary physicians. Ganim discusses both the importance of this annotation to the work as a whole and its metaliterary significance; indeed, several poems later in the collection,

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in Sonnet I, 2, 63, the poets’ eyes are described as crying tears of blood that spill onto the page as verse. Ben Jonson’s opening epigram To the reader captures very well the author’s relinquishment of control over his works and his anxiety about the reader’s interpretation: ‘Pray thee take care, that tak’st my book in hand, / To read it well: that is, to understand’.21 His fellow poet and playwright George Chapman is another interesting case of a writer striving to exert control over the reception of his works and proclaim his individual authorship. Gilles Bertheau (Chapter 10) highlights how Chapman viewed himself as ‘master’ of his ‘owne meaning’ in A Free and Offenceless Justification of Andromeda liberata (1614) and mounted an aggressive defence against malicious criticism of the poetic choices in his epithalamion in honour of the wedding of the Earl of Somerset and Frances Howard. Bertheau then moves on to investigate the numerous dedicatory epistles, prefaces, and addresses to the reader appended to Chapman’s poems and dramas, as well as the scholarly glosses to his translations from Homer. Considered as a whole, this copious amount of self-commentary gives a clear picture of Chapman’s elitist conception of poetry as a divine activity and portrays incompetent readers as a threat to authorial autonomy. Laments about unfair interpretation or specious misunderstanding could thus, in Chapman, become fierce attacks on inept and naïve readers. Coming to terms with the audience’s response may be all the more crucial in the public arena of theatre. When in 1660 Corneille published all the plays he had so far written, he accompanied each of them with a short retrospective analysis (examen) alongside three lengthy discourses on dramatic theory. Joseph Harris (Chapter 11) argues that Corneille proved to be an astute critic giving considered responses and explanations of the sometimes unexpected reaction of theatre audiences. Unlike Racine, Corneille is willing to accept popular verdicts and engages with his failures and misjudgements on the stage. He even exposes some previously unnoticed flaws in his plays, thus disparaging his talents as a playwright and cunningly affirming his critical abilities. By interpreting Corneille’s self-commentaries as part of a complex dialogue with his spectators, Harris underscores their narrative dimension and highlights the unpredictable figure of the audience, whose responses may defy conventional dramatic theory. 21  Jonson Ben, Epigrams, ed. C. Burrow, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge: 2012) vol. 5, 113. On Jonson’s careful construction of his authorial image and constant concern with the readers’ response, see in particular Helgerson R., “Self-Creating Ben Jonson”, in idem, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: 1983) 101–184; Loewenstein J., Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 43 (Cambridge: 2002).

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Rather than concentrating on a specific case study, Els Stronks (Chapter 12) reviews publicly or privately displayed forms of self-reflection and self-criticism in the textual culture of the Dutch Republic and unravels less explicit modes of self-assessment and, ultimately, self-affirmation. These works include the manuscript diary of the schoolmaster David Beck (1621–1656), meant for circulation amongst a limited circle of readers, and the paratexts to translations of Vergil by Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679), intended to obtain literary status and patronage. Stronks then investigates self-legitimising strategies with special regard to emerging authors such as Constantijn Huygens (1596– 1687). She not only considers the severe retrospective judgements that mature authors gave on their youthful writings, but also provides an innovative examination of the range of documents in which young authors, learning their trade in the guilds, assessed their own work and skills in emulation of their masters and other more experienced writers. In the seventeenth century female authorship could be problematic, and thus engender a greater degree of self-consciousness in women who wrote and published literary works. This might well have been the case for Anna Stanisławska (1651/54?–1700/01?), who has been seen as Poland’s earliest woman poet and autobiographer. Her only work, A Transaction, had survived until its nineteenth-century discovery and publication by means of a single manuscript, now irretrievably lost, and for a number of reasons represents an enigma. It does not belong to a clear-cut genre, being neither lament nor elegy; furthermore, most of its seventy-seven stanzas are supplemented in the margin by glosses penned in the author’s hand, which provide the names both of major historical figures and the writer’s relatives, add personal remarks, or summarise the respective stanzas. As Magdalena Ożarska argues (Chapter 13), these glosses sometimes offer information indispensable to an understanding of the personal narrative, but it remains uncertain whether they were added after the poetic text was completed or were part of the original structure of the work. They therefore constitute a cryptic example of self-commentary that could have been tightly interwoven with the work’s genesis and composition. Carlo Caruso’s concluding contribution (Chapter 14) examines two influential works of seventeenth-century Italian literature, Alessandro Tassoni’s mock-heroic poem La secchia rapita (1622) and Francesco Redi’s dithyramb Bacco in Toscana (1685), which are both equipped with an elaborate apparatus of notes. Tassoni’s ‘Dichiarazioni’ (‘Explanations’) were added in the definitive version of his poem (1630) and, under the pseudonym of Gaspare Salviani, presented an idiosyncratic and personal response to the reactions elicited by the poem’s earlier circulation in both manuscript and print. Interestingly, Tassoni was able to circumvent the strictures of ecclesiastical censorship by

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inserting a few variant readings of the first version of his poem in the eccentric self-commentary. In Redi’s Bacco in Toscana, a large number of words and phrases from the primary text are arbitrarily selected for annotation. These prompt profuse and indulgently learned digressions, which are nevertheless spirited and witty; they display the author’s erudition in a wide range of fields, most notably etymology and historical linguistics. Caruso thus identifies the dominant digressive mode, common to both, that renders the commentary a virtually separate and independent text in which elucidation of the poems is only partially and whimsically realised.

…

Numerous common features and convergent trajectories connect the essays in this volume. If we consider the morphologies of self-commentary as a whole, the prefatory matter stands out as a prominent site of authorial intrusion. In the cases examined, this takes various forms: prologues either in prose (Alberti, Chapter 1) or in verse (Douglas, Chapter 3); letters to the reader in the different types of Italian work examined by Richardson (Chapter 4); dedicatory epistles and addresses to the reader throughout Chapman’s oeuvre (Chapter 7); discourses on dramatic theory and critical examinations of the plays in the three-volume collection of Corneille’s complete works (Chapter 9); and introductory and commendatory poetry in Joost van den Vondel’s translation of Vergil into Dutch (Chapter 11). In his study of Renaissance prefaces to English, French, and German works, Kevin Dunn, in reference to Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” (1969),22 writes that ‘the “I” that speaks the preface of early modern books is never merely the writerly “I”; it is first and foremost the essence of the authorial claim. Put otherwise, it is always a rhetorical figure, a gesture with a design on its audience, an attempt at self-authorization’.23 Located at the beginning of a work, prefatory materials 22  Foucault M., “Qu’es-ce qu’un auteur?”, Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, 63, 3 (1969) 73–104; idem, “What is an Author?”, in idem, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D.F. Bouchard – S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: 1977) 113–138. 23  Dunn K., Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford: 1994) 11. Dedications also function as a means of self-authorisation by linking works to prestigious individuals and identifying specific sets of readers. For discussion of important examples, see Richardson, “Inscribed Meanings” 92–94; idem, “Manuscript, Print, Orality and the Authority of Texts in Renaissance Italy”, in Bromilow P. (ed.), Authority in European Book Culture 1400–1600, Material Readings in Early Modern Culture (Aldershot: 2013) 15–29 (17–19); Enenkel K.A.E., Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur 199–273, 347–380, 521–590. For systematic investigations of dedication practices, see Williams F.B. Jr, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English

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set the parameters for the reader’s interpretation by imposing the intended or assumed intended meaning of the work. Writers may also transmit their broader theoretical views on aspects such as language, style, or metrics, thus defending and reinforcing their choices. If we look at other elements that physically surround the main text or accompany it within the same volume, the following categories can be identified: marginal annotations in manuscript copies of Filelfo’s works (Chapter 2); handwritten side glosses in the only autograph copy of Stanisławska’s Transaction (Chapter 13); rubrics or captions preceding Italian poems in both manuscript and print formats (Chapter 4); prose framework in hybrid Elizabethan compilations (Chapter 7); didactical prose supplementing each of St John of the Cross’s three lira poems (Chapter 8); and apparatuses of notes, which follow each of La Ceppède’s sonnets (Chapter 9) or are grouped together at the end of the poems by both Tassoni and Redi (Chapter 14). Recent scholarship has conclusively established that there was no distinct rupture during the transition from manuscript to print culture; readers of printed volumes were in fact prompted to recall the disposition of elements within manuscripts, including the rubrics and marginalia, which had originally functioned as visual reference points. It also needs to be borne in mind that in the early modern period the margins were by no means a peripheral or subordinate space but were seen as fully integrated with the main text.24 Indeed, it was only in the eighteenth century that footnotes started to be placed hierarchically at the bottom of the page, as is the common practice today especially in scholarly works.25 The list of functions identified by William Slights for printed marginalia in the books of Renaissance England also apply to authorial headBooks before 1641, Bibliographical Society Publication (London: 1962); Terzoli M.A. (ed.), I margini del libro. Indagine teorica e storica sui testi di dedica, Miscellanea erudita. Nuova serie 67 (Rome: 2004). 24  Lipking L., “The Marginal Gloss”, Critical Inquiry 3 (1977) 609–655; Tribble E., Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: 1993); Orgen S., “Margins of Truth”, in Murphy A. (ed.), The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality (Manchester: 2001) 91–107; Slights W.W.E., Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books, Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism (Ann Arbor: 2001) 13, 61–100. 25  Several recent studies have investigated the use of annotations and footnotes from historical, linguistic, and typological perspectives. Special mention should be made of Grafton A., The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: 1999); Dürrenmatt J. – Pfersmann A. (eds.), L’espace de la note, Publications La Licorne 67 (Rennes: 2004); Pfersmann A., Séditions infrapaginales. Poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (XVIIe–XXIe siècles), Histoire des idées et critique littéraire 464 (Geneva: 2011); Frigerio S., Linguistica della nota. Strategie metatestuali autoriali, Travaux des universités suisses 36 (Geneva: 2016).

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ings and sidings: amplification, annotation, appropriation, correction, emphasis, evaluation, exhortation, explication, justification, organisation, parody, pre-emption, rhetorical gloss, simplification, and translation.26 The significant exegetical and self-exegetical potential of figurative elements, such as decorations and woodcut illustrations, should also be emphasised; these have only been discussed in passing in a limited number of contributions to this volume, and deserve further study in their own right.27 Both Archer and Pich note that the headings introducing poems can be so lengthy and eloquent as to equate to a short story or prose frame, to the extent that the work sometimes comes to resemble a prosimetrum. This happens, for example, with certain particularly articulate rubrics that accompany Whetstone’s verse (Chapter 7) and appear in Gasparo Visconti’s late fifteenthcentury book of poems (Chapter 4). St John of the Cross’s explicatory prose could instead be described as a long-winded running commentary that wanders off from the poems. In La Ceppède’s Théorèmes, glosses are placed at the end of each sonnet but may run for several pages, thus almost resembling an autonomous treatise. A bulky apparatus of notes is collated separately, without being signalled in the poems by any markers or cues, at the end of works by both Tassoni and Redi. As is also the case with digressive, overabundant, or highly tendentious and one-sided early modern commentaries, the drift towards self-sufficiency undermines the status of Genette’s paratext as a dependent, second-degree form of discourse. In this context, strict distinctions between overlapping morphologies and between primary and secondary texts seem all the more inappropriate when dealing with authorial self-commentaries. The artificiality of the latter type of distinction also emerges clearly from the more subtle inter- and intra-textual self-commenting modes that can be identified in Pecock’s doctrinal books (Chapter 3) and Montaigne’s Essais (Chapter 6), as well as from other similar modes suggested by Richard Maber in his Afterword. 26  Slights, Managing Readers 25–26. 27  For a discussion of methodological issues concerning the interaction between visual elements and texts in relation to exegesis, see Intorno al testo. Tipologie del corredo esegetico e soluzioni editoriali; Acheson K., Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, Material Readings in Early Modern Culture (London: 2013); Enenkel K.A.E., “Illustrations as Commentary and Readers’ Guidance: The Transformation of Cicero’s ‘De Officiis’ into a German Emblem Book by Johann von Schwarzenberg, Heinrich Steiner, and Christian Egenolff (1517–1520; 1530/1531; 1550)”, in idem (ed.), Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries 167–260; Stallybrass P., “Afterword”, in Smith – Wilson (eds.), Renaissance Paratexts 204–218; Melion W. – Clifton J. – Weemans M. (eds.), Imago exegetica. Visual images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 33 (Leiden – Boston: 2014).

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Amongst the self-commentary that is physically separate from the commented text, it is worth singling out the presentations and analyses of authors’ own works that are both scattered across private correspondence and located in autonomous critical examination (often apologias or works of broader literary criticism). These relate, respectively, to the remarks of young Dutch authors in letters to their seniors (Chapter 12) and Chapman’s defence of his epithalamion in his Free and Offenceles Iustification (Chapter 10). Another case in point is Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), who was acutely suspicious, not to say paranoid, about the reception of his epic Christian poem Gerusalemme liberata. Besides publishing a number of justificatory and theoretical works such as Apologia in difesa della sua ‘Gerusalemme Liberata’ (1585) and Discorsi del poema eroico (1594), in 1576 and 1577, by sending out his ‘poetic letters’, he was able to set up an extensive reading network and received valuable feedback on his work in progress as well as perceptive suggestions that shaped its revision.28 By their very nature, self-commentaries entail the splitting of the authorial self into the writer and the reader, the latter in the guise of an editor, annotator, critic, or combination of these roles. This phenomenon is especially pronounced when authors adopt pseudonyms and wear the mask of fictitious personae such as the mysterious E.K. in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, the verbose editor G.T. in Gascoigne’s Adventures Passed by Master F.I. (Chapter 7), and Tassoni’s friend Gaspare Salviani, to whom he falsely ascribed the notes in his Secchia rapita (Chapter 14). An interesting and not uncommon case is that of someone close to the author claiming a special familiarity with and knowledge of their work and making themselves its annotator. In this respect, special mention should be made of Pierre de Ronsard’s Amours (1553), glossed by his associate Antoine de Muret, and the provocative notes appended to the Basel edition of Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium (1515), which are attributed to one of his diligent students, Gerardus Listrius, but for which Erasmus was largely responsible.29 Such screens for the authors may have been intended 28  On Tasso’s self-exegesis in his letters, see Ricci R., Scrittura, riscrittura, autoesegesi. Voci autoriali intorno all’epica in volgare: Boccaccio, Tasso, Letteratura italiana 18 (Pisa: 2010) 103–174. For an all-encompassing framework for early modern epistolography, see Houdt T. Van – Papy J. – Tournoy G. – Matheeussen C. (eds.), Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia XVIII (Leuven: 2002). 29  See, respectively, Tribble, Margins and Marginality 67–72, and Slights, Managing Readers 52–58 (both with further bibliography). Relevant examples from sixteenth-century Italian poetry are discussed in Tomasi F., “Strategie paratestuali nel commento alla lirica del XVI secolo (1540–1560)”, in Bossier – Scheffer (eds.), Soglie testuali 21–53 (39–53), repr. in Tomasi F., Studi sulla lirica rinascimentale, Miscellanea erudita. Nuova serie 80 (Padua: 2012) 95–147 (130–147). On the Italian tradition of jocular exegesis and self-exegesis, with

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to either achieve apparent distance and impartiality or heighten the irreverence or irony of the work. On a more general note, however, it can be observed that the commenting self tends to be temporally distant from the authorial self who had composed the main text; writers thus return to it with a different eye, sometimes manipulate it, and even conceive a new work.30 More often than not, self-commentaries are retrospective: added to a text written previously, they can take into account its earlier circulation and reception. Alberti, Corneille, and Tassoni provide the most cogent examples amongst others discussed in this volume. Self-commentaries ultimately seek to construct or boost an authorial identity, and tend to perform as instruments of ‘self-fashioning’ even when they are presented as neutral tools of elucidation. Focusing on the sixteenth century, Stephen Greenblatt has coined this term to describe ‘the increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’ and places self-identity within a framework of alterity on the basis that it is achieved in both literature and social life ‘in relation to something perceived as alien, strange or hostile’.31 In his Afterword to this volume, Richard Maber outlines the broad array of motivations or claimed motivations a focus on sixteenth-century comic poetry, see Corsaro A. – Procaccioli P. (eds.), Cum notibusse et commentaribusse. L’esegesi parodistica e giocosa del Cinquecento, Cinquecento. Studi 5 (Rome: 2001). Parodic forms of self-glossing in a variety of fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury English works are analysed in Griffiths J., Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: 2014). 30  For interesting insights into the temporal character of reading, including discussion of the author’s rereading of their own text at some distance from its composition, see Noakes S., Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: 1988). 31  Greenblatt S., Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: 1980) 3, 4. Building on Greenblatt’s study, Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (see n. 21) investigates the ways in which poets such as Spenser, Jonson, and Milton fashioned their own identity as major public poets within the ‘literary system’ of the time by differentiating themselves from the multitude of mediocre versifiers. Further perspectives on Renaissance self-identity, self-fashioning, and self-presentation have been offered in recent years by, amongst others, Coleman P. – Lewis J. – Kowalik J. (eds.), Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Cambridge: 2000); Cheney P. – De Armas F.A. (eds.), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto: 2002); Martin J.J., Myths of Renaissance Individualism, Early Modern History: Society and Culture (Basingstoke: 2004) 43–46; Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W. (eds.), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self: Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 17 (Leiden – Boston: 2011); Deneire T.B., “Neo-Latin and Vernacular Poetics of Self-Fashioning in Dutch Occasional Poetry (1635–1640)”, in idem (ed.), Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts: Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular, Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts 13 (Leiden – Boston: 2014) 31–58.

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behind the author’s decision to comment on their own works. On a spectrum of nuanced and often intertwined possibilities, authorial aims range from self-explication and self-defence to self-promotion and self-glorification. Stepping away from the complexity of the individual cases under scrutiny, it could be summarily observed that self-commentaries frequently develop into commentaries on the self, thus straying into autobiography and displaying the author’s qualifications and talents (Alberti, Montaigne, Stanisławka, and the young Dutch poets), sometimes in opposition to competing writers and adversaries (Filelfo and Douglas). The defence of a specific feature of an author’s writing is pursued in the prefaces to Italian works (Chapter 5), whilst self-justification turns into a harsh attack on malevolent critics and readers in Chapman. In his critical self-assessment, Corneille’s consideration of the public’s reaction is instead alert and sympathetic. In St John of the Cross and La Ceppède, and also in Pecock but in a different way, the reading and interpretation of the texts are inflected towards an enhancement of doctrinal knowledge and the devotional experience. In the rubrics of Italian collections of lyric verse (Chapter 4), new details and meanings are ascribed to poetic texts that had originally been open to a range of divergent interpretations. In the Elizabethan hybrid compilations, the invention of the main text is extended by the tongue-in-cheek prose frame, which further complicates and imbues irony into the poetic texts by inserting the contrapuntal voices of fictive commenting personae. A similar parodic effect is achieved in the works of Tassoni and Redi through the ponderous apparatus of erudite yet facetious notes. Rather than offering firm conclusions on a vast and complex subject, it is hoped that the diversity of this collection, covering many genres and literary traditions, will lead to new paths of enquiry and stimulate further research. Selective Bibliography Acheson K., Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, Material Readings in Early Modern Culture (London: 2013). Alston R.C., Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library (London: 1994). Andersen J. – Sauer E. (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: 2002). Ascoli A.R., “Worthy of Faith? Authors and Readers in Early Modernity”, in Martin J.J. (ed.), The Renaissance World, Routledge Worlds (London: 2007) 435–451. Ascoli A.R., Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: 2008).

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Barthes R., “The Death of the Author”, Aspen Magazine 5–6 (1967), repr. in idem, Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (New York: 1977) 142–154; “La mort de l’auteur”, Mantéia 5 (1968) 12–17, repr. in idem, Le bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV, Points. Essais 258 (Paris: 1984) 63–69. Belloni G., Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo. Studi sul commento umanistico-rinascimentale al ‘Canzoniere’, Studi sul Petrarca 22 (Padua: 1992). Besomi O. – Caruso C. (eds.), Il commento ai testi (Basel – Boston – Berlin: 1992). Bolens G. – Erne L. (eds.), Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25 (Tübingen: 2011). Bossier Ph. – Scheffer R. (eds.), Soglie testuali. Funzioni del paratesto nel secondo Cinquecento e oltre / Textual Thresholds. Functions of Paratexts in the Late Sixteenth Century and Beyond. Atti della giornata di studi, Università di Groningen, 13 dicembre 2007, Cinquecento. Studi 36 (Rome: 2010). Buck A. – Herding O. (eds.), Der Kommentar in der Renaissance, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: Kommission für Humanismusforschung / Mitteilung 1 (Boppard: 1975). Burke S., The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: 2010). Cavallo G. – Chartier R. (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, trans. L.G. Cochrane (Cambridge: 1999). Céard J., “Les transformation du genre du commentaire”, in Lafond J. – Stegmann A. (eds.), L’automne de la Renaissance, 1580–1630 (Paris: 1981) 101–115. Cheney P. – De Armas F.A. (eds.), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto: 2002). Coleman P. – Lewis J. – Kowalik J. (eds.), Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Cambridge: 2000). Corsaro A. – Procaccioli P. (eds.), Cum notibusse et commentaribusse. L’esegesi parodistica e giocosa del Cinquecento, Cinquecento. Studi 5 (Rome: 2001). Danzi M. – Leporatti R. (eds.), Il poeta e il suo pubblico. Lettura e commento dei testi lirici nel Cinquecento, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 482 (Geneva: 2012). Deneire T.B., “Neo-Latin and Vernacular Poetics of Self-Fashioning in Dutch Occasional Poetry (1635–1640)”, in idem (ed.), Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts: Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular, Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts 13 (Leiden – Boston: 2014) 31–58. Dunn K., Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford: 1994). Dürrenmatt J. – Pfersmann A. (eds.), L’espace de la note, Publications La Licorne 67 (Rennes: 2004). Enenkel K.A.E., Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur (ca. 1350– ca. 1650). Zur autorisierenden und wissensvermittelnden Funktion von Widmungen,

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Vorworttexten, Autorporträts und Dedikationsbildern, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 48 (Leiden – Boston: 2014). Enenkel K.A.E. (ed.), Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 29 (Leiden – Boston: 2014). Enenkel K.A.E., “The Neo-Latin Commentary”, in Ford Ph. – Bloemendal J. – Fantazzi C. (eds.), Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Neo-Latin World, The Renaissance Society of America 3 (Leiden – Boston: 2014) vol. 1, 207–216. Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W. (eds.), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self: Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 17 (Leiden – Boston: 2011). Enenkel K.A.E. – Nellen H. (eds.), Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400–1700), Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia XXXIII (Leuven: 2013). Foucault M., “Qu’es-ce qu’un auteur?”, Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, 63, 3 (1969) 73–104; idem, “What is an Author?”, in Idem (ed.), Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D.F. Bouchard – S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: 1977) 113–138. Frigerio S., Linguistica della nota. Strategie metatestuali autoriali, Travaux des universités suisses 36 (Geneva: 2016). Genette G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: 1997; origin.: Seuils, Paris: 1987). Gibson R.K. – Shuttleworth Kraus C. (eds.), The Classical Commentary: History, Practices, Theory, Mnemosyne. Supplement 232 (Leiden: 2002). Gilson S., Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy: Florence, Venice and the ‘Divine Poet’ (Cambridge: 2018). Grafton A., Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA – London: 1991). Grafton A., Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Jerome Lecture Series 20 (Ann Arbor: 1997). Grafton A., “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and His Books”, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91 (1997) 139–157. Grafton A., The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: 1999). Grafton A., “Commentary”, in Grafton A. – Most G.W. – Settis S. (eds.), The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA – London: 2010) 225–233. Greenblatt S., Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: 1980). Griffiths J., Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: 2014). Helgerson R., Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: 1983).

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Hirschfeld H., “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship”, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 116 (2001) 609–622. Houdt T. Van – Papy J. – Tournoy G. – Matheeussen C. (eds.), Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia XVIII (Leuven: 2002). Intorno al testo. Tipologie del corredo esegetico e soluzioni editoriali. Atti del Convegno di Urbino: 1–3 ottobre 2001, Pubblicazioni del Centro Pio Rajna. Studi e saggi 2 (Rome: 2003). Iser W., The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore – London: 1978). Jackson H.J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: 2001). Jauss H.R., Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. T. Bahti, introd. P. de Man, Theory and History of Literature 2 (Minneapolis: 1982). Javitch D., Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of ‘Orlando Furioso’ (Princeton: 1991). Jeanneret M., “Commentary on Fiction, Fiction as Commentary”, in Patterson L. – Nichols G.S. (eds.), Commentary as Cultural Artifact. Special Issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 91, 4 (Fall 1992) 909–928. Kennedy W.J., Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY: 1994). Lipking L., “The Marginal Gloss”, Critical Inquiry 3 (1977) 609–655. Loewenstein J., Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 43 (Cambridge: 2002). Maclean I., Learning and the Market Place: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book, Library of the Written World 9 (Leiden: 2009). Malato E. – Mazzucchi A. (eds.), Censimento dei Commenti danteschi. 1 I commenti di tradizione manoscritta ( fino al 1480), 2 vols. (Rome: 2011) and 2. I commenti di tradizione a stampa (dal 1477 al 2000) e altri di tradizione manoscritta posteriori al 1480 (Rome: 2014). Marotti A.F., Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: 1995). Martin J.J., Myths of Renaissance Individualism, Early Modern History: Society and Culture (Basingstoke: 2004) 43–46. Mathieu-Castellani G. – Plaisance M. (eds.), Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire: France/Italie (XIVe–XVIe siècles). Actes du colloque international sur le commentaire (Paris: 1990). Melion W. – Clifton J. – Weemans M. (eds.), Imago exegetica. Visual images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 33 (Leiden – Boston: 2014). Miglietti S. – Parker S.E. (eds.), Reading Publics in Renaissance Europe 1450–1650. Special Issue of History of European Ideas 45, 3 (2016). Minnis A.J., Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: 1988).

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Minnis A. – Johnson I. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume II: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2005). Minnis A.J. – Scott A.B. (eds.), with the assistance of D. Wallace, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition revd. ed (Oxford: 1991). Most G.W. (ed.), Commentaries – Kommentare, Aporemata 4 (Göttingen: 1999). Nasti P. – Rossignoli C. (eds.), Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary, The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature 13 (Notre Dame: 2013). Noakes S., Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: 1988). Norton G.P. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume III: The Renaissance (Cambridge: 1999). Orgen S., “Margins of Truth”, in Murphy A. (ed.), The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality (Manchester: 2001) 91–107. Pade M. (ed.), On Renaissance Commentaries, Noctes Neolatinae / Neo-Latin Texts and Studies 4 (Hildesheim – New York: 2005). Peron G. (ed.), L’autocommento, pref. G. Folena, Atti del xvii Convegno Interuniversitario (Bressanone, 1990) Quaderni del Circolo Filologico-Linguistico Padovano 17 (Padua: 1994). Pfersmann A., Séditions infrapaginales. Poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (XVIIe–XXIe siècles), Histoire des idées et critique littéraire 464 (Geneva: 2011). Raven J. – Small H. – Tadmor N. (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: 1996). Ricci R., “Morphologies and Functions of Self-Criticism in Modern Times: Has the Author Come Back?”, Modern Language Notes 118 (January 2003) 116–146. Ricci R., Scrittura, riscrittura, autoesegesi. Voci autoriali intorno all’epica in volgare: Boccaccio, Tasso, Letteratura italiana 18 (Pisa: 2010). Richardson B., Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600, Studies in Publishing and Printing History (Cambridge: 1994). Richardson B., “Inscribed Meanings: Authorial Self-Fashioning and Readers’ Annotations in Sixteenth-Century Italian Printed Books”, in Moulton I. (ed.), Reading and Literacy: In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 8 (Turnhout: 2004) 85–104. Richardson B., “Manuscript, Print, Orality and the Authority of Texts in Renaissance Italy”, in Bromilow P. (ed.), Authority in European Book Culture 1400–1600, Material Readings in Early Modern Culture (Aldershot: 2013) 15–29. Rose M., Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: 1995). Roush S., Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella, Toronto Italian Studies (Toronto: 2002).

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Saenger M., The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot: 2006). Sharpe K., Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: 2002). Sherman W.H., Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, Material Texts (Philadelphia: 2008). Slights W.W.E., Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books, Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism (Ann Arbor: 2001). Smith H. – Wilson L. (eds.), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: 2011). Stoddard R., Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, MA: 1985). Terzoli M.A. (ed.), I margini del libro. Indagine teorica e storica sui testi di dedica, Miscellanea erudita. Nuova serie 67 (Rome: 2004). Tomasi F., “Strategie paratestuali nel commento alla lirica del XVI secolo (1540–1560)”, in idem, Studi sulla lirica rinascimentale, Miscellanea erudita. Nuova serie 80 (Padua: 2012) 95–147. Tournon A., Montaigne, la glose et l’essai (Lyon: 1983). Tribble E., Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: 1993). Williams F.B. Jr, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641, Bibliographical Society Publication (London: 1962).

chapter 1

Alberti’s Commentarium to His First Literary Work: Self-Commentary as Self-Presentation in the Philodoxeos Martin McLaughlin In Italy self-commentaries emerged in the late medieval and early Renaissance period, starting with Dante’s self-exegesis in his Vita Nova and Convivio, and in the Epistle to Cangrande (if it is by Dante).1 Petrarch and Boccaccio followed Dante’s example: the former commented on the first eclogue of his Bucolicum carmen in a letter to his brother (Familiares X 4), while Boccaccio wrote a commentary on his vernacular epic, the Teseida. These instances were followed by a number of other examples in the fifteenth century, including Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Comento on his own sonnets (c. 1473–1491), which explicitly imitates the mixture of poetry and explicatory prose in the Vita Nova and Convivio, and Girolamo Benivieni’s vernacular commentary on his own lyrics (1500).2 It is no surprise that self-commentaries appeared at the time of heightened self-awareness that characterised the Trecento and Quattrocento. As is well known, writers use self-exegesis in order to influence the reception of their own works, and to construct or self-fashion a modern authorial identity. One of the earliest but rather neglected examples of a self-commentary in the period after Dante is the Commentarium written by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) for the second and definitive redaction of his first work, the Latin

1  For commentaries in general, see Hanna R. et alii, “Latin commentary tradition and vernacular literature”, in Minnis A. – Johnson I. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume II: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2005) 363–421; for Dante’s self-exegesis see Baranski Z.G., “Dante Alighieri: experimentation and (self-)exegesis”, ibidem 561–582; idem, “The Epistle to Can Grande”, ibidem 583–589; also on the Epistle, Minnis A.J. – Scott A.B. (eds.), with the assistance of Wallace D., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition (revd. ed; Oxford: 1991) 440–445. For the tradition of medieval prologues, see Copeland R., “Academic prologues to authors”, in eadem (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 1: 800–1558 (Oxford: 2016) 151–164. 2  For Lorenzo de’ Medici and Benivieni’s self-commentaries, see Roush S., Hermes’ Lyre. Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella, Toronto Italian Studies (Toronto: 2002).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_003

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comedy Philodoxeos fabula (1424–1437). This paratext will be the central focus in this chapter.3 Alberti might have read some of Dante’s works, but his selfcommentary on the Philodoxeos is very distant in style both from Dante’s autoexegesis and from the later self-commentaries of Lorenzo and Benivieni.4 As is often the case, Alberti’s works owe little to the preceding vernacular tradition. Before examining the Commentarium in detail, one must consider the context in which it was written in order to understand its broader significance. Alberti was a writer who was precocious in everything and he began his literary career with this Latin prose comedy, first written by the time he was twenty, as he tells us on three different occasions (in the Prologue to the first redaction of the play, in the Commentarium to the second redaction and in his autobiography, written around 1438).5 This emphasis on his youthful age is explained by the fact that one of the key motives for writing the self-commentary was to excuse any flaws in the work, and also to underline his precocious literary genius (‘ingenium’ is one of the most repeated words in the Commentarium). Indeed this early version of the play was considered to be such a good copy of an ancient comedy that it was originally attributed to a spurious classical writer 3  For the texts and the paratexts of both redactions of the comedy, see Alberti Leon Battista, Philodoxeos fabula, ed. L. Cesarini Martinelli, Rinascimento 17 (1977) 111–234. References in what follows are to this edition and will be given in the form Philodoxeos, with page number. There is an English translation (not always accurate) in Humanist Comedies, ed. G.R. Grund, I Tatti Renaissance Library 19 (Cambridge, MA: 2005) 70–169, though it should be noted that Grund confusingly prints the Prologus to the first redaction immediately after the Commentarium to the second redaction without explaining that these paratexts belong to two different versions of the play (Humanist Comedies 72–82). 4  For Alberti’s knowledge of Dante, see Gorni G., Leon Battista Alberti. Poeta, artista, camaleonte, ed. P. Allegretti, Uomini e dottrine 57 (Rome: 2012) 58, 228–232; Cardini R., Mosaici. Il ‘Nemico’ dell’Alberti, Humanistica 6 (Rome: 1990) 42–43; McLaughlin M., “Alberti traduttore di se stesso: Uxoria e Naufragus”, in Arquez M.R. – D’Antuono N. (eds.), Autotraduzione. Teoria ed esempi fra Italia e Spagna (e oltre), Il segno e le lettere, Saggi 6 (Milan: 2012) 77–106 (101–102). 5  ‘Non quidem cupio, non peto in laudem trahi quod hac vigesima annorum meorum etate hanc ineptius scripserim fabulam’ (first Prologus, Philodoxeos 148, ‘I am not looking for praise for having foolishly written this play in this my twentieth year’); ‘Itaque nostra, ut docui, fabula materiam habet non inelegantem neque quam ab adolescenti non maiori annis viginti editam quispiam doctus minime invidus despiciat’ (‘Thus, as I have shown, this play contains subject-matter which is elegant and which, being written by a young man no more than twenty years old, will not be looked down on by anybody who is learned and not envious’) (Commentarium, Philodoxeos 146); ‘intermissis iurium studiis, inter curandum et convalescendum scripsit Philodoxeos fabulam, annos natus non plus viginti’ (‘After abandoning his legal studies, and while he was being cared for and convalescing, he wrote the play Philodoxeos when he was no more than twenty years old’) (Alberti L.B., Vita, in Autobiografia e altre opere latine, ed. L. Chines – A. Severi, BUR Rizzoli. Classici [Milan: 2012] 64–103, at 68).

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of comedies, Lepidus, invented by Alberti himself. Just like most of Plautus’ and all of Terence’s comedies, the first Philodoxeos was accompanied by two paratexts: a prologue (Prologus) and a summary (Fabule argumentum), both in prose.6 The second and definitive version of the play was written around 1434, and was accompanied by three paratexts: a prologue / commentary (this time called Commentarium, probably written shortly after 1434), a summary (Argumentum) and a dedicatory letter to Leonello d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara, dated to around 1437. Leonello was an appropriate patron since he was famous for his interest in Latin comedies, particularly those of Terence, as we know from Guarino’s letters and from Angelo Decembrio’s Politiae Literariae of the mid-1430s.7 While Alberti’s brief Prologus to the first redaction of the comedy seems to owe something to the traditional bantering prologues that accompanied Plautus’ and Terence’s comedies, his longer and more serious Commentarium to the definitive version of the Philodoxeos focuses on the self-presentation and on the self-fashioning of the modern author, much more than on the interpretation of the text. Indeed it is the first or at least one of the first Renaissance self-commentaries. The differences between the 1424 Prologus and the 1434 Commentarium are substantial and worth examining in detail. The former Prologus is a brief, comic introduction where the chief lexical model is Plautus – appropriately enough since the first redaction of the play has many Plautine elements.8 The second version of the comedy is modelled more on Terence, so the 1434 Commentarium is appropriately more solemn in tone, much lengthier and devoid of any Plautine references.9 The title of the 1424 redaction was given as follows: ‘Lepidi comici Philodoxios fabule prologus incipit. lege feliciter’. This paratext consists of three paragraphs. The person who speaks in the prologue clearly represents Alberti and 6  In Terence’s comedies, the verse prologues were written by Terence himself but the verse summaries were added later by a second-century grammarian, Sulpicius Apollinaris. 7  On this see McLaughlin M., “The recovery of Terence in Renaissance Italy: From Alberti to Machiavelli”, in Earle T.F. – Fouto C. (eds.), The Reinvention of Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Traditions, texts and performance (London: 2015) 115–139 (116, n. 10). 8  For Alberti’s knowledge of Plautus, including his possible acquaintance with the twelve ‘new’ comedies that reached Italy in 1428, see Cesarini Martinelli’s comments (Philodoxeos 121, n. 1). See now also Cardini R., “Quando e dove l’Alberti conobbe il nuovo Plauto (e qual è la cronologia del De commodis e dell’Ecatonfilea)”, in Cocco C. et alii (eds.), Itinerari del testo. Per Stefano Pittaluga, 2 vols. (Milan: 2018) vol. 1, 141–194. 9  For the more Terentian tone of the second redaction, see Codoñer C., “La doble versión del Philodoxeos albertiano”, in Cardini R. – Regoliosi M. (eds.), Leon Battista Alberti umanista e scrittore. Filologia, esegesi, tradizione. Atti dei Convegni internazionali del Comitato Nazionale VI centenario della nascita di Leon Battista Alberti (Arezzo, 24–25–26 giugno 2004), 2 vols. (Florence: 2008) vol. 1, 191–219.

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his opening words state that he has recently been drinking wine, probably to excess (‘Non diu preivit temporis postquam ebibi et nescio an abunde nimis’, Philodoxeos 148). He adds that it will be obvious to the audience that he has gone way beyond his limits in draining huge amounts of wine (‘debibundo exanclarim quam longe limites’, ibidem) if he is speaking a foreign language (i.e. Latin) in their presence. His purpose, though, is to plead for one single favour from them, namely that they will not vituperate him if, contrary to their expectations, he has gone into the business of writing comedies. And if they agree to this, he will regard it as most welcome and will disseminate his play to the wider public.10 In the second paragraph he informs the audience that if they welcome his comedy, he will perhaps write more such plays. He is not seeking any praise by writing this foolish work in his twentieth year, but he does want to reassure them that he has at least not been wasting his time in idleness (the work ethic is a constant theme in Alberti).11 In the final paragraph he advertises his comedy as a pretty (‘bellula’) play, and says it contains the usual stock characters of ancient Latin comedy: lovers, deceivers and those who make merry. As in the prologues of classical Latin comedies, the author informs the audience of the play’s title: Philodoxeos. Finally, again as in Plautus’ comedies, he reveals his own identity (unlike Terence who never names himself in his prologues), saying that he is a crafty madman and an ignorant sage, and his name is Lepidus (‘witty’, ‘charming’). He finishes by laughingly claiming that the audience is charming (lepidi) too!12

10  ‘Non diu preivit temporis postquam ebibi et nescio an abunde nimis: sed erit vobis indicio quod debibundo exanclarim quam longe limites, si apud vos loquar barbare. Nunc auscultate et iudicium date. Exoratum capi venio hanc unam singularem precibus e vobis ut impetrem gratiam, non ad vituperium in postremis dari, si preter vostram de nobis expectationem in negotium me ad scribundas fabulas miserim; quod si hoc sensero vostra pro facilitate e vobis posse, accipiam id pro summo, ut erit, opere pretio diffundamque quam hic suggero fabulam usque adfluat in vulgo manus’ (Philodoxeos 148). 11  ‘Hanc etenim si inter vos familiarem intellexero, animo institutionem ponam fortassis ad procreandas reliquas. Nunc sumite id vostra ex animi humanissimitate mihique etatique mee precibusque apud vos meis concedite, sinite ut exorem. Non quidem cupio, non peto in laudem trahi quod hac vigesima annorum meorum etate hanc ineptius scripserim fabulam; verum expecto haberi apud vos hoc persuasionis, non vacuum me scilicet, non ex undique incure meos obivisse annos’ (Philodoxeos 148). For the obsession with his work ethic, see McLaughlin M., “Alberti’s Canis: structure and sources in the portrait of the artist as a Renaissance dog”, Albertiana 14 (2011) 55–83. 12  ‘Datisne admodum hoc gratie? Et datis, video. Ergo a me cupitis fabulam. Hercle, et bellula est: insunt qui ament, qui decipiant, qui construant festos. Certiores vos reddo: hec est fabula, Philodoxios hec dicitur fabula. Quid conspectatis? Quid pendetis? Fabule nomen est. Hem, iam nunc video: amplius me vobis notum voltis. Dixero: sum catus demens et

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What is remarkable about even this first Prologus is that Alberti has noticed that most classical comedies had a self-justificatory prologue, in which the audience was told the play’s title, and so not only did he imitate these two aspects in terms of content, but the language that he uses already has echoes of Plautus and, to a lesser extent, Terence.13 Thus that very first verb ‘ebibi’ was used by Plautus at least six times and by Terence once,14 and the mention of wine reminds us of the prologue to Plautus’ Casina, where the character speaking the prologue declares at the outset that he considers men who drink vintage wine to be very wise, and later challenges the audience to bet a pitcher of wine against him.15 The second main verb used (‘exanclarim’, 148) was used by Plautus of draining wine, though it never appears in Terence.16 The use of ‘barbare’ to mean ‘speaking Latin’ is clearly modelled on Plautus’ use of the adverb in two of his prologues where he says he has translated from a Greek original into Latin: ‘Maccus vortit barbare’ (Asinaria 11); ‘Plautus vertit barbare’ (Trinummus 19). The naming of the author of the play (here Lepidus) in the prologue is also a Plautine device, as are the rhetorical questions addressed to the audience.17 In the first sentence alone, then, three lexical elements (‘ebibi […] exanclarim […] barbare’) reveal the young Alberti’s familiarity with comic, specifically Plautine language. In the third sentence Alberti uses a favourite Terentian verb ‘exorare’ (‘Exoratum capi venio hanc unam singularem inscitus sapiens. Hoc habetis iam nomen: Lepidus. Ha, ha, he, et vos lepidi estis! Ergo hanc tenete fabulam’ (Philodoxeos 149). 13  ‘Philodoxios hec dicitur fabula’ (Philodoxeos 149) recalls Terence’s opening words in one of his prologues: ‘Hecyra est huic nomen fabulae’ (Hecyra, Prologue, 1): most of Plautus’ and Terence’s prologues give the play’s title, using this or a similar formula. 14  ‘Factum est illud, ut ego illic vini hirneam ebiberim meri […] non ego cum vino simitu ebibi imperium tuom’ (Plautus, Amphitruo 431, 631); ‘ebibit sanguinem’ (Curculio 152); ‘ille ebibit, / caput deponit, condormiscit’ (Curculio 359–360); ‘Massici montis uberrumos quattuor / fructus ebibere in hora una’ (Pseudolus 1303–1304); ‘ea vos estis exunguimini ebibitis’ (Truculentus 312); ‘quid comedent! quid ebibent!’ (Terence, Heautontimoroumenos 255). 15  ‘Qui utuntur uino uetere sapientis puto’ (Casina 5); ‘Id ni fit, mecum pignus, siquis uolt, dato / In urnam mulsi’ (Casina 75–76). 16  ‘ne iste edepol vinum poculo pauxillulo / saepe exanclavit submerum scitissume’ (He often used a very small cup to drain nearly undiluted wine in a very expert way) (Plautus, Stichus 272–273). 17  Apart from the two instances involving ‘barbare’ cited above, Plautus’ name is explicitly given in several other prologues: Casina 5; Menaechmi 3; Poenulus 55; Trinummus 8; Truculentus 1. Alberti’s repeated rhetorical questions to the audience (e.g. ‘Datisne admodum hoc gratie? Et datis, video […] Quid conspectatis? Quid pendetis?’ [Will you grant me this favour? You do grant it, I see […] What are you looking at? What are you waiting for?], Philodoxeos, 149) find a precedent in several Plautus prologues where two or three such questions are asked in quick succession: Amphitruo 52–56; Casina 68–69, 78; Poenulus 113–116; Truculentus 4–6.

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[…] gratiam’, 148, ‘I come before you to beg that this one single favour be granted’), which had been deployed by Terence in a prologue, as well as on fifteen other occasions.18 Similarly the striking diminutive adjective ‘bellula’ coupled with an exclamation – ‘Hercle, et bellula est’ (Philodoxeos 149, ‘My goodness, it is a pretty play’) – smacks of Plautus, who used it in exactly this way on at least three occasions, although Terence never used this diminutive.19 Alberti’s identification of himself as a ‘catus demens et inscitus sapiens’ (149, ‘a demented smart-ass and a wise ignoramus’) shows his awareness of two largely pre-classical adjectives that were used by Plautus and Terence.20 In addition, he knows that an allusion to some of the stock characters of the comedy was a typical element of the prologue, so he says that in his play there will be lovers, deceivers and those who make merry (149, ‘insunt qui ament, qui decipiant, qui construant festos’).21 Finally the words he uses to reveal his own name – ‘Hoc habetis iam nomen: Lepidus’ (149, ‘There, you have his name now: Lepidus’) – seem to echo Plautus’ joking identification of his own name in the prologue to one of his comedies: ‘latine Plautus Patruus Pultiphagonides. / nomen iam 18  Terence uses ‘exorare’ four times in Phormio, three times each in Heautontimoroumenos and Adelphoe, twice in the Andria, twice in Eunuch, and once in Hecyra. He uses the noun ‘exorator’ in the second prologue of Hecyra: ‘Orator ad vos venio ornatu prologi. / sinite exorator sim dem ut iure uti senem’ (‘I come to plead with you in the guise of a Prologue. Allow me to have the same rights to plead with you as an old man’) (Hecyra 9–10). The verb was popular with Plautus too, who uses it five times in Bacchides, including three times in the space of two lines (Bacchides 1177–1178). It was also used three times in Poenulus, and twice each in Menaechmi and Trinummus. 19  ‘Bellula hercle’ (Plautus, Poenulus 347); ‘Edepol papillam bellulam’ (Casina 848); ‘Edepol haec quidem bellulast’ (Miles gloriosus 988–989). 20  ‘Catus’ was used twice in Plautus’ Mostellaria, twice in Poenulus, once in the prologue to Mercator (‘scita forma mulierem’, line 2), and once each in Epidicus, Menaechmi, Persa, Pseudolus, and Trinummus; it was also used once in Terence’s Andria (855). ‘Inscitus’ appears twice in Plautus’ Menaechmi, twice in Mostellaria, once in Rudens, and once each in Terence’s Hecyra and Eunuchus. 21  Alberti probably had in mind the famous mention of stock characters in a prologue, in Terence’s Eunuchus, since it is followed by a proverb often cited by Alberti in later works: ‘qui mage licet currentem servom scribere, / bonas matronas facere, meretrices malas, / parasitum edacem, gloriosum militem, / puerum supponi, falli per servom senem, / amare odisse suspicari? denique / nullumst iam dictum quod non dictum sit prius’ (‘how is it more permissible to write about a slave running here and there, good matrons, wicked prostitutes, a greedy parasite, a boastful soldier, a child being substituted, an old man being deceived by his slave, love affairs, hatred, suspicion? In the end there is nothing said now that has not been said before’) (Eunuchus, Prologue, 36–41). For Alberti’s allusions to this last idea, that there was nothing new to be said, see McLaughlin M., Leon Battista Alberti. La vita, l’umanesimo, le opere letterarie, Biblioteca dell’“Archivum Romanicum” – Serie I: Storia, Letteratura, Paleografia 447 (Florence: 2016) 147–148.

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habetis’ (Poenulus 54–55, ‘Uncle Plautus the porridge-eater translated it into Latin. You now have his name’). Perhaps the most obvious sign of the young humanist’s reading of Terence at this stage is in the invented name of the author of the comedy, the spurious Lepidus. This idea presumably came from the fact that this Terentian adjective, meaning both ‘witty’ and ‘charming’, indicated appropriate qualities for an author of comedies, but the humanist was probably thinking particularly of the ancient writer’s repeated use of the adjective in the exchange between the son Aeschinus and his mean father Demea in the Adelphoe: AESCHINUS. That’s fine, my very charming father [lepidissume]. DEMEA. Great, now they say I’m charming [lepidus] […] I have become charming [lepidus] and popular.22 If this is the source for the name Lepidus, it would not be surprising since the Adelphoe was probably the biggest influence on the Philodoxeos in terms of plot.23 Unlike the Prologus to the first redaction, the introductory paratext to the second version is entitled Commentarium. Why did Alberti choose this title? It was almost certainly part of his systematic strategy to present himself now in a more solemn light: his now more sobre second version of the Philodoxeos required a more dignified paratext. While the term Prologus was associated with the classical tradition of comedies, the term Commentarium was found in the prestigious late antique commentaries on Vergil, Horace and other canonical authors. However, the title probably did not owe anything to the late antique/medieval tradition of commentaries on comedies. This is not surprising since Donatus’ commentary on Terence was only rediscovered in 1433, when Alberti’s fellow-humanist Giovanni Aurispa unearthed a manuscript of that commentary in Mainz.24 So there is nothing in Alberti’s Commentarium about the nature or origins of comedy as a genre or the different kinds of comedy that one finds in Donatus.25 The Commentarium is instead largely a presentation of himself and the genesis of his play, not an act-by-act account of the comedy, 22  ‘AE. Placet, / pater lepidissume. DE. Euge, iam lepidus uocor. […] ego lepidus ineo gratiam’ (Adelphoe, 910–914). In all his plays Terence uses the adjective thirteen times. 23  On this see Codoñer, “La doble versión del Philodoxeos albertiano” 191–219. 24  Reynolds L.D. (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: 1986) 153–156. 25  On the contents of Donatus’ commentary, see Demetriou C., “Aelius Donatus and his commentary on Terence’s comedies”, in Fontaine M. – Scafuro A.C. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy (Oxford: 2014) 782–798.

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as in the late antique commentator. Thus although it starts with the allegorical meaning of the Philodoxeos – in this sense like Servius’ allegorical commentary on Vergil’s works –, most of the text is taken up with Alberti’s self-presentation, a kind of apologia for having passed off the first version of the play as the work of the spurious ancient comedian, Lepidus, and for having allowed obscenities to appear in it. Cesarini Martinelli defines the Commentarium as an ‘autodifesa’, an unconvincing attempt by the author to present himself as a victim of circumstances.26 But, as Claudia Pandolfi notes, there is nothing self-deprecatory here: in a paratext such as this and in the dedicatory letter to Leonello d’Este, one would expect a plethora of modesty topoi, but these are conspicuous by their absence.27 Instead the stress is on his genius. For Pandolfi, this is an official authorial preface, since it accompanies the final version of the play approved by the author, and it appears before the text in order to guide readers in appreciating the allegorical message of the plot and understanding the comedy’s genesis. Like other self-commentaries, Alberti’s Commentarium is intended to shape our vision of the author as well as of the text, and the emphasis is on two main points: on clearing his name regarding the vulgarities in the first redaction of the play, and on his genius, in particular his ability to pass off his first work as an ancient comedy, and his skill in emending it. The text consists of eight paragraphs. After the opening two paragraphs which provide the allegorical interpretation of the play, the bulk of the text is autobiographical (paragraphs 3–7), and indeed there are a number of phrases here that Alberti reuses in his own autobiography written at the end of the 1430s: his relatives’ inhumanity (mentioned twice in paragraph 4), the writing of the comedy as consolation for this ill treatment (paragraph 5), and his own genius (‘ingenium’), which is mentioned four times (in paragraphs 5, 6, 7, 8). The Commentarium thus acts as a literary calling-card, presenting the author as a mature humanist, not a deceptive manipulator: he had not set out actively to deceive the public with the fiction of spurious Lepidus, rather he was a passive victim of the theft of his first work which had then been interfered with by others who were jealous of his talents (paragraph 5). That this self-commentary is more about the author’s status and identity than about the comedy is confirmed by the fact that what is possibly the dedicatory copy of the play – and 26  Philodoxeos 112. 27  Pandolfi C., “Il Commentarium e la dedica della Philodoxeos Fabvla. Osservazioni sui paratesti”, in Furlan F. – Venturi G. (eds.), Leon Battista Alberti. Actes du Congrès International ‘Gli Este e l’Alberti: Tempo e misura’ (Ferrara, 29. XI–3. XII. 2004), 2 vols., special issue of Schifanoia 30–31 (Pisa – Rome: 2010) vol. 1, 99–117 (99–104).

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perhaps even an autograph copy28 – with its three paratexts (in the order: dedicatory letter, Commentarium, summary) is closely bound up with Alberti’s own sense of identity, since the paratexts here are bookended both by his ‘trade-mark’ symbol, the winged eye [Fig. 1.1], and by repeated emphasis on his new tripartite name, Leon Battista Alberti, with its echoes of classical triple names such as Marcus Tullius Cicero, Publius Vergilius Maro, or even Publius Terentius Afer.29 The winged eye precedes the dedicatory letter to Leonello d’Este [Fig. 1.2]; the letter is then followed by the Commentarium, which in turn is followed by another winged eye before the Argumentum/Summary of the second redaction and the incipit of the play, which once more includes Alberti’s tripartite name [Fig. 1.3]. He appears to have added that first name

Figure 1.1 Leon Battista Alberti, Philodoxeos Fabula. Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, ms. α. O.7.9 [= Lat. 52], fol. 1 v. By kind permission of Il Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Italy 28  Cesarini Martinelli (Philodoxeos 118, n. 1) argues against Grayson’s view that the manuscript was autograph. 29  The winged eye appears twice in the manuscript: Modena, Biblioteca Estense, ms. α. O.7.9 [= Lat. 52], fols. 1v (just before the dedicatory letter) and 6v (just after the Commentarium): see figs. 1, 2, 3.

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Figure 1.2 Leon Battista Alberti, Philodoxeos Fabula. Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, ms. α. O.7.9 [= Lat. 52], fol. 2r. By kind permission of Il Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Italy

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Figure 1.3 Leon Battista Alberti, Philodoxeos Fabula. Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, ms. α. O.7.9 [= Lat. 52], fols. 6v–7r. By kind permission of Il Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Italy

‘Leo’ to ‘Battista’ in the mid-1430s, around the time of the second redaction of the Philodoxeos, and also around the time of his self-portrait in the bronze medal now in Washington [Fig. 1.4], which is dated to 1435 and which includes the winged eye symbol just beneath his chin and at either side of his abbreviated name ‘L. BAP.’30 So the Commentarium is part of this autobiographical nexus of names, texts and images that revolve around Alberti’s identity in the mid-1430s. By contrast with the brief first Prologus of just three paragraphs, the prologue to the second version of the play is a more substantial Commentarium. If for the paratext accompanying the first redaction he had used the traditional term Prologus, here he adopts different, perhaps more prestigious nomenclature, 30  On the links between Alberti’s new name, the self-portrait and the Philodoxeos, see McLaughlin M., “From Lepidus to Leon Battista Alberti: Naming, renaming and anonymizing the self in Quattrocento Italy”, Romance Studies 31, 3–4 (November 2013) 152–166 (160–161).

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Figure 1.4 Leon Battista Alberti, “Selfportrait” (c. 1435). Bronze, 20,1 × 13,6 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection

repudiating the association with the comic genre and aligning the paratext with the learned commentary tradition. This prologue/commentary explains the moral allegory behind the action (paragraph 1) and provides a summary of the plot (paragraph 2), as well as recounting the work’s genesis (paragraphs 3–7). The first words of its opening sentence – ‘Hec fabula pertinet ad mores’ (This play deals with morals)31 – could have come from the accessus ad auctores tradition, but the phrase also echoes, as has been noted, the opening of Cicero’s lacunose De fato (‘quia pertinet ad mores […]’), and now claims for this youthful comedy a serious moral purpose.32 Wherever the formula is from, it has a much more solemn tone than the joking, drunken words of the first 31  Philodoxeos 144. 32  I am grateful to Paul White for the probable link with the accessus ad auctores tradition of commentary. For this tradition, see ‘Accessus ad auctores’: Medieval Introductions to the Authors (Codex latinus monacensis 19475), ed. and trans. S.M. Wheeler, TEAMS Secular commentary series (Kalamazoo, MI: 2015); MacLennan L.J., The Trecento Commentaries on the ‘Divina Commedia’ and the ‘Epistle to Cangrande’, Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs (Oxford: 1974). Claudia Pandolfi first noted the echo of the

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Prologus. The rest of the first sentence – ‘docet enim studiosum atque industrium hominem non minus quam divitem et fortunatum posse gloriam adipisci’ – sums up the main moral message of the play, namely that a hard-working, scholarly person can obtain glory just as much as a rich or fortunate one can. There then follows, in the second paragraph, a plot summary, most of which is taken up with the allegorical explanation of the character’s names, which are mostly Greek and for which Alberti provides the Latin meanings. Again the stress is on the humanist’s Greek erudition and on the moral message of the play, which ends happily as Philodoxus is finally rewarded by being given Doxa as his lawful wife.33 Interestingly, this plot summary is rounded off by a short sentence, stating that there are many other elements in the play that are witty, but the author will pass over them for the sake of brevity.34 This reticence about humour is very different from the emphasis on comedy in the prologue to the first redaction, showing once again that in this self-commentary Alberti wanted to underline the ethical, not the comic side of his play. The rest of the Commentarium deals largely with the comedy’s genesis. It begins in the third paragraph with Alberti stressing the text’s positive points: first, the elegant subject-matter, which nobody would condemn in something written by a twenty-year-old;35 and second, the play’s eloquent style, which was such that all Latin experts approved of it, believing it to be the work of some ancient writer.36 As a result of these qualities of content and style, everyone regarded it with great admiration, many memorised it entirely and more than a few spent a lot of effort in transcribing it.37 At this point Alberti deploys a Ciceronian formula to make the transition to the account of why people did not recognise the work was his: ‘Hic locus admonet ut recitem quonam pacto meam esse ignorarint’ (Philodoxeos, 146, ‘This is the appropriate point for me to tell you how they were unaware that the play was by me’).38 The first words of this fourth paragraph point to another opening phrase of the fragmentary first book of Cicero’s De fato (“Il Commentarium e la dedica della Philodoxeos Fabvla” 99, n. 1). 33  ‘Denique datur amatori legitima uxor’ (Philodoxeos 145). 34  ‘Sunt et pleraque alia que salem habeant; ea brevitatis causa pretereo’ (Philodoxeos 145). 35  ‘Nostra, ut docui, fabula materiam habet non inelegantem neque quam ab adolescenti non maiori annis viginti editam quispiam doctus minime invidus despiciat’ (Philodoxeos 146). 36  ‘Tum et ea eloquentia est, quam in hunc usque diem docti Latinis litteris omnes approbarint atque usque adeo esse antiqui alicuius scriptoris existimarint’ (ibidem). 37  ‘Ut fuerit nemo qui non hanc ipsam summa cum admiratione perlegerit, multi memorie mandarint, non pauci in ea sepius exscribenda plurimum opere consumpserint’ (ibidem). 38  See ‘Admonet autem hic locus, ut quaeratur quid ante rem, quid cum re, quid post rem evenerit’ (‘This topic suggests that we should enquire into what happened before

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crucial event in Alberti’s life, namely the death of his father (in 1421), while the young Alberti was studying law in Bologna in order to endear himself to his family.39 The final illness of Lorenzo di Benedetto degli Alberti is evoked also at the start of his vernacular dialogue De familia: indeed it is the occasion that brings together the members of the Alberti family who participate in the dialogue. The demise of his father was a traumatic episode for Battista and is mentioned in several works because it marked the beginning of his struggles with his relatives in order to obtain the inheritance that his father had left him. This emerges in the next sentence of the Commentarium, where Alberti twice mentions that his relatives were inhumane with him: they were envious of his emerging fame, but he bore their inhuman behaviour with equanimity, and unlike them he was mindful of his duty and of being humane rather than bearing grudges.40 The repeated stress here on humanity and inhumanity shows that this too is one of the key themes of the Commentarium. The fifth paragraph highlights the fact that it was in this context of difficulty and hostility that he wrote the comedy, primarily in order to console himself.41 Alberti admits that there were flaws in his first redaction of the Philodoxeos, but he presents himself as being a victim of circumstances: the play was still unpolished and crude when it was stolen by one of his acquaintances who copied it hurriedly, thus the work had many defects, both those of the young author and those caused by the hasty transcription.42 The acquaintance circulated the event, what happened at the same time as it, and what happened after it’) (Cicero, Topica 51). 39  ‘Mortuo Laurentio Alberto patre meo, cum ipse apud Bononiam iuri pontificio operam darem, in ea disciplina enitebar ita proficere ut meis essem carior et nostre domui ornamento’ (‘When Lorenzo Alberti died, while I was in Bologna studying canon law, I made every effort to make such progress in that subject that my relations would hold me even more dearly and that I would be an honour to our household’) (Philodoxeos 146). 40  ‘Fuere inter meos qui inhumaniter nostro iam iam surgenti et pene florescenti nomini vehementius inviderent. […] Tuli igitur illorum in me inhumanitatem animo non iniquo et magis officii et humanitatis quam iniuriarum memori’ (Philodoxeos 146). 41  ‘Idcirco hanc in eo quo tum eram constitutus merore incommodorum meorum et acerbitatis illorum […] consolandi mei gratia fabulam scripsi’ (‘In the midst of the sadness I was in, because of my disadvantages and my relations’ harshness […] I wrote this play in order to console myself’) (ibidem). The theme of consolation is also stressed in Alberti’s autobiography: ‘Idcirco consolandi sui gratia, intermissis iurium studiis, inter curandum et convalescendum scripsit Philodoxeos fabulam, annos natus non plus viginti’ (‘Therefore, in order to console himself, he abandoned his legal studies, and while he was being cared for and convalescing, he wrote the play Philodoxeos when he was no more than twenty years old.’) (Alberti, Autobiografia e altre opere latine 68). 42  ‘Quam [sc. fabulam] quidem inelimatam et penitus rudem familiaris quidam mei studiosissimus subripuit furtimque illam horis paucissimis quam celerrime transcripsit; ex quo

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the play widely, but the text was further corrupted by the inexperience of the copyists who rendered it totally inelegant.43 The final damage to the comedy was perpetrated by those who were aware of Alberti’s genius but were not his friends, and who because of this inserted many obscenities into the text.44 The editor of the Philodoxeos rightly doubts that these indecent details were added by others since that would have given rise to an earlier ‘innocent’ redaction, one without obscenities, of which there is no trace in the manuscript tradition. What we find in the first version, as we have it, are indeed a number of scurrilous passages which the author took care to eliminate in the second, and it is possible, according to Cesarini Martinelli, that the twenty-year-old Alberti, still studying law at Bologna, could have included such indecent passages under the influence of the ‘goliardic’ atmosphere of the university.45 So it is likely that such passages were included in the text by Alberti in the first place. If so, then bearing in mind that the crudeness of the obscenities excised from the first redaction has no parallel in any of Alberti’s future writings, this attempt to distance himself from these indecencies is probably another of the main reasons why the young author, now making a name for himself in the mid-1430s and dedicating his youthful comedy to a prestigious patron, Leonello d’Este, composed this lengthy, solemn Commentarium. And yet, claims the author, despite all these defects, his youthful, unpolished and corrupted text was so much in demand that nobody could be considered an expert in Latin comedy who had not read the Philodoxeos.46 The last three paragraphs begin with the author admitting that, since everyone admired the comedy, in order to make it seem a classical work he pretended that he had taken it from an ancient manuscript.47 This story was convincing, says the author, for a number of reasons: the Philodoxeos followed factum est ut ad meas mendas scribendi quoque istius festinatione multa vitia adicerentur’ (ibidem). 43  ‘Fecit tamen eius me invito copiam vulgo, apud quem librariorum imperitia nimirum omnino inconcinna reddita est’ (ibidem). 44  ‘Neque defuere aliqui, nostri magis ingenii conscii quam amatores, qui quo meam esse suspicabantur, eo multa obscena interseruerint’ (ibidem). 45  See Philodoxeos, 112, n. 1, for a list of obscene passages that were cut. On these and other changes between the two versions, see Ponte G., Leon Battista Alberti. Umanista e scrittore, 2nd ed. (Genoa: 1991) 158–161. 46  ‘Itaque puerilis et inelaborata corruptaque fabula, dum meam esse ignorarent, tanto fuit in pretio habita, ut nemo satis comicis delectari putaretur cui Philodoxeos parum esset familiaris’ (Philodoxeos 146). 47  ‘Quam ego fabulam cum eo placere et passim a studiosis expeti, quo vetusta putaretur, intelligerem, rogantibus unde illam congessissemus per commentum persuasimus ex vetustissimo illam esse codice excerptam’ (Philodoxeos 146–147).

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the ‘rules of the comic genre’ and smacked of something authentically ancient; in addition it was easy to believe that a young student of canon law could not have been the author as he would not have been at all interested in pursuing praise for his literary eloquence.48 At this point he adds one final reason for the fact that readers believed the fiction of Lepidus: in those days nobody believed that anyone possessed the kind of genius capable of producing a work that could pass for something written by a classical author.49 Once more, the emphasis is on the young Battista’s brilliance, and there is no sign of a modesty topos here. He finishes this paragraph by saying that he had taken the precaution of adding a prologue to the first redaction, in which he mentioned his studies, his age and other details which, when the time came, would prove that he was indeed the author of the play.50 The penultimate paragraph mentions the fact that the first redaction circulated for ten years, until the author had graduated from his studies of canon and civil law.51 After this he returned to the humanities, and emended the play so that it became more polished in language and cleaner in content.52 However, here lay the paradox: once he had reclaimed his comedy after its years of ‘exile’, people became envious and liked the Philodoxeos less, and whereas everyone wanted to read it when it was obscene and unpolished, now there were very few who did not criticise the emended version. Thus Alberti seems to have written his Commentarium after his second redaction had circulated a bit.53 There is in fact some substance to Alberti’s complaints about the positive reception accorded to the first redaction and the negative approach to the second version: there are only two manuscripts and a printed edition of the latter, but there are no fewer than nineteen manuscripts plus a printed edition of the first redaction. Concluding this section, the author berates the inconsistency of his critics: if there were people who previously had loudly praised his 48  ‘Facile omnes adsentiri: nam et comicum dicendi genus et priscum quippiam redolebat. neque difficile creditu erat adolescentem pontificiis scriptis occupatum me ab omni eloquentie laude abhorrere’ (Philodoxeos 147). 49  ‘Adde quod per hec tempora non eiusmodi vigere ingenia arbitrabantur’ (ibidem). 50  ‘Tamen, ne meas lucubrationes perderem, adieci prohemium in quo et studia et etatem et reliqua hec de me omnia aspersa esse volui, ut, siquando libuisset, nostram liquido esse – quod fecimus – vindicaremus’ (ibidem). 51  ‘Denique annos decem vagata est, quoad e studiis pontificiis aureo anulo et flamine donatus excessi’ (ibidem). 52  ‘Cum autem ad hec studia philosophie rediissem, hec fabula elimatior et honestior mea emendatione facta’ (ibidem). 53  ‘Quod eam quasi postliminio recuperarim, invidia effecit ut minus placeat, et quam omnes etsi obscenam et incomptam cupiebant, eam nunc pauci sunt qui non vituperent’ (ibidem).

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genius and eloquence but who now attacked him, they should either reject their previous verdict or should declare that they are envious and inconsistent by nature.54 Alberti claims that if they have hurt him with their criticisms, he has in any case derived benefit from this as a kind of stimulus; but if they have been unable to hurt him, he can dismiss them since because of the wickedness of such men good people will rather love him than castigate him.55 In the final paragraph the author returns to the theme of his own genius, appealing to the support of those who cultivate virtue rather than obstructing others, and saying that if it is their duty to support talented people like himself who are neither lazy nor idle, then he appeals to their loyalty and their cult of the sacred religion of literature.56 In a passionate peroration he appeals to good people to defend the author, and here he gives his full name: ‘Leon Battista Alberti’. He wants to be defended from the sniping of the envious, since he is most devoted to scholars, and with the support of these good people he can, if leisure permits, produce more comic works and even serious ones as well, in order to please them and be loved by them all the more.57 The Commentarium is thus a very different paratext in terms of tone, when compared to the initial drunken words from the playwright in the earlier Prologue. It has the more dignified title, Commentarium, and in addition, the account of the plot that follows is given an allegorical interpretation which claims for this youthful comedy a serious moral purpose, of which there had been no mention in the Prologue to the first redaction. Similarly Alberti’s Latin is much more mature here than in the first Prologus which contained non-classical words such as the noun ‘humanissimitate’ and the adverb ‘incure’ (Philodoxeos 148). Instead the Commentarium is written in a more secure Latin, typical of the more mature writer who had in the meantime written 54  ‘Sed siqui sunt, qui nostrum ingenium et eloquentiam quam pridem magnopere laudarant modo reprehendant, ii profecto aut suum pristinum iudicium vituperant aut declarant quam sint natura invidi atque inconstantes’ (ibidem). 55  ‘A quibus quidem, siquid leserint, satis pene ex eorum invidie stimulis sumpsimus; sin autem lesisse nequeunt, parvi eos possum facere, ubi me boni ob eorum improbitatem potius ament quam redarguant’ (ibidem). 56  ‘Nunc autem, o studiosi, qui vestram operam in colenda virtute, non in aliorum cursu interpellando ponitis, si officii est ingeniis huiusmodi non inertibus neque desidiosis favere, vos precor atque obtestor, vestram imploro fidem et sanctissimam litterarum religionem’ (ibidem). 57  ‘Defendite vestrum Leonem Baptistam Albertum studiosis omnium deditissimum; defendite, inquam, me ab invidorum morsibus, ut, cum per otium licuerit, bona spe et vestra approbatione confirmatus possim pacato animo alia huiusmodi atque non invita Minerva longe in dies maiora edere, quibus et delectari et me amare vehementius possitis’ (ibidem).

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the De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (1428–1432) and some of his Intercenales (begun around 1429), as Cesarini Martinelli pointed out.58 To accompany this more solemn paratext, its title and the author’s name are no longer given as ‘Lepidi comici Philodoxios fabule prologus’ (‘The Prologue to the play Philodoxios by the comic poet Lepidus’, Philodoxeos 148), as in the first redaction, but as ‘Commentarium Philodoxeos fabule Leonis Baptiste Alberti’ (‘The Commentary on the play Philodoxeos by Leon Battista Alberti’) (Philodoxeos 144): the stress is on the more dignified title Commentarium and on the author’s new tripartite name. Finally a word about the other two paratexts that accompany the Commentarium and shed light on it. The brief dedicatory letter to Leonello d’Este (1437) starts by stressing the author’s friendship with Leonello’s brother Meliaduse, whom he calls most humane (‘humanissimi’, Philodoxeos 144), in direct contrast with the emphasis on the inhumanity of Alberti’s enemies that was so evident the Commentarium. But the main motive for the dedicatory letter is to explain that since the play was much in demand amongst his friends, the author could think of no worthier patron to dedicate it to than to the virtuous Leonello. It is also worth noting that in addressing the marquis at the start of the letter, Alberti again uses his new Latin name, which now neatly mirrors that of the dedicatee: ‘Illu[strissimo] D[omino] Leo[nello] Esten[si] Leo B[aptista] /Al[bertus]’ [Figs. 1.2, 1.3], the abbreviation of ‘Leonello’ to ‘Leo’ emphasising even more strongly the parallelism between Leon Battista Alberti and his new patron Leonello d’Este. As for the two plot summaries, the earlier ‘Fabule argumentum’ (Philodoxeos 150) and the later ‘Argumentum’ (151), they differ only in terms of language but in a significant way. In the first summary, written for the 1424 redaction, we find evidence of Plautine and Terentian diction, as we saw. But the second Argumentum tones down the obscene lexis by modifying two of Plautus’ and Terence’s favourite verbs, which had been used in the first Summary and which the ancient authors had used in their prologues, namely ‘vitiare’ and ‘comprimere’, meaning ‘to deflower’ and ‘to have sex with’ respectively. Alberti replaces them with the more classical but less explicit equivalent, ‘rapere’, meaning ‘to abduct’: thus the phrase about Fortunius’ rape of Doxa’s sister, which in the first redaction reads ‘Phimiamque, Doxie sororem unicam, vitiat’ (Philodoxeos 150), becomes ‘Phimiam sororem Doxie rapit’ (Philodoxeos 151) in the second. Similarly in the final sentence about Fortunius being able to keep the girl he had had sex with, the phrase ‘ut hanc compressam hic teneat’ (Philodoxeos 150) becomes ‘ex quo hic raptam tenuit’ 58  Philodoxeos 115.

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(Philodoxeos 151).59 Thus even these brief paratexts reflect the young Alberti’s developing sense of appropriate language, the second summary being similar in tone to that of the more sober Commentarium, and more appropriate to the elevated status of the dedicatee, Leonello. Alberti’s first work, the Philodoxeos Fabula, was part of the humanistic revival of comedy that had begun with Pier Paolo Vergerio’s Paulus (c. 1390) and Leonardo Bruni’s Poliscena (1408) and was gathering pace particularly in the 1420s, with Sicco Polenton’s Catinia (1419), Antonio Barzizza’s Cauteriaria (1420/1425), and Pier Candido Decembrio’s lost Aphrodisia (1420).60 Unlike most of those contemporary comedies, Alberti knew that his comedy had to be accompanied by a plot summary and a prologue or commentary in which the author, like Plautus and especially Terence, defends himself from his critics.61 But whereas Terence’s enemies were other comic poets who accused him of plagiarism, Alberti’s enemies were members of his family and other humanists who were envious and disliked the second version of the Philodoxeos. The self-presentation in the Commentarium provides the earliest evidence of an autobiographical urge in the author that would be developed in the later, fullblown autobiography (the Vita), where many of the same themes are covered. Alberti rewrites his original Prologus to the first redaction of the comedy as a longer and more serious piece of prose, entitled Commentarium, in which the emphasis is no longer on comedy but on the moral message of the play and on 59  My emphasis. Comprimere is used twice in a Plautus summary: ‘Comprimit adulescens Lemnius Sicyoniam […] quam compresserat’ (‘A young man from Lemnos had sex with a girl from Sicyon […] the girl he had had sex with’) (Cistellaria, “Argumentum”, 1, 6); both verbs are used in another summary: ‘Tandem compressae pater cognoscit omnia, / utque illam ducat qui vitiarat convenit’ (In the end the father discovers everything about a girl who had been raped, and they come to an agreement that he who had deflowered her should marry her) (Truculentus, Argumentum, 9–10); and vitiare is used three times in the two summaries of another play: ‘eius filiam / Lyconides vitiarat. […] qui virginem vitiarat […] Lyconides istius vitiat filiam’ (Lyconides had deflowered his daughter […] the man who had deflowered the virgin […] Lyconides deflowers the man’s daughter) (Aulularia, “Argumentum” I, 4–5; “Argumentum” II, 3). 60  On these comedies, see Stäuble A., La commedia umanistica del Quattrocento (Florence: 1968). 61  Vergerio did write a short verse Prologus to the Paulus, but in it he simply presents in broad terms a contrast between his youthful frivolous comedy and his new maturity, with none of the autobiographical detail we find in Alberti’s Commentarium: see the edition in Humanist Comedies, ed. Grund, 2. Similarly, Barzizza’s brief Prologue to his Cauteriaria merely explains that he has written the comedy in prose because not even the experts understand Terence’s metres properly, and asks forgiveness for any mistakes that have arisen from the haste with which the comedy was composed: for an edition of the prologue see Barzizza Antonio, Cauteriaria, in Teatro goliardico dell’Umanesimo, ed. V. Pandolfi – E. Artese, Poeti europei. Classici 2 (Milan: 1965) 448.

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the major setbacks that the author had suffered at the hands of envious relatives, friends and critics. It also underlined his capacity for overcoming such adversity and the prodigious nature of his ingenium, which promised to deliver even greater works. One last word about the title. Alberti may have been influenced in his choice of terminology by the growing popularity of the term commentarium in the Quattrocento for a historiographical genre that would become popular in humanist circles thanks to works by Leonardo Bruni and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, but this is probably coincidental, as their commentarii are historical-autobiographical works, very different from Alberti’s Commentarium.62 The only other early Quattrocento example of a selfcommentary is that of Alberti’s friend Leonardo Dati, in his ‘Argomento’ to his Scena for the Certame coronario, a vernacular literary contest organised by Alberti himself in 1441, but Dati’s vernacular commentary is more concerned with the rhetorical divisions and metres of his theatrical text, is distinctly indebted to the medieval accessus ad auctores tradition and says nothing about the author himself.63 Once again an Alberti initiative, in this case writing his own self-commentary, seems to have developed in a totally original way. Selective Bibliography Texts

Alberti Leon Battista, Philodoxeos fabula, ed. L. Cesarini Martinelli, Rinascimento 17 (1977) 111–234. Alberti Leon Battista, Vita, in Autobiografia e altre opere latine, ed. L. Chines – A. Severi, BUR Rizzoli. Classici (Milan: 2012) 64–103. Alberti Leon Battista, Philodoxeos fabula, with English translation, in Humanist Comedies, ed. G.R. Grund, I Tatti Renaissance Library 19 (Cambridge, MA: 2005) 70–169. Barzizza Antonio, Cauteriaria, in Teatro goliardico dell’Umanesimo, ed. V. Pandolfi – E. Artese, Poeti europei. Classici 2 (Milan: 1965) 443–549.

62  For the use of the term Commentarii for a historical work, such as that by Leonardo Bruni, see Ianziti G., “I ‘Commentarii’: Appunti per la storia di un genere storiografico Quattrocentesco”, Archivio Storico Italiano 150 (1992) 1029–1063. 63  See Bertolini L., “L’autocommento di Leonardo Dati alla Scena”, Studi italiani 7 (1992) 121–147.

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Bertolini L., “L’autocommento di Leonardo Dati alla Scena”, Studi italiani 7 (1992) 121–147. Cardini R., Mosaici. Il ‘Nemico’ dell’Alberti, Humanistica 6 (Rome: 1990). Cardini R., “Quando e dove l’Alberti conobbe il nuovo Plauto (e qual è la cronologia del De commodis e dell’Ecatonfilea)”, in Cocco C. et alii (eds.), Itinerari del testo. Per Stefano Pittaluga, 2 vols. (Milan: 2018) vol. 1, 141–194. Codoñer C., “La doble versión del Philodoxeos albertiano”, in Cardini R. – Regoliosi M. (eds.), Leon Battista Alberti umanista e scrittore. Filologia, esegesi, tradizione. Atti dei Convegni internazionali del Comitato Nazionale VI centenario della nascita di Leon Battista Alberti (Arezzo, 24–25–26 giugno 2004), 2 vols. (Florence: 2008) I, 191–219. Copeland R., “Academic prologues to authors”, in ead. (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. I: 800–1558 (Oxford: 2016) 151–164. Demetriou C., “Aelius Donatus and His Commentary on Terence’s Comedies”, in Fontaine M. – Scafuro A.C. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy (Oxford: 2014) 782–798. Gorni G., Leon Battista Alberti. Poeta, artista, camaleonte, ed. P. Allegretti, Uomini e dottrine 57 (Rome: 2012). Hanna R. et alii, “Latin commentary tradition and vernacular literature”, in Minnis A. – Johnson I. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume II: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2005) 363–421. Ianziti G., “I ‘Commentarii’: Appunti per la storia di un genere storiografico Quattrocentesco”, Archivio Storico Italiano 150 (1992) 1029–1063. McLaughlin M., “Alberti’s Canis: structure and sources in the portrait of the artist as a Renaissance dog”, Albertiana 14 (2011) 55–83. McLaughlin M., “Alberti traduttore di se stesso: Uxoria e Naufragus”, in Arquez M.R. – D’Antuono N. (eds.), Autotraduzione. Teoria ed esempi fra Italia e Spagna (e oltre), Il segno e le lettere, Saggi 6 (Milan: 2012) 77–106. McLaughlin M., “From Lepidus to Leon Battista Alberti: Naming, renaming and anonymizing the self in Quattrocento Italy”, Romance Studies 31, 3–4 (November 2013) 152–166. McLaughlin M., “The recovery of Terence in Renaissance Italy: From Alberti to Machiavelli”, in Earle T.F. – Fouto C., The Reinvention of Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Traditions, texts and performance (London: 2015) 115–139. McLaughlin M., Leon Battista Alberti. La vita, l’umanesimo, le opere letterarie, Biblioteca dell’“Archivum Romanicum” – Serie I: Storia, Letteratura, Paleografia 447 (Florence: 2016). MacLennan L.J., The Trecento Commentaries on the ‘Divina Commedia’ and the ‘Epistle to Cangrande’, Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs (Oxford: 1974).

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Pandolfi C., “Il Commentarium e la dedica della Philodoxeos Fabvla. Osservazioni sui paratesti”, in Furlan F. – Venturi G. (eds.), Leon Battista Alberti. Actes du Congrès International ‘Gli Este e l’Alberti: Tempo e misura’ (Ferrara, 29. XI–3. XII. 2004), 2 vols., special issue of Schifanoia 30–31 (Pisa – Rome: 2010) vol. 1, 99–117. Pandolfi V. – Artese E. (eds.), Teatro goliardico dell’Umanesimo (Milan: 1965). Ponte G., Leon Battista Alberti. Umanista e scrittore, 2nd ed. (Genoa: 1991). Reynolds L.D. (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: 1986). Stäuble A., La commedia umanistica del Quattrocento (Florence: 1968).

chapter 2

Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo’s Marginalia Jeroen De Keyser The way in which the Italian humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) sought to promote his writings was defined by two key factors.1 First of all, he wrote the bulk of his oeuvre before the advent of the printing press, and, secondly, he did so as a freelance courtier in the competitive, patronage-driven environment of Quattrocento humanism.2 This meant that he produced a great many handwritten copies of his numerous writings to be sent out all over Italy and even beyond. Some of these manuscripts were lavishly decorated dedication codices presented – in person or by proxy – to prominent prelates and princes. Other manuscripts were more modest, to be circulated among Filelfo’s extended network of fellow humanists. What both had in common was the meticulous way in which Filelfo micromanaged the production of the copies that left his desk. Examples abound of codices displaying the author’s finishing touch in the form of autograph revisions of the texts themselves – both corrections of his scribes’ errors and last-minute ‘second thoughts’ as to the phrasing of his text – as well as marginal annotations of various kinds. Since these marginal notes usually occur in an almost identical form in different copies of Filelfo’s writings, it is indisputable that the author considered these glosses an inseparable part of his literary production. They clearly stem from his personal master copy and there is no doubt that Filelfo required his scribes to reproduce his annotations along with his texts. Often the addition of autograph marginalia is helpful for establishing the relative chronological order of the witnesses 1  The best introduction to Filelfo’s life and work is the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI) entry by Paolo Viti (1997): www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-filelfo_(DizionarioBiografico). Fundamental are the collection of articles in Avesani R. et alii (eds.), Francesco Filelfo nel Quinto Centenario della Morte. Atti del XVII Convegno di Studi Maceratesi (Padua: 1986); and Robin D., Filelfo in Milan. Writings 1451–1477 (Princeton, NJ: 1991). 2  For an assessment of Filelfo’s patronage-driven activity see De Keyser J., “The Poet and the Pope. Francesco Filelfo’s Common Cause with Sixtus IV”, Schede Umanistiche 26 (2012 [re vera: 2015]), 43–65; idem, “Picturing the Perfect Patron? Francesco Filelfo’s Image of Francesco Sforza”, in Baker P. et alii (eds.), Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance: The Humanist Depiction of Rulers in Historiographical and Biographical Texts, Transformationen der Antike 44 (Berlin: 2016) 391–414.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_004

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of a given text. When Filelfo decided to add a new marginal note or to alter his text upon vetting his scribe’s work, he would usually copy back any additions or alterations into his own master copy, after which they became part of the integrated textual package on the basis of which future copies would be produced.3 Both the alterations which Filelfo gradually introduced in his texts and the ever-expanding series of marginal annotations he added to them are interesting illustrations of his evolving lexicological opinions and stylistic preferences. The marginalia contain telling information about his focus and obsessions, and about the way in which he wanted to convey his message to his readership. As will become clear from the examples below, quite often the man was the message – and vice-versa. Along with this attention for self-promotion, another key to a correct understanding of Filelfo’s praxis is the fact that he began his career as a translator. While he started writing satires in 1428, and some of these poems had been circulating for years, he completed the collection of 10,000 verses only in 1451. In the meantime he had published a series of translations from Greek, starting with Dio Chrysostom’s De Troia non capta, of which he produced a Latin version on the journey back from Constantinople (in 1427), where he had spent seven years and acquired a supreme mastery of Greek. One year later Filelfo translated Ps.-Aristotle’s Rhetorica ad Alexandrum and Lysias’ Funeral oration and Eratosthenes. None of the manuscript copies of Filelfo’s first three translations that I have been able to inspect display significant marginal annotations.4 The first one that does is a manuscript produced by Filelfo a year later, in 1430, for Cardinal Niccolò Albergati of Bologna. It is the dedication copy of his translation of four writings focusing on the political organisation and history of ancient Sparta, now ms. Plut. 63.34 of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. The texts translated are Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans and Agesilaus, and Plutarch’s Lycurgus. The quartet is completed by Plutarch’s Life of Numa, which 3  For more information about Filelfo’s modus operandi in the serial production of copies of his writings see Fiaschi S., “Prima e dopo la raccolta: diffusione e circolazione delle Satyrae di Francesco Filelfo: spunti dall’epistolario edito ed inedito”, Medioevo e Rinascimento n.s. 14 (2000) 147–165; Filelfo F., Satyrae I (Decadi I–V ), ed. S. Fiaschi (Rome: 2005); Gionta D., Per i ‘Convivia mediolanensia’ di Francesco Filelfo (Messina: 2005); De Keyser J., “The Transmission of Francesco Filelfo’s Commentationes Florentinae de Exilio”, Interpres. Rivista di Studi Quattrocenteschi 30 (2011) 7–29; Filelfo F., Traduzioni da Senofonte e Plutarco. Respublica Lacedaemoniorum, Agesilaus, Lycurgus, Numa, Cyri Paedia, ed. J. De Keyser (Alessandria: 2012). 4  None are mentioned in Filelfo F., Dione Crisostomo, Captivitatem Ilii non fuisse. Traduzione latina di Francesco Filelfo, ed. S. Leotta (Messina: 2008).

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was added because the second king of Rome forms a pair with Lycurgus in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.5 Much more numerous and varied, however, are the annotations displayed by multiple copies of Filelfo’s last and most ambitious translation effort, for which he returned to Xenophon: the Cyropaedia, dedicated to Pope Paul II in 1468, an explicit attempt to replace Poggio Bracciolini’s abridged version of the same text. Filelfo’s Paedia Cyri was printed during his lifetime, in 1477, and with his consent – witness his correspondence with friends in January and February 1477 – yet the result was disappointing: in later letters the author complains about the poor quality of the Milanese printer’s performance. In contrast to the meticulously crafted handwritten reproductions of Filelfo’s works, the editio princeps is riddled with errors that do not do justice to Filelfo’s translation effort.6 A notable aspect of Filelfo’s Cyropaedia translation is the fact that we can identify the Greek source text Filelfo used in producing his translation. Filelfo collated two manuscripts, adding in both the variae lectiones that he found in the other witness. His prime source was the Biblioteca Laurenziana’s ms. Plut. 55.19, which was copied for Filelfo in Constantinople by Georgius Crisococcas.7 Filelfo’s other source manuscript is now at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (ms. Phillips 1627).8 Apart from collating both manuscripts and correcting them reciprocally, Filelfo also added marginal notes structuring the narrative. Most of these autograph additions from the Greek Laurenziana manuscript were subsequently incorporated in the Latin marginalia displayed by the idiograph copies of Filelfo’s Latin version (that is, authorised manuscripts that were produced under his watch). In these examples (all from the fourth book), the Latin marginal notes in the copies of Filelfo’s translation correspond to the annotations he added himself in Greek to his source manuscript:

5  All textual quotations are from my critical editions: Filelfo F., Traduzioni da Senofonte e Plutarco (see n. 3); idem, On Exile. Commentationes Florentinae de Exilio, ed. J. De Keyser, trans. W.S. Blanchard, I Tatti Renaissance Library 55 (Cambridge, MA: 2013); De Keyser J., Francesco Filelfo and Francesco Sforza. Critical Edition of Filelfo’s ‘Sphortias’, ‘De Genuensium deditione’, ‘Oratio parentalis’, and his Polemical Exchange with Galeotto Marzio (Hildesheim – Zürich – New York: 2015); Filelfo F., Collected Letters. Epistolarum Libri XLVIII, ed. J. De Keyser, 4 vols. (Alessandria: 2015). 6  See Filelfo, Traduzioni da Senofonte, for a full discussion of the genesis and fortuna of Filelfo’s Xenophon translations. 7  More about Filelfo’s Greek source manuscripts in Filelfo, Traduzioni da Senofonte xlvii–lviii. 8  The second source was identified by Orlandi L., “In margine alla Ciropedia di Filelfo”, Studi medievali e umanistici 11 (2013) 193–214.

Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo ’ s Marginalia

Κύρου δημηγορία add. Filelfo Cyrus’ speech

Cyri oratio Cyrus’ speech

Περὶ ἡδονῆς add. Filelfo About pleasure

De voluptate About pleasure

Ὑρκάνιοι ἄγγελοι πρὸς Κῦρον add. Filelfo Hyrcanian envoys to Cyrus

Hyrcanii ad Cyrum Hyrcanians to Cyrus

Φῶς ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ add. Filelfo Light from heaven

Signum caeleste Sign from heaven

Ἔθος ᾿Ασιανῶν add. Filelfo Habit of the Asians

Mos exercitus Asiatici Habit of the Asian army

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περὶ ἵππου ὁράσεως add. Filelfo Adverte praecipuam equi naturam About the horse’s power of sight Observe the horse’s peculiar property Γωβρύας πρὸς Κῦρον add. Filelfo Gobryas to Cyrus

Gobryas ad Cyrum venit Gobryas comes to Cyrus

In what follows I will categorise the marginalia from Filelfo’s Xenophon translations from 1430 and 1468, along with those displayed by some of his own writings.9 The first are the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio, a consolatory dialogue staging the aristocrats who were exiled from their hometown after the return to power of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1434. Some other prominent Florentines, such as Poggio Bracciolini and Leonardo Bruni, also participate 9  Various manuscripts of texts discussed in this article are entirely available online. At the website of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (mss.bmlonline.it): Plut. 33.33 (Sphortias 1–4); Plut. 55.19 (Filelfo’s annotated Greek Cyropaedia); Plut. 53.10 (Oratio parentalis); Plut. 57.12 (epistolographi Graeci); Plut. 63.34 (dedication copy of the Xenophon and Plutarch translations for Albergati). The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (digi.vatlib.it) has: Urb. lat. 410 (Cyri Paedia, dedication copy for Federico da Montefeltro); Urb. lat. 701 (Odes). The Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica offers Lat. 8125 (Sphortias 1–8) at gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7200078b. Yale’s Beinecke Library has another copy of the Oratio parentalis, Marston MS 18, at brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3792222. Both the BnF Sphortias and the Beinecke Oratio parentalis were copied by Filelfo’s friend Fabrizio Elfiteo. More about Filelfo’s scribes can be found in De Keyser J., “I codici filelfiani della Biblioteca Trivulziana”, Libri & Documenti 39 (2013) 91–109.

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in the dialogue. The work was probably written in the mid-1440s. We have two perfect twin manuscripts of it, both transcribed by Pagano da Rho, one of Filelfo’s trusted scribes: one at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence (ms. II II 70), the other at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris (ms. 741). Then there is the Sphortias, an unfinished epic poem which Filelfo all but abandoned after the death of its protagonist, Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan, in 1466. Of this poem we have, among other manuscripts, the dedication copy for Piero de’ Medici at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (ms. Plut. 33.33), also copied by Pagano da Rho. It contains the first redaction of the first four books. Other splendid dedication copies contain the eight books that Filelfo did complete (of precisely 800 verses each). In the case of the Sphortias, Filelfo’s autograph master copy survives, albeit severely damaged, in Rome at the Biblioteca Casanatense (ms. 415). Also dedicated to Sforza is De Genuensium deditione, a poem of 550 verses celebrating the surrender of Genoa to Sforza’s rule, written in distichs in 1464. It has a transmission of its own, but was subsequently incorporated by Filelfo in his collection of epigrams, De iocis et seriis, of which we also have an autograph copy at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (ms. G 93 inf.). One year after Sforza’s demise, in 1467, Filelfo wrote a celebratory Oratio parentalis for his late patron. Of this eulogy he frenetically produced copies to be sent out to various friends and possible patrons all over Italy. By far the most voluminous of Filelfo’s writings are his collected letters, a corpus of over half a million words. The 110 Greek and more than two thousand Latin letters span half a century, from Filelfo’s return to Italy in 1427 to 1477. This idiosyncratic assemblage of diverse epistolary genres juxtaposes short memos to friends with lengthy and learned philosophical essays. They are transmitted by numerous, partially overlapping witnesses, but the complete canonical collection in 48 books survives in a single manuscript at the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan (ms. 873). While this important manuscript does not contain autograph corrections or annotations, there are good reasons to assume that it was commissioned by the author and established under his supervision. When it comes to marginalia, though, its interest is rather limited. Marginal notes abound in the famous Trivulziano manuscript, yet almost all of them belong to the first of the categories I will now distinguish and discuss.10 10  As to Filelfo’s other writings, only the marginalia to his Satires have been published, in Fiaschi S., “Autocommento ed interventi d’autore nelle Satyrae del Filelfo: l’esempio del codice Viennese 3303”, Medioevo e Rinascimento n.s. 16 (2002) 113–188. An analysis of a few Odes marginalia is given by Dadà V., “L’epistolario e lo scrittoio del poeta. I Carmina di Filelfo e la lettera ad Alberto Parisi (Epist. 24.1)”, in Bognini F. (ed.), Nuovi territori della lettera tra XV e XVI secolo (Venice: 2016) 81–104.

Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo ’ s Marginalia

1

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Index of Names and Places

The bulk of Filelfo’s marginalia consists in the combination of what editors would nowadays include in an index nominum and an index rerum at the end of their volume. In these notes Filelfo simply repeats proper names of persons and places that are mentioned in the text, usually in the nominative instead of the inflected forms that are used in the text itself. When a certain name is cited multiple times on the same page, the choice to repeat it a second time in the marginalia or not seems mostly random, although it may in part be due to differences in the page distribution between Filelfo’s master copy and the apographs. 2 Transliteration Similar to the first category are the repetitions of single Greek words that are cited in the main text mostly for etymological or other lexicographical reasons. These words are often immediately transliterated in the Latin alphabet. In the Trivulziana manuscript containing Filelfo’s collected letters a transliteration of all short Greek quotes (one or a few words) is incorporated into the main text. 3 Identification In only a few instances the marginal index nominum yields more information than the actual text, by identifying a person who in the main text is anonymised or mentioned only in generic terms. When describing a solemn ceremony in Milan in De Genuensium deditione, Filelfo lists the persons present on stage: first of all Duke Francesco Sforza and his consort Bianca Maria, and ‘inde duae sedere nurus’ (‘then their two daughters-in-law’). They are identified in a marginal note at v. 223 as ‘Beatrix Aestensis’ and ‘Antonia Vermia’, that is, Beatrice d’Este, wedded in second marriage to Francesco’s illegitimate son Tristano Sforza, and Antonia Dal Verme, the wife of Sforza Secondo, another illegitimate son of Francesco Sforza. At the end of letter PhE·32.25, sent on 30 September 1470 to Giovanni Stefano Bottigella, Filelfo states: ‘Caeterum dedi tuo ad te famulo maledici hominis scripta in Platonem. Quae vero a cardinali Nicaeno sapientissime sunt responsa, propediem ad te ibunt.’ (‘Furthermore I have sent you that badmouthed man’s writings against Plato via your servant. The Cardinal of Nicea’s wise response will be sent to you in the next few days.’) At this point the marginal

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index reads ‘Georgius Trapezuntius – Plato – Bessarion Cardinalis’, identifying the two protagonists of the famous Quattrocento Plato-Aristotle controversy: George of Trebizond, who attacked the Platonists, and Cardinal Bessarion, whose In calumniatorem Platonis was a fierce rebuttal of the man who dared slander the admired philosopher. Somewhat hybrid instances of categories 2 and 3 are the marginalia in which Filelfo expounds a nickname given to one of the characters of his story. In Sphortias 6.393 the name of the Hydropotes character is explained in a marginal note: ‘Aquobibus Hydropotes. Nam hydropotes Graeca dictio est, quae Latine significat aquobibus.’ (‘Hydropotes is Aquobibus. For hydropotes is a Greek word, which in Latin means “water drinker”.’). At Sphortias 6.745 Filelfo expounds the name Leucus, his nickname for Pier Candido Decembrio: ‘Leucus Graeca dictio est. Nam λευκός (leucos) “candidum” significat. Petrus enim Candidus Decembris, Uberti filius, cum omnibus flagitiis sit deditus, tum vel in primis invidentiae unus omnium est obnoxius’ (‘Leucus is a Greek form. For λευκός [leucos] means “candid”. In fact, Pier Candido Decembrio, the son of Uberto, is prone to all vices, but especially and more than anyone to envy’). At Sphortias 4.596 the name of Cenchrius is explained: “‘Panicarolam’ significat; nam Henericus Panicarola mercator clam mittebatur ad Venetos, arcana foedera tractaturus”. In one manuscript he adds: ‘Κέγχρον autem Graece significare “panicum” Latine, nemo doctus ignorat’ (‘This is Panicarola’, for the merchant Enrico Panicarola was secretly sent to Venice, to negotiate a secrete treaty; no learned person fails to note that the Greek κέγχρος means “millet” in Latin’). 4

Parallel Places

When translating, Filelfo occasionally points out that the passage at hand disagrees with either other passages in the same text or with the information provided by other classical authors. In the first chapter of the Life of Lycurgus, where Plutarch himself mentions Xenophon as an authority on Lycurgus’ life, Filelfo adds: ‘Id habetur in superiori Republica Lacedaemoniorum’ (‘This is described in the Constitution of Spartans above’), referring the reader to the preceding text included in the quartet dedicated to Cardinal Albergati. In the Life of Numa at 15.10 and 22.7 he twice adds ‘Aliter Livius’, indicating that Livy provides different information on the topic discussed in these lines. In the first chapter of the fourth book of the Cyropaedia, Filelfo points out an incoherence in Xenophon’s narrative: ‘De morte regis Asyrii superius minime constat. Itaque puto in libro superiore hominum negligentia aliquid

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deesse. Nam in omnibus huiusmodi codicibus idem defectus reperitur apud Graecos.’ (‘There is absolutely no certainty as to the death of the king of the Assyrians above. I therefore believe that in the previous book something is missing on account of men’s negligence. Indeed, all Greek manuscripts display this same flaw.’) In the last book of the Cyropaedia (8.2.28) Filelfo adds ‘More Graeco hinc usus est Cicero in prima Quaestione Tusculana,’ probably a reference to the use of ‘Graecorum more’ in Cicero’s Tusculans 1.7. While the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio are an original work of Filelfo’s, the dialogue contains many passages that are actually translated from Greek sources. Some of these are explicitly identified while others are not. In 1.102–108 Filelfo translates one of the spurious letters of Diogenes, who in his turn cites verses 13.434–438 of the Odyssey. At this point Filelfo adds ‘Diogenes hosce versus quibusdam in locis invertit’ (‘Diogenes has at some points changed the word order of these verses’). Homer’s verses are indeed botched, yet interestingly Filelfo also intervened in the Biblioteca Laurenziana’s ms. Plut. 57.12, on the folium where Diogenes’ seventh letter is to be read (fol. 90r). This manuscript is actually the copy of the Epistolographi Graeci from which Filelfo translated all the spurious Greek letters that he incorporated in De exilio.11 When Filelfo is not translating, such parallel passages are hard to find. One example is Sphortias 4.657, where the name Nemesis is elucidated with a reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses 3.406: ‘Dea est indignationis, dicta cognomento Rhamnusia; unde apud Ovidium “Assensit precibus Rhamnusia iustis”.’ (‘The goddess of indignation, nicknamed Rhamnusia; hence Ovid’s “Rhamnusia assented to this just request”.’).12

11  More about this manuscript and Filelfo’s use of it in De Keyser J. – Speranzi D., “Gli Epistolographi Graeci di Francesco Filelfo”, Byzantion 81 (2011) 177–206. 12  In another passage of the same poem (Sphortias 2.311), Nemesis is identified with Rhamnusia without adding Ovid’s parallel passage. In one manuscript (ms. Triv. 731) Filelfo added an etymological note, explaining Nemesis’ name from its Greek origin: ‘Nemesis, quae cognominata est Rhamnusia, dea est indignationis, dicta a νεμεσᾶν (nemesan), id est ‘indignari’. Indignatur enim Nemesis cum qui fruitur bonis quae non meretur.’ (‘Nemesis, who is also named Rhamnusia, is the goddess of indignation, from νεμεσᾶν, that is, indignari. For Nemesis shows indignation against those who enjoy goods which they do not deserve.’).

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Encyclopaedic Information

Although a traditional Sachkommentar, that is a commentary supplying explanations of (uncommon) proper names and realia, is clearly not Filelfo’s main concern, a few examples of such explanations can be given. In his translation of Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus he explains at length the meaning of ἀπομαγδαλιά, which in his Latin is not translated but transliterated. He explains that the Greeks used bread crumbs to wipe off greased knives and then fed it to their dogs while cooks used it to clean their hands; furthermore, the Spartans used these apomagdalia as voting ballots.13 More ethnographic information is given in the Cyropaedia translation, where Filelfo goes into geographical issues (6.2.11: ‘Syria inferior est Iudaea’, ‘Lower Syria is Judea’) and explains typical Persian terminology. So in Cyr. 2.4.21, ‘Parasanga apud Persas significat stadia triginta, apud Aegyptios vero stadia sexaginta’ (‘In Persian a parasang stands for thirty stades, yet in Egypt for sixty stades’)14 and in Cyr. 7.5.11, ‘Plethrum mensura est Persica pedum centum’ (‘A plethron is a Persian measure of hundred feet’). 6

Stylistic and Moral Assessment

Only in his Latin version of the Cyropaedia does Filelfo take a stance concerning the stylistic qualities of the Greek text he is translating. In various instances he adds qualifications such as ‘Aposiopesis’, ‘Astute ac blande’ (‘Cunningly and courteously’), ‘Religiose’ (‘Pious’), ‘Similitudo aptissima’ (‘A most apt comparison’), ‘Similitudo rursus perpulchra’ (‘Again a very beautiful comparison’), ‘Religiose semper’ (‘Still pious’), ‘Ridiculum caput’ (‘A funny chapter’). Such comments about his own literary achievements are obviously absent from the authorised marginalia in the manuscript copies of Filelfo’s original writings. 7 Recommendations Only in the Cyropaedia translation do we find marginalia pointing to moral lessons to be learned from the text, especially by princes, the prime audience of this Fürstenspiegel. By doing so Filelfo joins Xenophon in propagating a 13  See Filelfo, Traduzioni da Senofonte, ed. De Keyser, 52–53 for the text of the long gloss. 14  Similar annotations in Cyr. 3.3.28 (‘Parasanga mensura est Persica, quae stadia complectitur triginta’), Cyr. 4.2.20 (‘Parasanga triginta stadia complectitur’), and Cyr. 6.3.10 (‘Parasangae duae sunt stadia sexaginta’).

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model of idealised leadership. Examples are ‘Quarum rerum praecepta imperatori tenenda sint’ (‘Which teachings a ruler should abide by’), ‘Comparatio aptissima resarcinatoris et medici’ (‘Most apt comparison of a packer and a physician’), ‘Fugiendam esse nimiam regum licentiam’ (‘That excessive regal licence is to be shunned’), ‘Advertite, principes’ (‘Listen, princes’), ‘Litteris notandum aureis a principibus insolentibus’ (‘To be marked with golden letters by arrogant princes’), ‘Munera, crede mihi, capiunt hominesque deosque’ (‘Believe me, gifts do have an effect on both men and gods’), ‘Audiant iusti principes’ (‘Righteous princes should listen’), ‘Audite, rapacissimi tyranni’ (‘Listen, greedy tyrants’), ‘Idem faciunt huius temporis principes’ (‘The same is done by princes of our age’). These comments are perfectly in line with Filelfo’s assessment of the Cyropaedia in the dedication letter to Pope Paul II, where he confirms Cyrus’ status as a role model for any ruler, stating that ‘Itaque in uno rege Persarum Cyro ea inesse omnia facit Xenophon, quae in principe iustissimo ac summo inesse debent’ (‘Therefore Xenophon presents Cyrus, the king of the Persians, in such a way that he alone displays all qualities that a most just and supreme prince should display’).15 8

Structuring of the Text

In the Oratio parentalis, the oration commemorating Francesco Sforza (1401– 1466), Filelfo indicates the rhetorical structure of his text in marginal notes: ‘Exordium narrationis vim in se continens’ (‘Introduction, which contains the essence of the narrative’), ‘Argumentationis propositio’ (‘Theme of the argumentation’), ‘Confirmatio primae partis per approbationem’ (‘Confirmation by proof of the first part’), ‘Confirmatio secundae partis per approbationem’ (‘Confirmation by proof of the second part’), ‘Confirmatio tertiae partis per approbationem’ (‘Confirmation by proof of the third part’), ‘Conclusio generalis per enumerationem et amplificationem’ (‘General conclusion by recapitulation and amplification’). He does the same in two of his many long ‘crusade letters’: one addressed to King Charles VII of France (PhE·08.24, 14 February 1451) and one to Charles the Bold of Burgundy (PhE·39.01, 5 April 1474). In PhE·08.24 the text is articulated by the indications ‘Narratio’ (‘Narration’), ‘Partitio tripartita’ (‘Division in three parts’), ‘Confirmatio primae partis’ (‘Confirmation of the first part’), ‘Confirmatio secundae partis’ (‘Confirmation of the second part’), ‘Tribus rebus victoriam parari’ (‘The three elements guaranteeing victory’), ‘Mahometus quis qualisque fuerit’ (‘Who and what kind of man Muhammad 15  Filelfo, Traduzioni da Senofonte, ed. De Keyser, 105.

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was’), ‘Confutatio’ (‘Confutation’), ‘Conclusio generalis’ (‘General conclusion’). The division of PhE·39.01 is quite similar: ‘Exordium’ (‘Introduction’), ‘Narratio’ (‘Narration’), ‘Partitio trimembris’ (‘Threefold division’), ‘Confirmatio et confutatio primae partis’ (‘Confirmation and confutation of the first part’), ‘Confirmatio et confutatio secundae partis’ (‘Confirmation and confutation of the second part’), ‘Confirmatio et confutatio tertiae partis’ (‘Confirmation and confutation of the third part’), ‘Conclusio per enumerationem et amplificationem’ (‘Conclusion by recapitulation and amplification’). In the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio a marginal annotation by Filelfo in the Biblioteca Nazionale manuscript (ms. II II 70) is our only source of information on the outline of the work as Filelfo originally planned it. ‘Ordo decem librorum: Liber primus Summatim de incommodis exilii, liber secundus De infamia, liber tertius De paupertate, liber quartus De servitute, liber quintus De contemptu, liber sextus De intempestiva senectute, liber septimus De aegrotatione, liber octavus De carcere, liber nonus De morte, liber decimus De miseria’ (‘Order of the ten books: book 1 On the disadvantages of exile, in summary form, book 2 On infamy, book 3 On poverty, book 4 On slavery, book 5 On contempt, book 6 On untimely old age, book 7 On illness, book 8 On captivity, book 9 On death, book 10 On misery’). The ambitious plan was never completed, since Filelfo wrote only three books.16 To my knowledge, this is the only example of Filelfo commenting on the planned composition in the margins of the very literary work to which such a declaration of intent pertains. Much more common are letters reflecting such musings. For example, the epistolarium is a great source of information concerning the various stages of Filelfo’s plans for the Sphortias, which was gradually downsized from the initially prospected twenty-four to fourteen books – and eventually left unfinished at barely nine.17 9 Emendation This category inevitably only concerns translations of works by other authors. Apart from pointing out an obvious incoherence in the text at hand, as illustrated by the example above (category 4) concerning the death of the Assyrian king, Filelfo once signals a material flaw of his Greek source text. In Agesilaus 3.2 he annotates: ‘In Graeco codice semiversus deficit’ (‘In the Greek 16  More about the manuscripts containing De exilio in De Keyser, “The Transmission” (as in n. 3). 17  See De Keyser, Francesco Filelfo and Francesco Sforza xii and n. 3, for references to these letters.

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manuscript half a line is wanting’). The Vatican Library’s ms. Vat. gr. 1335 has at this point a lacuna of some 22 characters. This famous codex – one of the most important witnesses of Xenophon’s oeuvre – was brought to Florence from Constantinople by Manuel Chrysoloras in 1397. From 1424 it belonged to the library of Filelfo’s friend Palla Strozzi, from whom he also had on loan the copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives used for the translation of Lycurgus and Numa. A comparison of Filelfo’s Latin with the variants that are displayed by the various witnesses of the Greek text of Agesilaus proves that this manuscript was indeed his only source text.18 In one instance Filelfo actually offers an emendation of the Greek source text. In the dedication copy of his translation, he added an autograph note at Agesilaus 1.36 ‘Ephorium ab ephoris: dicit enim ἐν τῷ ᾿φoρίῳ et non ἐν τῷ φoρίῳ. Id enim “in ferculo” seu “in lectica” significaret. Quare in ephorio dicendum nobis concinnius visum est, veluti dicimus “in praetorio”, “in curia”, “in prytanio”.’ (‘Ephorium named after the ephors. For he says ἐν τῷ ᾿φoρίῳ rather than ἐν τῷ φoρίῳ. The latter would indeed mean “on a litter” or “on a bear”. Therefore I deemed it more fitting to say in ephorio, just like we say “in the governor’s residence”, “in the senate”, “in the town-hall”.’). Printing ἐφορείῳ, modern editors still recognise the correctness of Filelfo’s emendation (referring also to Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Agesilaus 4, which has comitio). 10

Translation Choices

The most notable example of this category is Filelfo’s repeated justification of his use of principium when rendering the Greek word ἀρχεῖον. He first does so at Cyr. 1.2.3, explaining that ‘principia are in this case those places we call with another borrowing from Greek archiva, where the written public records are kept and where furthermore the judges usually convene to pass their sentences’, adding parallel places from Plutarch, Terence and Livy: Principia hic sunt ea loca quae alio nomine a Graecis sumpto vocantur archiva, ubi tum publica et acta et scripta ipsa servantur, tum iudices quoque solent ad iudicandum convenire, id quod etiam patet apud Plutarchum in Vita Galbae [12.1]. Et apud Terentium in Eunucho [781– 782]: ‘Hic ego ero post principia, unde omnibus signum dabo.’ Itaque non absurde subditur: ‘Illuc est sapere, ut hosce instruxit: ipsus sibi cavit locum.’ Et apud Titum Livium libro septimo Ab Urbe Condita [7.12.14]: 18  See n. 7 above for more information about Filelfo’s Greek source manuscripts.

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‘Immiscerique militibus centuriones, nec in circulis modo fremere, sed etiam in principiis ac praetorio in unum sermones confundi.’ At several more places Filelfo briefly reminds the reader that principium is his rendering of the Greek ‘archives’: Cyr. 7.5.85 ‘Principia hoc item loco pro archivis posita sunt;’ Cyr. 8.1.5 ‘Principium hoc etiam loco archivum significat;’ Cyr. 8.5.17 ‘Principia hoc etiam loco pro archivis intellige’; and Cyr. 8.6.10 ‘Principia, hoc est archiva.’ The last instance, at Cyr. 7.5.35, is again somewhat more elaborate: ‘Principia hoc loco pro ἀρχεῖοις (archiis), hoc est archivis, accipi oportet. Nam idem apud Romanos significare quandoque principium quod ἀρχεῖον (archion) apud Graecos, locupletissimus testis est Plutarchus Cheronensis in Vita Galbae Augusti, quam ipsi in Latinum convertimus.’ (‘Principia should here be taken as rendering ἀρχεῖοις [archiis], that is archives. The fact that principium in Latin sometimes has the same meaning as ἀρχεῖον [archion] in Greek, is largely proven by Plutarch from Chaeronea in his Life of emperor Galba, which I translated myself into Latin.’). With its underscoring of the fact that Filelfo previously produced a translation of Plutarch’s Life of Galba as well, this marginal also qualifies for category 12, propaganda and self-promotion. In Filelfo’s Letters we find two of these marginal annotations: in PhE·26.01, written on 1 August 1465 to Lodrisio Crivelli, at l. 642 (‘Principia, hoc est archiva’) and in PhE·47.01, written on 22 November 1476 to the Venetian Doge Andrea Vendramin, at l. 146 (‘Principia, id est archiva’). Furthermore, there are letters in which the issue is actually discussed at length, about which more below. 11

Philological Elucidation and Justification

This most prominent kind of marginalia shows Filelfo explaining etymology, elucidating his nomenclature and highlighting his – at times idiosyncratic – orthographical, prosodical and metrical choices. In Commentationes Florentinae de exilio 1.122 he adds an explanation of how he expresses the concept of voluntariness in Latin: ‘Nam spontaneum idem esse quod ultroneum, Latinus et litteratus dubitat nemo’ (‘For no one literate with a grasp of Latin doubts that spontaneus and ultroneus mean the same’). Yet this marginal addition for once was added as an insertion to the main text by Filelfo’s scribe Pagano da Rho. It is unclear whether the author wanted it to be an addition to the text itself or perhaps an explanatory marginal note. In Oratio parentalis 13 Filelfo explains the etymology of Machalaum: ‘Machalaum nomen est Graecum, compositum ex mache, quod “pugnam”

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significat, et alaos, quod “caecum” significat et “errantem”’ (‘Machalaum is a Greek name, composed by mache, meaning “fight”, and alaos, meaning “blind” and “astray”’). At De Genuensium deditione v. 134 Filelfo claims an alternative etymology for the name of the Aborigines, the ancestors of the Romans, and justifies his alternative spelling. Rather than from ab and origo, according to Filelfo the word derives from Greek: ‘Aborrigines; oros enim Graece “montem” significat; geminatur autem -rr- in Aborrigines gratia metri.’ (‘Aborrigines; for oros in Greek means “mountain”; however the -rr- in Aborrigines is doubled for metrical reasons’). Over the years Filelfo developed a tendency for the use of accusative singular forms ending in -a instead of -em in the case of proper names derived from Greek. Both in Oratio parentalis 9 (‘Orthon, Orthonis: Orthona accusativus est Graecus’) and twice in letter PhE·26.01 (‘Aenean accusativus Graecus’ at l. 608; ‘Ancona accusativus est Graecus’ at l. 864) there are such instances, and this kind of annotations abounds in his poetry for various Greek inflectional endings, for example in the Sphortias at 2.135 ‘Aereus pro aheneus. Nam aeneus dictio trisyllaba non est in usu, sed aheneus dictio quattuor syllabarum. Praeterea sub aere apud priscos omne metalli genus continetur’ (‘Aereus instead of aheneus. For aeneus in three syllables is not used, yet aheneus in four syllables is. Besides, the Ancients used the word aes for any kind of metal’); at 5.741 ‘Athos, cuius genitivus Atho’ (‘Athos, of which the genitive is Atho’); at 6.53 ‘Nominativus Atticus Hermoleos pro Hermolaus’ (‘Attic nominative Hermoleos instead of Hermolaus’); and at 6.332 ‘Romulidon genitivus est Graecus pro Romulidarum’ (‘Romulidon is a Greek genitive instead of Romulidarum’). There are also short notes explaining the syllabication of Greek words and proper names, such as at 8.624 ‘Phaëthon dictio est trisyllaba’ (‘Phaëthon comprises three syllables’); and at 8.667 ‘Barnabaes dictio quadrisyllaba pro Barnabas, quod syneresin patitur. Nam Barnabas in hoc versu locari non potest’ (Barnabaes in four syllables instead of Barnabas, with a synaeresis. For Barnabas cannot stand in this metre’). In the Sphortias we also find a number of short notes on prosody (at 4.275 ‘Briseis habet penultimam productam, ut Aeneis, Theseis et simillia’, ‘Briseis has a long penultimate syllable, just like Aeneis, Theseis and similar’), but there are also various elaborate notes combining etymological and/or prosodical elucidation with other information, such as the notes on Asty (1.494), Cythera (3.408), Seres (4.171) and Tethys (5.291), Iachus (7.193), Iris (8.236) and the Geryones (8.676).19

19  All these glosses can be read in their various editorial stages in De Keyser, Francesco Filelfo and Francesco Sforza.

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Propaganda and Self-Promotion

In his translation of the Cyropaedia Filelfo notes at 4.2.1: ‘Sceritae, ut patet in Xenophontis libro De republica Lacedaemoniorum [12.2], qui a nobis iam pridem traductus est in Latinum, procubitores erant qui observabant nequis noctu extra phalanga progrederetur; praeterea Sceritae primi inibant pugnam.’ (‘The Scirites were night watchmen who took care that no one would leave the band at night, as is clear from Xenophon’s Constitution of the Spartans, which I translated in Latin some time ago; furthermore, the Scirites entered the battle first.’). In Cyr. 7.5.35, one of the pages where Filelfo explains his use of principia as cited above, he refers to Plutarch’s Life of Galba, also adding: ‘which I translated myself into Latin.’ In the last book, 8.7.14 is accompanied by another note by the translator: ‘Marcus Tullius Cicero in Latinum convertit totam hanc orationis particulam quae incipit ab hoc loco, “Non enim sane” et tendit usque ad eum locum qui sequitur “et post deos quidem hominum etiam genus” etc. Sed ita convertit, ut pro auctoritate sua quaedam praetermiserit, quaedam addiderit, quaedam etiam aliter dixerit quam in Xenophontis textu sit apud Graecos. Nos autem textum secuti sumus, nihil omnino praetereuntes quod aut ad vim verborum aut ad sententiarum dignitatem pertineat.’ (‘Marcus Tullius Cicero translated the entire passage from “Non enim sane” down to “et post deos quidem hominum etiam genus” into Latin. Yet he translated it in such a way that by virtue of his authority he left out a few things, added others and even put some things different than in Xenophon’s Greek text. But I have followed the text, not omitting anything that pertains either to the power of its wording or the worthiness of its phrasing’).

…

The way in which Filelfo advertises his own translation as superior, inasmuch as more faithful than the one given by Cicero in De senectute 79–81, is no coincidence. Filelfo liked to pride himself on his knowledge of Greek and, consequently, his unique qualities as a translator. Furthermore, he repeatedly bragged about being the only writer of his century – if not of all times – so versatile in both classical languages and in so many literary genres. When, on 19 January 1458, he announces his decision to write Greek poetry in a letter to his friend Palla Strozzi (PhE·14.10), Filelfo underscores that he has already distinguished himself in various kinds of Latin prose and poetry, yet does not want to privilege any genre above the other. He recalls the topos that the great poet Virgil was not successful in prose and that indeed the supreme orator Cicero

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was a poor poet – and points to the fact that neither of them wrote Greek poetry.20 Other statements are even bolder: in letters PhE·34.21 to Ludovico Foscarini (13 November 1471), PhE·37.02 to Lorenzo de’ Medici (29 May 1473) and PhE·41.12 to Pope Sixtus IV (1 November 1474) Filelfo states that he is capable of producing prose and poetry alike in both spoken and written Latin and Greek – in a unique combination of capacities never seen since Antiquity. The archetype of such statements is letter PhE·24.01, sent on 31 October 1464 to Alberto Parisi. It is actually a polemic reply to Galeotto Marzio, who had dared criticise some metrical and prosodical errors and other flaws in Filelfo’s Sphortias. At the end of the letter, Filelfo justifies his creation of neologisms citing Cicero as example of doing so. He adds the observation that even Cicero, Virgil and Homer were criticised by detractors and concludes: Quod autem ad me attinet: quid de me ipso sentiam, quid praestare audeam, dicere non dissimulabo. Fateor equidem permultos fuisse Latinos viros (et fortassis etiam esse), quibus in omni genere vel disciplinae vel eloquentiae sim ducendus inferior. At illud quoque mihi gloriari licet: me solum esse hac tempestate, qui in omni dicendi genere, et versu pariter et soluta oratione, tum Latine audeam, tum etiam Graece omnia quae velim quamfacillime et scribere et loqui; id quod ex hominibus nostris video nemini, neque poetae neque oratori, eidem uni adhuc contigisse, non modo praesentibus ac vivis, sed ne ex universa quidem antiquitate. Tu siquem alterum habes, quaeso in medium referas. (As far as I am concerned: I shall not refrain from stating what I think of myself and what I dare vouch for. I do admit that there have been [and perhaps even still are] very many men literate in Latin to whom I am inferior in all kinds of discipline or eloquence. Yet on this I pride myself: that I am the only one in this time who in any kind of eloquence, in 20  ‘Quod nemini unquam Latinorum contigit, institui nullum esse orationis genus quod intemptatum reliquerim. Quare cum plaeraque et versu et prosa oratione Latine scripserim (non oratorio et poetico more duntaxat, sed etiam philosophico), idem nunc Graece facere animum induxi. Quibus quidem in rebus quantum aut valuerim aut valeam, nescio. Unum certo scio: me non magis uno genere quam alio atque alio delectari. Videmus Virgilium oratione pedestri minime valuisse, versu vero claruisse plurimum. Contra Cicero soluta oratione fuit illustris, at versu fuisse indocto simillimum et legimus et iudicamus. Quorum neutrum tamen audimus Graecis versibus in scribendo delectatum. Ego autem cum Latine utraque oratione et delector et utor, tum nuper aggressus sum Graece scribere non nulla elegia, ut etiam Graeci intelligant audere Latinum hominem quod ipsi negligunt: non Graece minus canere quam Latine. Nam quantum etiam in dicendo apud Graecos aut possim aut non possim, iampridem cognoscere tibi licuit.’

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poetry as much as in prose, is capable of writing and saying most fluently whatever he wants in Latin and even in Greek. I do not see a single poet or orator among ours so far for whom the same goes, not only among those living in our times, but not even from the whole of Antiquity. If you know of any other, please name him.) In June of the same year, in the final verses of De Genuensium deditione, Filelfo had already promised his patron Francesco Sforza that he would ‘extol him in both Greek and Latin verses, something no one else is capable of’: ‘Sic ego (quod nemo possit praestare) Pelasgo / carmine te et Latio sydera ad usque feram’ (545–546). Three years later, on the last page of the Oratio parentalis, Filelfo promises that he will always honour Sforza and sing his praises in both Latin and Greek, in prose and poetry, as well as he can, to secure his late patron’s eternal fame.21 Not only did Filelfo practice all possible genres, he also went to great lengths to convey a specific message across the boundaries that one might expect to be imposed by those genres. Combination and contamination of genres seems to have indeed been a hallmark of Filelfo’s literary style. His Odes collection contains various compositions that (apart from their metre) could as well have been included in the Satires. The fourth book of the Sphortias contains a love story reminiscent of Ovid’s love poetry rather than of any epic poem. And while Filelfo did not nominatim produce any invectiva, one might almost doubt whether he ever wished to produce anything but invectives. If Filelfo was permanently looking for new patronage opportunities, he did so not only by promoting his own trump card – his unique knowledge of Greek – but also by detracting from and superseding the competition. This explains why he transla­ ted the Cyropaedia after Poggio Bracciolini had already done so, as is more than clear from Filelfo’s preface – which is to a large extent an exercise in Poggiobashing – and from the letters written in the months after he finished his own version.22 With similar intentions, Filelfo produced Latin versions of Basil the Great’s De vita solitaria and of the apocryphal De sacerdotio Christi, which

21  ‘Nam quod in me est, unum illud vobis polliceor, promitto, spondeo, quantum praestare ingenii potero viribus, quantum lingua resonare, quantum arundine Latine Graeceque scribendo consequi aut oratoria aut poetica facultate: semper unus apud me Franciscus Sphortia memorabitur, audietur, legetur, ut non mortuum minus quam vivum ab uno Francisco Philelfo et amatum illum et observatum et celebratum praesentes omnes venturique cognoscant.’ 22  Letters cited in Filelfo, Traduzioni da Senofonte, ed. De Keyser, xxix–xxxvi.

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challenged the Latin versions published by Ambrogio Traversari.23 In the epistles, we see Filelfo searching for a copy of Appian – who had been translated by another enemy, Pier Candido Decembrio.24 These three humanists also were satirised in the Satires, and severely castigated in many other genres.25 Poggio is staged as a buffoon and a drunk in the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio. Even in the Vita di San Giovanni Battista, dedicated to Filippo Maria Visconti in 1445, when denouncing the behaviour of Herodes and Herodias, Filelfo sees the occasion to interlace his sacral poem in terza rima with an off-topic jab at Poggio: ‘Né ’n cosa onesta apria già mai la bocca, / ma sol con buffonie, com’ fa or Poggio, / in fatti osceni il suo parlar discocca’ (‘She never opened her mouth to say anything honest, but when speaking only launched buffooneries and obscene things, just like Poggio does these days’).26 Likewise, Pier Candido Decembrio becomes a character in the Sphortias (4.15–50 and 6.744–780), featuring as the personification of Envy – this is indeed where we find the marginal note cited above (category 3). At the same time, many of the Sphortias marginalia justifying metrical and prosodical choices are follow-ups of the polemical exchange with Galeotto Marzio, for example the use of Asty versus Hasta for the city of Asti in Sphortias 1.494. 23  See De Keyser J., “Solitari ma non soli. Traduzioni umanistiche della lettera De vita solitaria di Basilio di Cesarea”, Medioevo Greco. Rivista di Storia e Filologia Bizantina 9 (2009) 53–83; and idem, “Early Modern Latin Translations of the Apocryphal De Sacerdotio Christi”, Lias. Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its Sources 40.1 (2013) 29–82. 24  In PhE·31.64, written on 30 April 1470, Filelfo writes to Francesco Griffolini claiming that he almost finished the translation. If he ever did, it was lost: no copies survive. See also Calderini A., “Ricerche intorno alla biblioteca e alla cultura greca di Francesco Filelfo”, Studi Italiani di Filologia classica 20 (1913) 204–424 (258–260). 25  In PhE·26.01, a long apologetic letter to Lodrisio Crivelli, Filelfo singles out Niccolò Niccoli, Poggio Bracciolini and Pier Candido Decembrio as his enemies, and Leonardo Bruni and Guarino da Verona as his friends: ‘Nicolaum enim Nicolum et Poggium Bambalionem et Petrum Candidum Decembrem, tris ineptissimos plane omnium nebulones foetulentissimasque cloacas cunctarum nequiciarum et turpissimae vitae sordium (te tamen, Leodrysi, ut fatuum et amentem semper excipio), ut usque contempsi atque despexi duxique pro nihilo, ita Leonardum meum Arretinum et Guarynum Veronensem maximi usque feci et dilexi in primis, et aeque ab iis dilectus amatusque sum’ (‘Of course, Niccolò Niccoli, Poggio the Stutterer and Pier Candido Decembrio, the three most idiotic wretches of them all, cesspools filled with everything vile and with the filth of a lifetime of turpitude. Yet to me, Lodrisio, you will always remain the one exceptional, mad idiot, and I have despised those three, looked down on them and loathed them with the same ardour as I have held in the highest regard and valued above everyone else Leonardo Bruni and Guarino da Verona, who loved and valued me equally in return’). 26  Benadduci G. “Prose e poesie volgari di Francesco Filelfo raccolte e annotate”, Atti e Memorie della Deputazione di Storia Patria per le province delle Marche ‘Pel centenario di Francesco Filelfo’ 5 (1901) 1–261 (85).

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As noted before, the issue of the use of principia for archiva, which Filelfo repeatedly focuses on in the Cyropaedia marginalia, is also mentioned in two annotations in the letters. Furthermore, the whole issue is discussed at great length within the letters themselves: PhE·17.01, 23 March 1461 to Alberto Scotti; PhE·30.02, 1 February 1469 to Iacopo Antiquari (where the asty discussion is repeated as well); and PhE·33.06, 18 February 1471 to Alberto Parisi. The issue of the marginal note dedicated to the syllabication of Phaëthon (cited in category 11 above) even is the topic of an entire, albeit very short, letter (PhE·10.54, sent on 8 March 1453 to Pietro Perleone), citing the original Greek form (Φαέθων) to explain why its Latin counterpart Phaëthon has three syllables.27 One of the fundamental matters in dispute in the exchange between Filelfo and Marzio, to wit, whether a sound knowledge of Greek is needed if one wants to be a good Latinist, is kept alive in the letters following Filelfo’s reply to Marzio by proxy of Parisi in PhE·24.01. Filelfo hammers this point home in letters PhE·24.08 and 24.21 to 24.24. What we see across Filelfo’s oeuvre is an uninterrupted succession of instances in which the same issues and polemics resurface, often targeting a few usual suspects whom Filelfo loved to hate.28 Time and again he repeats his point, crossing borders both between genres and between text and paratext. In an all-out effort aimed at fashioning himself as the most competent and versatile translator and writer of all times Filelfo deployed a multiple-front strategy. His goal was not the construction of sophisticated ‘intertextual’ ties within the various utterances of his multifaceted oeuvre, to be discovered by his audience, but a simultaneous transmission on all possible wavelengths in order to inundate as many receivers as possible. Translations and original writings alike, along with their paratexts – be it prefaces or marginal notes – had to convey one specific message to the widest possible audience: the superiority of the uniquely qualified writer and translator Francesco Filelfo.

27  ‘Franciscus Philelfus Petro Perleoni salutem. De Phaëthonte quod petis: dictio trisyllaba est. Phaëthon scribitur enim apud Graecos Φαέθων (Phaëthon), et non Φαίθων (Phaethon). Vale. Ex Mediolano, viii Idus Martias mccccliii.’ 28  It is no coincidence that various marginal notes discussed above were also added to the revised Vienna manuscript of the Satires. See Fiaschi, “Interventi d’autore”, especially for those occurring in the Sphortias, such as the notes on Nemesis Rhamnusia (142), Hydropotes (149), Seres (153), Pier Candido Decembrio (161, 166–168), Cytherea (165) and Phaëthon (169).

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Selective Bibliography Texts

De Keyser J., Francesco Filelfo and Francesco Sforza. Critical Edition of Filelfo’s ‘Sphortias’, ‘De Genuensium deditione’, ‘Oratio parentalis’, and his Polemical Exchange with Galeotto Marzio (Hildesheim – Zürich – New York: 2015). Filelfo Francesco, Satyrae I (Decadi I–V ), ed. S. Fiaschi (Rome: 2005). Filelfo Francesco, Dione Crisostomo, Captivitatem Ilii non fuisse. Traduzione latina di Francesco Filelfo, ed. S. Leotta (Messina: 2008). Filelfo Francesco, Traduzioni da Senofonte e Plutarco. Respublica Lacedaemoniorum, Agesilaus, Lycurgus, Numa, Cyri Paedia, ed. J. De Keyser (Alessandria: 2012). Filelfo Francesco, On Exile. Commentationes Florentinae de Exilio, ed. J. De Keyser, transl. W.S. Blanchard, I Tatti Renaissance Library 55 (Cambridge, MA: 2013). Filelfo Francesco, Collected Letters. Epistolarum Libri XLVIII, ed. J. De Keyser, 4 vols. (Alessandria: 2015).

Studies

Avesani R. et alii (eds.), Francesco Filelfo nel Quinto Centenario della Morte. Atti del XVII Convegno di Studi Maceratesi (Padua: 1986). Calderini A., “Ricerche intorno alla biblioteca e alla cultura greca di Francesco Filelfo”, Studi Italiani di Filologia classica 20 (1913) 204–424. Dadà V., “L’epistolario e lo scrittoio del poeta. I Carmina di Filelfo e la lettera ad Alberto Parisi (Epist. 24.1)”, in Bognini F. (ed.), Nuovi territori della lettera tra XV e XVI secolo (Venice: 2016) 81–104. De Keyser J., “Solitari ma non soli. Traduzioni umanistiche della lettera De vita solitaria di Basilio di Cesarea”, Medioevo Greco. Rivista di Storia e Filologia Bizantina 9 (2009) 53–83. De Keyser J., “The Transmission of Francesco Filelfo’s Commentationes Florentinae de Exilio”, Interpres. Rivista di Studi Quattrocenteschi 30 (2011) 7–29. De Keyser J., “The Poet and the Pope. Francesco Filelfo’s Common Cause with Sixtus IV”, Schede Umanistiche 26 (2012 [re vera: 2015]) 43–65. De Keyser J., “I codici filelfiani della Biblioteca Trivulziana”, Libri & Documenti 39 (2013) 91–109. De Keyser J., “Early Modern Latin Translations of the Apocryphal De Sacerdotio Christi”, Lias. Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its Sources 40.1 (2013) 29–82. De Keyser J., “Picturing the Perfect Patron? Francesco Filelfo’s Image of Francesco Sforza”, in Baker P. et alii (eds.), Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance: The Humanist Depiction of Rulers in Historiographical and Biographical Texts, Transformationen der Antike 44 (Berlin: 2016) 391–414.

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De Keyser J. (ed.), Filelfo, Man of Letters, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 289 (Leiden – Boston: 2019). De Keyser J. – Speranzi D., “Gli Epistolographi Graeci di Francesco Filelfo”, Byzantion 81 (2011) 177–206. Fiaschi S., “Prima e dopo la raccolta: diffusione e circolazione delle Satyrae di Francesco Filelfo: spunti dall’epistolario edito ed inedito”, Medioevo e Rinascimento n.s. 14 (2000) 147–165. Fiaschi S., “Autocommento ed interventi d’autore nelle Satyrae del Filelfo: l’esempio del codice Viennese 3303”, Medioevo e Rinascimento n.s. 16 (2002) 113–188. Gionta D., Per i ‘Convivia mediolanensia’ di Francesco Filelfo (Messina: 2005). Orlandi L., “In margine alla Ciropedia di Filelfo”, Studi medievali e umanistici 11 (2013) 193–214.

chapter 3

Vernacular Self-Commentary during Medieval Early Modernity: Reginald Pecock and Gavin Douglas Ian Johnson This chapter considers attitudes and textual behaviour in the business of selfcommentary in a complex and hard-to-gauge time and place of change and continuity, the mid-fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century in anglophone Britain.1 It concerns two scholar-politician-bishops, the Welsh-born Reginald Pecock (c. 1390–c. 1460) and the Scot Gavin Douglas (c. 1476–1522), who both produced works of massive self-commenting ambition – whether they were commenting on a text, or on what they themselves may have been doing in or with their texts, or commenting on the self per se. The term, ‘medieval early modernity’, used in the title of this chapter, is not such a provocative paradox as it might at first seem, simply because its overt hybridity befits the undeniably mixed conditions of the writers under consideration in this study. In the difficult, transitional, and confusingly undecidable times in the British Isles stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the early sixteenth century, one should expect mixed cultural behaviour and affiliations. For example, Douglas is, as we shall see, a thoroughly “modern” philological humanist, who regards himself as following in the footsteps of Laurentius Valla as an accurate classicist overgoing and outclassing the poor medieval fare of William Caxton’s woefully unclassical and ineloquent prose Eneydos, rendered ignorantly from a French intermediary rather than from the Latin original. Yet at the same time, Douglas’s reliance on Christian commentary, his Christianising adjustment of his pagan source, and his acute textual attentiveness show not only profound affinities with the late medieval tradition of learned translation but also with the high-order humanism of a scholastic literary sensibility.2 It is telling that Douglas cites both Horace and Gregory the Great as authorities 1  For instances of anglophone self-commentary in England and Scotland at this time, see Wogan-Browne J. – Evans R. – Taylor A. – Watson N. (eds.), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: 1999). 2  For a refutation of dubious distinctions made by modern scholarship between scholasticism and humanism, see Minnis A. – Johnson I., “Introduction”, in idem (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume II: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2005) 1–12 (7–9).

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sanctioning his approach to translation.3 There is a different confusability of period-affinities in Reginald Pecock, who is steeped in the scholastic methods and ideology of Aquinas and medieval Aristotelianism, but who also cultivates his own style and intellectual personality, changing mainstream religious discourses whilst leading with his own voice, and self-projecting in a manner approaching an idiosyncratic version of early modern self-fashioning. Two very different sets of literary materials constitute the twin focus of this study: in the case of Pecock, a multi-textual oeuvre of interlinked prose treatises recodifying Church teaching and catechetics, and, in the case of Douglas, a single poetic translation of the greatest pagan classical text in the western tradition, newly arrayed with prologues and other self-commenting apparatus. Given the differences between Douglas’s and Pecock’s literary materials, two very different sorts of self-commentary are only to be expected. Pecock explains the rationale and motivation for his programme of repackaging doctrine and the catechism. Each of his works is, furthermore, profuse with a distinctive form of self-commentary in which he compendiously or expansively explicates the teachings of his other works, marking and articulating his own personal intertextuality through rhythms of explanatory cross-reference and self-justification. As we shall see, Douglas, like Pecock, comments on his textual activities and on the treatment of his sources in order to orientate his readers and to assure for them and for his original the best reception possible. Unlike Pecock, however, whose ultimate source is the transcendent principle of divine reason, Douglas has a single source, and it is monumentally textual. Much of the Scots translator’s self-commentary is devoted to displaying, in the best humanist fashion, his fidelity to his daunting original; it is in his self-commentary that he signals his profound linguistic engagement with, and duty to, the fabric of the Latin text. Douglas may be a philological humanist in this, but such translational conduct is idealogically and pragmatically consonant with that of the makers of the fourteenth-century Wycliffite Bible and the associated Glossed Gospels, who pay similarly minute attention to scholarly contextualisation and the claims of well-informed linguistic accuracy.4 Despite 3  Douglas G., Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ Translated into Scottish Verse, ed. D.F.C. Coldwell, 4 vols., Scottish Text Society 25, 27, 28, 30 (Edinburgh – London: 1957–1964), I Prol. 400 and 395 respectively. References to this edition will henceforth be entered into the main body of the text of this essay by Book, chapter and line numbers. 4  See Dove M., The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 66 (Cambridge: 2007); eadem (ed.), The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate (Exeter: 2010); Hudson A., Doctors in English: The Study of the Wycliffite Gospel Commentaries, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Liverpool: 2015).

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his proud classicism, Douglas takes great care as a Christian educator to emphasise the moral and allegorical teaching to be drawn from his pagan source. But this desire to educate converges with the self-vauntingly ambitious drive to valorise and to display the eloquence of the original through his own eloquence and, conversely, to display his own eloquence through the eloquence of the original – all refracted through his own vernacular voice and his boldly deferential impersonation of Vergil. Both writers’ enterprises were intrinsically tied up with the viability and fruitfulness of their own particular kinds of translatio studii in the formation and education of the self. Both wished to vernacularise and disseminate a measure of originary discursive power conventionally reserved to Latin clerisy. Pecock’s project was one of translating free-willed doctrinal understanding and pragmatic theological competence into the domain of the laity. Douglas’s venture was to inculcate in middling and gentle layfolk knowledge of the Vergilian text informed by Christian discretion in understanding, feeling, and applying it. Both, in their own distinctive ways, used self-commentary not only for the purpose of re-voicing cultural authority, but also to give cultural authority to their own voices.5 1

Reginald Pecock

In the mid-1400s, Reginald Pecock, Bishop of St Asaph’s and subsequently of Chichester, was no stranger to controversy. In 1447, he preached a sermon in London that, in claiming that bishops had more important things to do than to preach, unsurprisingly enough, scandalised many. More importantly for our purposes, he produced a spectacular and controversial encyclopaedic programme of inter-related treatises that were distinctively animated and valorised by interconnectivities of explicit and implicit self-commentary. The purpose of Pecock’s enterprise was no less than to deconstruct, re-systematise and teach the entirety of Christian doctrine and catechesis in English to all levels of educational attainment, thereby re-invigorating the mainstream Church whilst outflanking Lollardy and any other heterodox elements in the process. He was thanked for his efforts in 1457 by a conviction for heresy, a bonfire of his works at Paul’s Cross in London before 20,000 people, loss of his

5  For a study of voice in late medieval literature, which particularly takes authority into account, see Lawton D., Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: 2017).

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bishopric, imprisonment with no books and nothing to write on. It is generally thought that within two or three years of his incarceration Pecock was dead.6 Reginald Pecock receives more attention in this essay than the better-known Gavin Douglas because it takes more words to unpack his strange and complex works and to illustrate his idiosyncratic modes of self-commentary than it does with his counterpart. For Pecock was a vernacular scholastic, who combined a radically philosophical take on all things divine with a Vincent of Beauvaislike belief in ordinatio and in the rational re-organisability of knowledge. He thought that, regardless of Scripture and mainstream catechesis, the intelligent layperson could grasp the rudiments of theology and doctrine simply by exercising God-given reason and following due philosophical procedure as taught in the educational system. He also thought that, inasmuch as the ways of God, the Church, doctrine and Scripture were intrinsically reasonable and as a rule reducible to reason (though all too often unreasonably articulated), then it was his role to recodify and disseminate Christian knowledge, teaching and their governing principles along rational lines. This essay will therefore discuss passages in which Pecock explains the approach that he takes in his works and in which he comments on what he is doing. When Reginald surveyed the untidy sum of discourses in which Church doctrine and catechesis were miscellaneously expressed and gathered, his reason was appalled. For him, the various teachings of the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Five Wits, the Seven Works of Corporal Mercy, and even the Articles of the Creed were no better than a ‘heepe […] oute of cours, of ioynt, and oute of liþþ, oute of ordre, and oute of dewe processe to gider clumprid’ (‘heap […] clumped together off-course, out of joint, disarticulated, out of order, and out of due process’).7 And so, in a programme of more than two dozen works (of which six survive) he reworked Christian doctrine in accord with his own Four Tables of meenal and eendal virtues (virtues to do with means and ends respectively). The surviving works are: The Reule of Crysten Religioun (c. 1443), The Donet (c. 1443–1449), The Repressor of Over Much 6  For an informative biography of Pecock covering the details of his life mentioned here and much else, see Scase W., Reginald Pecock, Authors of the Middle Ages 8 (Aldershot: 1996). For general studies on Pecock, see Green V.H.H., Bishop Reginald Pecock: A Study in Ecclesiastical History and Thought (Cambridge: 1945); Campbell K., The Call to Read. Reginald Pecock’s Books and Textual Communities (Notre Dame: 2010); Brockwell C.W. Jr, Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Lancastrian Church: Securing the Foundations of Cultural Authority, Texts and Studies in Religion 25 (Lewiston, NY: 1985). 7  Pecock R., The Donet by Reginald Pecock, D.D., Bishop of St Asaph and Chichester, Now First edited from MS. Bodl. 916 and collated with The Poore Mennis Myrrour (British Museum, Addl. 37788), ed. E.V. Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, O.S. 156 (London: 1921 [for 1918]) 147.

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Blaming of the Clergy (c. 1449), The Poore Mennis Myrrour, The Folewer to the Donet (both c. 1453–1454) and The Book of Faith (1456).8 It is easy to see how Pecock got into trouble with the ecclesiastical establishment – especially when one sees how, in his prolific self-commentary, he maintains (as in his Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy) that the foundational authority of Christianity is not the Bible but reason, which precedes Scripture and gives it authority. Humans are, for him, endowed by their very natures with the ability to exercise this originary discourse of reason, a langue made by God yet speakable by a humanity made in his image. Pecock sees the soul as a divinely inscribed book, the writing of which, if articulated according to the doom of reason, is an unending discourse of reason reflecting divine truth. Here, the commentable and commenting self becomes intriguingly textual: Scripture is not ground to eny oon [‘any one’] such seid vertu, gouernaunce, deede, or trouthe, […] but oonli [‘only’] doom of natural resoun [‘the judgement of natural reason’], which is moral lawe of kinde [‘nature’] and moral lawe of God, writun in the book of lawe of kinde in mennis soulis, prentid [‘printed’] into the ymage of God, is ground to ech such vertu, gouernaunce, deede, and trouthe.9 By being written on, the soul receives reason and is an archive of it. As well as being capable, through its powers of judgement, of receiving and understanding the reasonable ideas and ways of the divinity and Holy Church, the soul may also conceive and generate rational thought, thereby articulating the divine langue simply by being itself in such action. This means that even the ultimate textual authority of Scripture may be adjudicated by the right exercise of reason in a fittingly book-like and text-like human self. Note here how Pecock appropriates the tell-tale word ‘ground’ – a favourite term used by the Lollards for signalling the universally foundational status of what they saw as God’s Law, the literal sense of the Bible – and relocates and rewrites it in the human soul. His profoundly textual conception of the soul as a self-aware and 8  In addition to the Donet Pecock’s works are as follows: The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy by Reginald Pecock, D.D., Sometime Lord Bishop of Chichester, ed. C. Babington, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 19.1–2 (London: 1860); The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. W.C. Greet, Early English Text Society, O.S. 171 (London: 1927 [for 1926]); Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. J.L. Morison (Glasgow, 1909); The Folewer to the Donet, ed. E.V. Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, O.S. 164 (London: 1924 [for 1923]). For The Poore Mennis Myrrour see Hitchcock’s edition of the Donet 223–230. 9  Pecock, Repressor 18.

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living Book of Reason has intriguing hermeneutic implications, not only for his deployment of self-commentary but also for his conception of his works as a metascriptural summa of reason homologous with the self that it glosses and which glosses it. For Pecock, his works are in some aspects more primary than Scripture itself; his self-commentary, in which he justifies and explains his work, is likewise prior to Scripture. Pecock thus redefines the status and function of Holy Writ, going so far as to accord the Bible a secondary function not as a text but as a discursive role akin to that of a reporter or compiler – one who recites and observes the words of others of greater authority (as a compiler does of an auctor):10 Of al the moral seruice of God, which is moral lawe of kinde, Holi Scripture is not the reule. […] Holi Scripture is oonli a witnesser and a rehercer [‘rehearser/repeater’].11 Scripture reports, testifies to, re-iterates and confirms the originary rule rather than being the rule. The Bible and reasoned discourse are accordingly capable of, in effect, commenting on and cross-referencing each other. In line with this, Pecock expends great energy in laboriously cross-referencing and self-glossing his works of divine reasoning, thereby mutually confirming and illuminating them in a vast reciprocal network of what is in effect self-commentary – be it explicit or implicit. One mode of Pecockian self-commentary is the extrapolatory treatment of what he has already written at a more elementary level and in briefer compass. In the Reule Pecock points out that his Seven Matters (instrumental virtues that go to make up his first of the Four Tables) are dealt with by many other connected treatises. The Donet treats these Seven Matters rudimentarily, but his ‘book of spreding þe iiij tablis’ (no longer extant) and other treatises expound them more copiously and pleasurably:

10  For explanation of how medieval literary thought and literary practice inter-related compiling and authorship, see Minnis A.J., Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: 1984) 94–112, 190–210. See too the classic essay by Parkes M.B., “The Influence of the Concept of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book”, in idem, Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: 1991) 35–69; first published in Alexander J.J. – Gibson M.T. (eds.), Medieval Learning and Literature. Essays presented to R.W. Hunt (Oxford: 1978) 115–141. 11  Pecock, Repressor 79.

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þouз þis present book wiþ þe book ‘spreding þe iiij tablis’ wiþ meny oþer bookis þerto felawschipid [‘affiliated’] to him, trete þe same vij maters, зitt myche differently and in greet difference þo maters þei tretyn, ffor whi [‘because’] ‘þe donet’ tretiþ hem [‘them’] in a schort and a general fundamental maner, þis present book tretiþ hem in a larger and clerer and dilectabler maner, and þe ‘book of spreding þe iiij tablis’ wiþ oþer mo bokis treten hem in fullist and parfitist [‘most perfect’] and dilectablist maner as for maner of leernyng or of doctrine in reward of [‘with regard to’] þe former soortis of bokis.12 Another of Pecock’s ways of auto-commentary is his manner of commenting retrospectively in his Donet on how the first part of this work recycles, rationalistically repackages and improves on familiar catechetical discourses. For example, in the second half of the Donet, Pecock points out which of his self-designed categories has subsumed the Fifth to Tenth Commandments – namely, ‘riзtwisnes’ (‘righteousness’) towards our neighbours. At the same time, not only does he take care to tell his readers where precisely in his ordinatio this redesignation has taken place, but he also goes to the trouble, having consigned the Commandments to his Tables, of quoting each of these commandments in English. Why quote them now, when he has effectively elided them and moved on past them? The answer is to do with reassuring his audience and making his system recognisable in terms already known. To quote the Commandments has the soothing and convincing rhetorical effect of signalling that the old familiar discourses, seemingly made invisible and submerged in Pecockian systematics, are in fact still there – still alive and well, however much they may be re-presented in his new format: The text of þe ve, vje, vije, viije, ixe and xe commaundementis in moyses tablis is þis: ‘þou schalt not […] [Pecock then recites all six of them]’. Alle þese vj comaundementis þou schalt fynde afore in þe first afore goyng party, þe ix chapitre, where mensioun is maad of þe ije membre of þe iije poynt in þe iiije table, which poynt is called ‘riзtwisnes’; for whi [‘because’] where euer it be comaundid vs to be iust and riзtful anentis [‘towards’] oure neiзboris, in þis same it is forboden [‘forbidden’] vs forto be uniust or unriзtful anentis þe same neiзboris.13

12  Pecock, Reule 367. 13  Pecock, Donet 134.

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Here, then, the self-commentary is partly defensive (although from another perspective it may seem that the mere repetition in the vernacular of these articles is in some way a personally and culturally assertive act).14 This is not so, however, when it comes to Pecock’s declaring that the Ten Commandments, in their familiar catechetical and biblical form, are theologically and morally incomplete, unclear, insufficiently defined, and inarticulate of their own sentence – which is why he has dispersed and re-expressed them more systematically in the Tables in the first half of the Donet: no man may seie, if he wol assaie, þat þe seid comoun foorme of þe x comaundementis schewiþ forþ to vs and to alle cristen cleerly, pleynli, openli and liзtli and esili, withoute ouer greet laboure in deluyng [‘delving’] and diggyng derkely and laborosely, þe hool summe of goddis comaundementis tauзt afore in þe first party of þis book, from þe bigynnyng of þe iiije chapitre into þe eende of þe ixe chapitre.15 There is no need for Pecock’s readers to dig about in these old discourses anymore, because he has organised them into a convenient and intuitive ordinatio (so he claims – though in reality it is rather counter-intuitive) and has glossed them into comprehensibility by re-expressing them in a new format. Each familiar Commandment (or Deadly Sin or Virtue etc) is now safely rearticulated and explicated in new and more reasonably contextualised words chosen by Pecock. In the same passage, as part and parcel of the same operation, he advertises the shortcomings of the canonical Decalogue, making much of the incompleteness of the Ten Commandments as an expression of the whole sum of God’s commandments, and does not miss the opportunity to display how his own Donet does, on the contrary, articulate their whole sum: […] nedis folewiþ þat þe seid comoun foorme of þe x comaundementis is not suche forme þat þerbi and þerynne we mowe se, recorde, remembre and reporte sufficientli to vs silf and to oþire, as nede or oure profite askiþ, þe hool summe of goddis comaundementis. And who so wole, who so nyle [‘whether one wishes it or not’], at þe ferþest it folewiþ þat nouзwhere nyзe [‘nothing like’] þe seid foorme availiþ

14  I am grateful to Alessandra Petrina for pointing out that such repetition of articles in English may also be rather assertive. 15  Pecock, Donet 145.

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to þe seid purpos as þe vj seid chapitris doon [‘do’] of þe first party of þis book.16 The canonical format cannot hold a candle to how he has dealt with them in six mighty chapters in the first part of the Donet. Titles of medieval works, especially religious ones, are often pithy microcommentaries on their texts. Pecock accordingly gave a significant number of his works ‘rulebook’ titles. The Donet echoes the name of a standard grammatical text, the Donatus, and is for Pecock a grammar of how to parse and then articulate one’s spiritual life. The Reule of Crysten Religioun is not just a gathering of teachings but an integrated and portable rule, sufficient for belief and Christian conduct, in which ‘is conteyned al what ech cristen persoone owiþ to do and to suffer bi bidding of god forto be a trewe cristen lyuer and þe servaunt of god’.17 Although the Reule may have its own self-sufficiency in expressing an integrated system, it is also in supplementary harmony with the different orders of treatment of subject matter (‘þe ordris of þe same maters’) and the various authorial intentions (‘dyuers ententis of þe treter’) to be found in the Donet or indeed in any other of Pecock’s books: And þus þe ordre in þe which þe vij maters of þis book ben tretid is proued sufficiently to be conuenient ynouз [‘enough’]. And þouз in ‘þe donet’ be not kept þis same ordre in treting þise same vij maters, no man ouзt juge þat ouþer þere oþer here [‘whether there or here’] is þe ordre of tretyng vnconuenient or vndewe. ffor whi, for þe dyuers ententis of þe treter in oon book and in an oþer, þe ordris of þe same maters tretid bi him in þe oon book and in þe oþer may conueniently and allowabily be chaungid and dyuersid.18 Pecock chimes with Chaucer’s invocation of gospel harmony in his Prologue to Melibee: the gospels may vary in their manner of telling but they agree in sentence.19 Likewise, an underlying sentence and a guarantee of transcendent reason are common to all variant modes of re-presentation of his Seven Matters. For all that the Reule is selective and must therefore omit what may be said elsewhere about the ‘vij seid maters’, it is nevertheless enough for ‘bigynners in 16  Ibidem. 17  Pecock, Reule 13. 18  Ibidem 16. 19  Chaucer G., Canterbury Tales VII. 936–52, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. Benson (Oxford: 1988) 3–328.

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diuynite’ – in other words sufficient to get them saved and for them to thrive spiritually, which is sufficiency indeed: wheþer forsoþe þe doctrine of þis book be eny hool kunnyng [‘complete knowledge/understanding’] and hauing eny hool, such as now is seid subject, or no, I leve here vnseid of me and to be seide of oþere men; neuerþeles bi what is here bifore seid and after to be seid in þe prologis, open it is þat þe maters vpon whiche renneþ [‘runs’] al þe doctryne of þis present book wiþ all bookis whiche to hym be subalternat or vndir ordyned and to hym nyз [‘near’] perteynyng [‘relevant’], ben þe vij seid maters, And þis to knowe is ynouз [‘enough’] to bigynners in diuynite.20 Not only is the Reule sufficient, it is also cast as the superior partner of other books, connected to them via three subtly different modes of intertextual ordinatio. Treatises connected with the Reule are accordingly ‘subalternat or vndir ordyned and to hym nyз perteynyng’. These three categories of relation ask for comment. Firstly, the two terms in the doublet ‘subalternat or vndir ordyned’ may both simply be understood as meaning the same thing – subordination. They are not, however, necessarily identical in meaning. Pecock may have found ‘subalternat’ useful for suggesting otherness as well as subordination in the forms of an inferior alternative and/or an inferior complement. The third term, ‘to hym nyз perteynyng’, is also intriguing. Pecock qualifies ‘perteynyng’ with ‘nyз’. On its own, ‘perteynyng’ would denote relevance only. Mere relevance is not enough here, it would seem, for ‘perteynyng’ is paired with the spatialising ‘nyз’ in a collocation gently emphasising the nearby intimacy yet non-identicality of the Reule with its lesser partner texts. The word ‘nyз’ advertises proximity; however, we are not told how near one text may be to the other. Pecock does not use here the superlative ‘nexste’ – meaning ‘next’ or ‘nearest’. Nevertheless, ‘nyз’ does not preclude the absolute condition of being next to something or in contact with it: in this passage Pecock assumes conjoinability. These connected texts share the same neighbourhood in a commonality, subjection to, and participation in, the same regulatory context. It is intriguing that in this passage of self-commentary doctrine is characterised as running: it ‘renneþ’. It is conceived of as flowing from book to book. It is particularly significant that doctrine runs with: ‘renneþ […] wiþ’. In Middle English ‘rennen with’ commonly meant ‘to keep company with’ (MED rennen 20  Pecock, Reule 16–17.

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sense 1d.[f]):21 Pecock’s books and doctrine are hospitably congruent with each other in a community of textual production and interpretation. Pecock tells us in the same passage that doctrine also runs upon certain divisions of subject matter: ‘þe maters vpon whiche renneþ al þe doctrine of þis present book’. Relevant here too is MED sense 12b. (d) ‘to study (a topic), examine; of a text: treat (a subject)’, a sense commonly used by Pecock elsewhere in his works. The flow of doctrine is predicated on a division of subject matter overseen by Pecock: his ordinatio and hermeneutic divisio make the flows of doctrine diversely ‘current’, that is, comprehensible and properly distributed. These dynamic images of intertextual and interpretative flow, mutual hospitality, division of subject matters and studious treatment thereof are strands that intertwine subtly without disappearing into each other. Pecock develops this iterative conceit of companionable textual and doctrinal running and flowing by applying it to his own trajectory as a textual producer moving around his emerging and changing oeuvre from text to text, adding to them and co-ordinating them, ever mobile in the flux of a multiplicity of works under revision. He tells us not only of the textual mouvance inscribed into his growing oeuvre but also of his own intertextual mouvance: his ‘cours fro book to book’ darts hither and thither. Reginald, however, is no butterfly; he strategically engineers mutual supportiveness and interconnections amongst his books. To this end, he remixes the explanatory images of running and hospitality once more, morphing them intriguingly into an elaborately multi-locative yet still iterative metaphor of a carefully planned cluster of rooms, houses and a great hall: y maad my cours [‘course’] fro book to book þat ech [each] of hem myзte helpe þe oþer to be maad [‘made’], and þat ech schulde accorde wiþ oþer and leene to oþer and be joyned and knytt to oþer, riзt as chaumbris, parlouris and manye housis of officis answeren and cleeven to þe cheef halle for to make of alle hem so togidere [‘together’] placid and knytt oon [‘one’] formal, oon semely, beuteful, esiful [‘easyful’, i.e. full of ease] and confortable habitacioun.22 Pecock’s complex and suggestive architectural conceit, which describes and valorises the inter-relationships amongst the works of his oeuvre, is a 21  M  iddle English Dictionary, eds. H. Kurath – S.M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor – London: 1952–) http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. Henceforth I shall cite this work in the main body of this essay in abbreviated form as MED. 22  Pecock, Reule 22.

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particularly suggestive instance of self-commentary on a structured corpus rather than on a single text. His multitextual edifice is portrayed as self-supporting – a many-mansioned complex and home for habitus-forming: from the chief hall that is the Reule to the humble abode that is The Pore Mennis Mirror (a short digest of the Reule). This co-residence of books makes for a community of interpretative hospitality designed to house and educate different readers moving around its textual topography, negotiating its variously placed interconnecting teachings. The works of this ‘habitacioun’ are constructed not just to teach what but how. This ‘habitacioun’ is profoundly ‘formal’ in imparting to its readers and hearers the governing form behind Scripture and catechesis: reason. For Pecock, the form of this ‘habitacioun’ is fitting for the divine meaning informing it. Its multitextual form bespeaks the socio-theological function for which he makes it exist. Moreover, its layout and iterability suggest various levels of transparency and access for his readers. This is a planned textual layout of rooms and buildings. The architecture of ordinatio envisages a complex planned to accommodate not only the diverse matters of texts but also the diverse conditions and needs of humanity (to say nothing of accommodating the vast and protean universalising ambition of Pecock himself). The ‘cheef halle’ is presumably the Reule, which, with the other affiliated books (and their constituent parts – ‘chaumbris, parlouris’), is planned out like a manorial, collegiate, magnate or palace compound. These imaginary spaces and places are somewhere for readers to interact with Pecock’s books and materes room by room and house by house, be it through communal reading or hearing with other readers using the same codicological and textual space and occasion, or in private with or without clerical supervision. This residence of books makes for a community of interpretative hospitality designed to house and educate different readers moving around its textual topography and negotiating its variously placed interconnecting teachings. Of course, for many readers this ‘habitacioun’ will at first look strange indeed, because so many features familiar to them in their devotional lives have been redesigned or moved. Readers, then, need some orientation. Constant cross-referencing keeps them aware of Pecock’s self-canonisingly comprehensive, self-sustaining network of texts catering for different readerships and emphasising different materiae. Indeed, such cross-referencing may be seen as nerves or connective tissues of his corpus. Textual parts, being mutually dependent, accordingly ‘leene to oþer’, supported by other edifices in the supertextual architectonics of the cluster. At the same time, items that lean on others may in turn support neighbouring textual structures. The words ‘leene to oþer’ may also carry

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a sense of textual units conducing or tending towards others in a deixis of favourable preparation or interpellation. They may also bear a further sense of being textual items that are supplements, unable to stand without the texts they lean on. It should also be pointed out that the homophonically similar verb ‘lenen’, meaning ‘to lend/give’, might also be bubbling co-operatively under the surface. After all, the idea of target texts borrowing from source texts is commonplace, so why, when Pecock’s works lend to, and borrow from, each other, should the same not be conceivable here too? The same verb can also mean ‘to give strength to’ something – a sense not so far from the notion of leaning that would work for Pecock’s purposes here. Pecock, with his ingrained scholastic sensibility of ordinatio, is careful to combine the spatial and logistical imagery of the arranging of textual elements with the joining thereof. Textual parts are not only ‘placid’, but also ‘joyned and knytt to oþer, riзt as chaumbris, parlouris and manye housis of officis answeren and cleeven to þe cheef halle’. Undertexts are responsible to the chief text; they must ‘answeren’; such ‘subalternat’ neighbour-works may respond and explicate, settling issues for folk too ‘simple’ to understand the Reule. In their relatively autonomous operation and necessary differences from the Reule they are still nevertheless responsible to the Reule – to which they answer and cleave. The notion of answerability complicates the building metaphor; it is not exclusively concerned with mere physical building design; more richly, it suggests relations amongst texts as if they happened socially in a structure or institution housing and promoting the diffusion, comprehension and exercise of divine reason and the distribution of power and authority in textual form. Undertexts thus answer to the ‘cheef halle’, and are somewhat personified in cleaving loyally to the metatextuality of the Reule and to Pecock’s oeuvre at large. This ‘habitacioun’ is, then, a composite, complex, communal, hierarchical settlement. Its naming as a ‘habitacioun’ climactically completes this passage and is heralded by a fanfare and procession of defining and valorising adjectives. It is, thus, ‘semely’ – proper and decorous, as well as pleasing and attractive. It is ‘esiful’, full of ease and not intimidating (something reassuring for readers initially put off by Pecockian jargon). The word ‘esiful’ also connotes plenteous rest, refreshment and leisure. The adjective ‘confortable’ denotes a comfortable and, more importantly, a comforting and strengthening ‘habitacioun’. In this age of Boethian comfort, ideas of fortifying, improving, spiritual edifying and encouraging inevitably come into play here. What, then, is in it for Pecock when he chooses the term ‘habitacioun’, and what does the term tell us about his conception of his project? First of

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all, ‘habitacioun’ is the ‘act or fact of dwelling in a place or with others’ (MED sense 1). This ‘habitacioun’ is certainly more than just a dwelling place – it is the act of readerly living in a place of Pecockian self-fashioning; it is also the dwelling of Pecock’s texts in transaction with each other. ‘Habitacioun’, as an action, is not, however, just about the occurrence of behaviours, it is about the making of behaviours, the process of habitus-making. ‘Habitacioun’ has an agenda as a teleological meta-process that enables individually dispersed textual and readerly processes to happen coherently and effectively. Pecock’s ‘habitacioun’ can be described as ‘formal’ in more than one sense. This includes the sense of ‘formative’ (MED formal 4[a]), inasmuch as his textual programme teaches the steps of his ‘form of religion’. Each Christian soul seeking to engage in this discipline is meant progressively to internalise and to be reformed by the rules of this educative ‘habitacioun’. This conception of formativity also agrees with sense ‘1.(a) In due or proper form; according to established procedure; orderly, correct’: not only is Pecock a nurturer of souls, he is also an observer of proper academic procedure and of the decorum of scholastic textuality. He furthermore sees himself as socio-religiously correct – an obedient son of the Church endeavouring to quell sin and heterodoxy and to teach correct doctrine. The word ‘formal’ bears another sense befitting this ‘habitacioun’: MED 4. Phil. (a), ‘Pertaining to the form, or essence, of a thing (rather than to the matter); capable of imparting the characteristics of a type or species’. The essence of Pecock’s programme is to inculcate in the laity the shareable principles of divine reason. The texts constituting the ‘habitacioun’ are constructed not just to teach what but also how. This ‘habitacioun’ is profoundly ‘formal’ in imparting to its readers and hearers the governing form behind Scripture and catechesis: reason. For Pecock, the form of this ‘habitacioun’ is meet to the divine meaning and function informing it. The sum total of buildings is also the sum total of what Pecock’s oeuvre is and can do. His representation of his works in his conceit of ‘habitacioun’ is, moreover, an elaborate and eloquent form of self-commentary. 2

Gavin Douglas

Pecock’s hyper-scholastic enterprise was intriguingly out of step with the local episcopal humanism of his time. For this was an age (if we go with Andrew Cole’s intriguing and convincing perspective) in which cutting-edge bishops were no longer showing their credentials by uncovering Lollards – they were doing so by reclaiming the classics, valorising themselves and addressing each

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other magniloquently in terms of Roman eloquence.23 Pecock may have been behind the humanist curve, so, it is worthwhile pairing him with a later bishop who had undoubted humanist enthusiasms, admired Valla, and who knew some big names amongst Scottish and international humanists. He was also the kind of humanist who, although he was rude about scholastics and definitely classicising, also ‘advocated a return to the Biblical and patristic sources of Christianity’.24 He was, at the same time, thoroughly ‘medieval’ in much of the ideology and procedures of his self-commentary and translating. Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld (though Provost of St Giles Kirk in Edinburgh at the time of composing his great translation), saw himself as the Scottish Vergil in the latest international fashion, albeit a Vergil thoroughly Christianised and with a rendering of Maffeo Vegio’s non-Vergilian Book XIII included for good measure. Like Pecock, Douglas fell out with those in power, dying miserably of plague in exile in London in 1522.25 His early sixteenthcentury Scots verse translation (1513) of the Aeneid, the first complete rendering of this work into any variety of English, relies on commentary-tradition in a way little different from John Walton’s early fifteenth-century Boethius.26 Douglas, however, does maintain something of a humanist historicising distance from the world of Vergil; he does not, for example, go in for the kind of romance assimilation that would send Sir Eneas on a quest, although there is a chivalric imperative in Aeneas being assessed by Douglas according to honourably knightly aristocratic norms. Douglas also freely draws on earlier vernacular poetic idioms as a resource for effective cultural adaptation. At this point it would be helpful to provide an overview of the overall structure and of the various parts of Gavin Douglas’s work. The Eneados consists of thirteen Books, not twelve as in the Aeneid: Douglas supplements the canonically Vergilian Books with his Scots translation of Maffeo Vegio’s Latin continuation of the original. At the very beginning of his work are placed thirteen couplets respectively summarising each of the thirteen Books. Each Book is 23  Cole A., “Heresy and Humanism”, in Strohm P. (ed.), Middle English, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: 2007) 421–437. 24  See Bawcutt P., Gavin Douglas (Edinburgh: 1976) for his cultural background 23–46, and for this comment 29. See also Royan N., “Gavin Douglas’s Eneados”, in Copeland R., (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Volume 1: 800–1558 (Oxford: 2016) 561–580. 25  For biographical information on Douglas, see Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas 1–22 and also her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, “Douglas, Gavin” at http://www.oxforddnb .com. 26  See Walton J., Boethius: De Consolatione Philosophiae translated by John Walton Canon of Oseney, ed. M. Science, Early English Text Society, O.S. 170 (London: 1927).

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divided into chapters varying in length between 100 lines into 230 lines.27 Each chapter is preceded by a couplet summarising its contents. This user-friendly division into discrete sections gives readers a degree of orientation throughout the course of a long and challenging text. Such division into chapters was, at this time, common practice in standard editions of Vergil and other large-scale works. The prologue to Book I and its first seven chapters are accompanied by marginal notes, which appear in full only in the Cambridge manuscript.28 Generally believed to have been composed by Douglas himself, they contain much explanation of historical, geographical, mythological and linguistic issues. They are often derived from commentary found in standard Latin editions. One of the key characteristics of Douglas’s approach is his recourse to such Latin commentary, not just in these notes but also in the very fabric of his translating. In this he shares much with medieval predecessors like the early fifteenth-century Boethian translator John Walton (fl. 1410) and with a whole host of devotional and scriptural translators who drew on standard biblical commentaries such as the Glossa ordinaria and Nicholas of Lyra’s Postills. Each Book of the Eneados is preceded by a verse prologue showing considerable rhetorical sophistication and technical versatility. The prologues vary in length: the prologue to Book I is 511 lines; Book II, 158 lines; Book III, 130 lines; Book IV, 270 lines; Book V, 68 lines; Book VI, 168 lines; Book VII, 168 lines; Book VIII, 182 lines; Book IX, 98 lines; Book X, 175 lines; Book XI, 136 lines; Book XII, 310 lines, and Book XIII, 198 lines. Varied verse forms are used, though the couplet predominates. The prologue to Book VIII uses alliteration as well as rhyme in elaborate thirteen-line stanzas that end with something like a traditional ‘bob-and-wheel’ quatrain typical of the alliterative tradition. The prologues to Books II and IV are in rhyme royal form, while the prologue preceding Book III displays an ornate nine-line stanza. Some prologues are more explicit than others in their engagement with the Books that they introduce and in their manner of explaining and preparing the reader for what follows. They range across a variety of topics, including, most notably, Christian contextualisation and explication of pagan material; moral preaching aiming at salvation; complaint against the evils of the times, and admonition against libidinousness and adultery. Amongst the forms Douglas deploys are invocation, dream vision and dialogue. Particularly arresting, and justly celebrated by critics, are several astonishing passages of description of

27  For discussion of Douglas’s division of the original into chapters, see Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas 105–107. 28  For introductory discussion of Douglas’s prose marginalia, see ibidem 107–110.

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the natural world – landscape, seasons, flora and fauna – to be found most notably in the prologues to Books VII, XII and XIII. At the end of the translating of Book XII are eight lines, in couplets, in which Douglas ‘makis mennsioun of thre of his pryncipall warkis.’ This is followed by a five-line puzzle in which the name of the translator, broken up etymologically amongst the verses, is as much revealed as concealed. Book XIII is followed by a ‘Conclusio’, in which Douglas takes leave of his work and his readers, prophesying fame for his translation and for himself. After this is a socalled ‘Direction’ of 148 lines: here he dedicates his work to Lord Henry Sinclair. Though Douglas treats Sinclair with immense courtesy, he does so with the confident humility of a social equal and a cleric of national authority. He also addresses his work at this point to every noble Scot, advertising it as useful for teaching children the Aeneid. Here Douglas also tells us that the completion of his translation marks the fulfilment of a promise made in his earlier poetical work, the Palice of Honour. There follows an ‘Exclamation’ of five stanzas against detractors and unduly fault-finding readers, in which Douglas proclaims that Vergil and his text should be consulted as the true measure and the judge of his work, and that would-be critics should hold their tongues rather than chide. He sends his ‘wlgar Virgill’ into the world: now it shall be learnt by relatively uneducated people, whereas before it was understood only by clerks. Twenty-six lines, stating the time, place and date of the translation come next. Finally, the whole enterprise ends with the quotation of Vergil’s apocryphal two-line Latin epitaph, which is then expanded by Douglas into six Scots lines. Douglas’s Eneados boasts, then, an astonishing array of prologues and other paratextual discourses, vibrant not only with immense poetic versatility and strategically flexed poetic personae but also with self-commentary. In the Directioun at the end of his work, refuting detractors who may say that he repeats pagan lies and idolatry, he advertises his work as a proper exposition of Vergil and as a good humanist tool fit for the schoolroom: Heir the translatar direkkis [‘directs’] hys buk and excusis hym self etc. Nane othir thyng, thai threpe, heir wrocht haue I [‘They contend that here I have made nothing else’] Bot fenyeit fabillys [‘But feigned fables’] of idolatry, […] For weill I wait, our wark to mony a wy [‘For well I know that to many a creature our work’] Sall baith [‘Shall both’] be plesand and eyk profitabill, For tharin beyn seir [‘several/various’] doctrynys full notabill; It sal eik [‘shall also’] do sum folk solace, I gess, To pass the tyme, and eschew idylnes.

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Ane othir proffit of our buke I mark, That it salbe reput a neidfull wark [‘That it shall be reputed as a necessary/needful work’] To thame wald Virgill to childryn expone [‘To those who would expound it to children’]; For quha lyst note my versys [‘For whoever cares to note my verses’], one by one, Sall fynd tharin hys sentens euery deill [‘Shall find therein every part of his meaning/teaching’], And al maste word by word, that wait I weill [‘I know well’]. Thank me tharfor, masteris of grammar sculys, Quhar ye syt techand [‘Where you sit teaching’] on your benkis and stulys [‘benches and stools’]. Directioun 25–48

When Douglas claims to translate ‘al maste word by word’ he sounds like the vernacular humanist he is, preoccupied with textual accuracy. But he is more than an ad verbum literalist; his rendering is heavily influenced by the standard commentary materials of the likes of Ascensius and Servius, whom he uses to unpack the sententia of his auctor, in the best medieval style, for ‘doctrynys full notabill’. Douglas’s translational eloquence is exegetical in the manner of Robert Henryson in his Orpheus and Eurydice and of John Walton in his translation of De consolatione philosophiae:29 a blend of sapientia and eloquentia – closely verbal yet extrapolatory, using doublets and phrases to capture complex sense with stylish fouth (that is, copia) and a deep debt to the matter and methods of commentary tradition. Unsurprisingly, Douglas is genuinely awed by his task. He really does revere Vergil in good faith and with a measure of humility that is entirely convincing, even though, at the same time, he also reveals stratospheric ambition and no little ego: Throw owt the ile yclepit [‘isle called’] Albyon Red sall I be [‘I shall be read’], and sung with mony one [‘sung by many’]. Conclusio 11–12

29  See Walton, Boethius; Henryson R., The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. D. Fox (Oxford: 1981) 132–153; and idem, The Complete Works, ed. D.J. Parkinson (Kalamazoo: 2005): http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams.

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Not only shall his ‘wlgar Virgill’ (Exclamatioun 37) be read, he himself shall be read: ‘Red sall I be’ – and not just ‘red’ (for sapientia and solace) but ‘sung’ – and sung by many throughout ‘Albyon’ (the island of Great Britain) to boot. Here, Douglas substitutes himself for his text and even for Vergil. Now he is the man who shall be sung – and sung by many as if he were an auctor, a source for others to recite. Moreover, in referring to himself as the man to be sung he seems to be alluding to words in the famous first line of the Aeneid itself: ‘virumque cano’ (I.1.1). It is intriguing, in this respect, to look at Douglas’s own prose gloss on this line: ‘Virgille reherssis not Eneas naim, bot callis him “the man” be excellens, as thocht he said “the mast soueran man”’. Here, however, the unnamed translator is the man. Here too, Douglas’s self-commenting gloss connects with an ambitiousness that would put him in the company of Vergil and Aeneas himself. Step forward in excellence, Gavin Douglas, sovereign poet-hero. Douglas’s work, albeit in one manuscript only (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.3.12), sports learned self-commentary in the form of marginal prose glosses that peter out before the end of the first book.30 Despite Douglas’s apparent abandonment of this kind of self-glossing, his prose annotations are nevertheless fascinating as a substantial and telling example of self-commentary, not only with regard to the Eneados but also with regard to late medieval and early modern commentary tradition more generally. Often drawn from the Latin edition of Ascensius, they provide historical, mythological, and geographical context – as, for instance, with the glosses on I.1.8 and I.2.11 respectively: Quhat [‘What’] is Latium, or Latio, luyk eftyr [‘look below’] in the vi c. of the viii buyk [‘book’]. The cite of quham heir is mention [‘The city of which there is mention here’] was New Troy, quham [‘which’] Eneas biggit [‘built’] at the mouth of Tibir; and fra Ene [‘from Eneas’] bein namyt [‘are named’] the Latynis, and nowdir fra [‘neither is named from’] the cyte nor the land. Sarpedon, son of Iupiter and Laodomya, dochtyr [‘daughter’] to Bellerophon, was kyng of Lycia; of huge statur, and slan [‘slain’] by Patroclus. Occasionally, a gloss takes the form of moralising Christian allegory, as with the long exposition drawn from the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Cristoforo 30  For an interesting discussion of Douglas’s glosses, see Griffiths J., Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: 2014) 81–103.

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Landino. In this gloss, on I.3.100, Aeneas’s promised land, Italy, represents contemplation of good and divine works. Juno would drive the soul/Aeneas away from such desiderata by means of concupiscence and worldliness, but, happily, the storm ceases, thanks to Neptune, who represents ‘the fre wyll and raison predomynent’. Consequently, Aeneas and his companions arrive safely at a harbour, finding ‘tranquilite of consciens’. Such self-glossing is interesting in its own right. It also gives Douglas’s enterprise the physical appearance and the academic character of an authoritative Latin edition. John Gower (c. 1330–1408) and John Walton were similarly motivated to valorise the functionality and authority of their texts by accompanying them with glosses that they had penned themselves. Gower intermittently provided rather impersonal and emotionally detached moral Latin commentary throughout his most famous English work, Confessio amantis. The distance between the text and the commentary, and the fact that the latter is inscribed in the learned tongue of Latin, are doubtless designed to give an impression that Gower’s work is indeed an authoritative work deserving and requiring such paratextual treatment and apparatus.31 Walton, in Englishing an auctor of the greatness and cultural centrality of Boethius, did not need to confect authority from scratch in the way that Gower attempted to do. Even so, he conferred the prestigious voice of the prose commentator on his English poetic translation by including substantial marginal glosses on some of the most important passages of De consolatione philosophiae.32 Whereas Douglas’s marginal notes key into specific lines, Walton’s expositions (applied to the text metrum by metrum and prosa by prosa) are more continuous and expansively contextualising, and Gower’s self-commentary, much of which precedes individual sections of the narrative, explain, as a rule, how the exemplary narrative works. What is particularly intriguing in Douglas’s case, is his decision not only to provide glosses to the translated text but also to his prologue to the first Book. To do this is to augment his authority as a Vergilian textual maker, especially when a gloss discloses his superiority or prowess, as with the gloss on I Prol. 137 bluntly disdaining an earlier vernacular adaptor of the Aeneid: ‘Caxton faltes’; or when, commenting on the line ‘Virgill tharin ane hie philosophour hym 31  See Gower John, The English Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 2 vols., Early English Text Society, E.S. 81, 82 (London: 1900–1901). For introductory discussion of Gower’s Latin commentary, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship 188–190; Pearsall D., “Gower’s Latin in the Confessio Amantis”, in Minnis A. (ed.), Latin and Vernacular: Studies in LateMedieval Texts and Manuscripts, York Manuscripts Conferences Proceedings Series 1 (Cambridge: 1989). 32  For Walton’s prose commentary, see Walton, Boethius 364–379.

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schew’ (I Prol. 192), he valorises the profundity and complexity of his venture with the gloss ‘Vnder derk poetrye is hid gret wisdome and lerning’. Another occasion on which he shows off his skill is when, self-glossing I Prol. 350, he demonstrates the necessity of using more than one Scots word to render a Latin term: Oppetere is alsmekil [‘as much’] to say as ore terram petere, lyke as Seruius exponys the sammyn [‘same’] term, quhilk [‘which’] to translate in our tung is with mowth to seik or byte the erd. And lo, that is ane hail [‘one whole’] sentens for ane of Virgillis wordis. By flagging prose glosses from within his own verse prologue and then delivering them Douglas palpably makes his own words look worthy of commentary and therefore authoritative in the manner of his (or any other) auctor. One of the most amusing paratextual moments in this work is Douglas’s exuberantly contemptuous pillorying of William Caxton’s unscholarly and unstylish Eneados for violating sententia and eloquentia (that is, for being ‘but [without] sentens or engine [ingenuity/invention]’) in clod-hopping prose cribbed from an inept French intermediary. Douglas makes of poor Caxton a negative exemplum emblematic of both what he is and is not trying to do in his own correct Vergilian translating: […] Wilyame Caxtoun, of Inglis natioun, In proys hes prent ane buke of Inglys gross [‘has printed a book in gross English prose’], Clepand [‘Calling’] it Virgill in Eneados, Quhilk [‘Which’] that he says of Franch he dyd translait, It has na thing ado tharwith, God wait [‘knows’], Ne na mair lyke than the devill [‘no more alike than the devil’] and Sanct Austyne. Haue he na thank tharfor, but loys hys pyne, So schamefully that story dyd pervert. I red his wark with harmys at my hart, That syk [‘such’] a buke but [‘without’] sentens or engine [‘ingenuity’] Suldbe intitillit [‘Should be entitled’] aftir the poet dyvyne; Hys ornate goldyn versis mair than gilt [‘more golden than if gilded’] I spittit for dispyte to se swa spilt [‘see so ruined’] With sych a wyght, quhilk [‘by such a creature, that’] trewly be myne entent Knew neuer thre wordis at all quhat [‘what’] Virgill ment –

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Sa fer he chowpis I am constrenyt to flyte. [‘So much he mumbles/talks stupidly I am constrained to flyte’] The thre first bukis he has ourhippyt quyte [‘skipped over entirely’]. I Prol. 138–154

Caxton’s failure is not that he is English, but that he has not respected the textual integrity of his auctor or his eloquence – and he has even mangled the narrative.33 Douglas endeavours to accommodate both. Caxton’s work is simply not a proper and reputable translation of Vergil in any sense that Douglas would accept. Neither is Chaucer’s engagement with Vergil in his Legend of Good Women. In another instance of competitive self-placement Douglas criticises his master Chaucer for his typically medieval sympathy with Dido and by extension for not sufficiently respecting Aeneas’s manifest destiny as a nationbuilder and aristocratic leader (I Prol. 408–450). In his prologue to the first Book, then, Douglas faces other writers and poetic tradition, other moral and textual selves. As a writer of his time and as a pious Christian reworking a pagan text, he takes acute paratextual care, in the best late medieval manner, to present a moralised self, facing his God, seeking his muse in the form of the divinity, beseeching forgiveness for, and alleviation of, his moral and literary shortcomings, and petitioning for the grace that would upraise his performance and exculpate him morally. Significantly, Douglas recycles, in a sacralising translatio, the laudatory designation, ‘prynce of poetis’, used earlier (I Prol. 418) by him as a title for Vergil himself, and now upraised as his own devout designation for the Christian God he petitions: Thou prynce of poetis, I the mercy cry, I meyn [‘mean’] thou Kyng of Kyngis, Lord Etern, Thou be my muse, my gydar and laid stern [‘guide and lode-star’], Remittyng [‘Forgiving’] my trespass and euery myss [‘wrongdoing’] Throu prayer of thy Moder, Queyn of Blyss. […] On the I call, and Mary Virgyn myld – Calliope nor payane [‘pagan’] goddis wild May do to me na thing bot harm, I weyn [‘know/suppose’]: In Criste is all my traste [‘trust’], and hevynnys queyn. Thou, Virgyn Moder and Madyn, be my muse, That nevir yit na synfull lyst refuss [‘Who never yet would refuse a sinner’] I Prol. 452–464

33  For Caxton’s French background, see Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas 79–80.

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In replacement and marginalisation of classical muses like Calliope, Douglas’s muse is the one true God, who will provide direction as his ‘gydar and laid stern’. Douglas’s Christianisation of his venture entails a petition for grace – a bid for inspirational illumination through internal will and external grace cooperating in the soul. Douglas’s God is thus an intimate external efficient cause assisting him in his poetic and translational labour, a divine lode-star befitting a sacred teleology. There is more to this scenario than the logistics of textual causality, for Douglas conflates the issue of textual causality with the business of sin and its remission. Like any number of late medieval devotional writers, Douglas seems neither willing nor able to separate the production of his text under divine guidance from his need, as a sinner, to be forgiven by the Almighty. He cannot and does not ask for guidance without at the same time beseeching forgiveness for the sins in his life at large. Indeed, in begging that ‘Thou be my muse, my gydar and laid stern [“guide and lode-star”], / Remittyng [“forgiving”] my trespass and euery myss [“wrongdoing”]’, he presents the remission of sin as in itself part and parcel of the function of guidance in text-making. In this he is little different from the makers of many pious late medieval prologues. In some of his prologues, Douglas highlights Christian messages that are inscribed by him into the essential experience of reading and understanding the Eneados. For example, in V Prol. 62–67 God is deemed to help the soul to overcome the transience of life, replacing the sorrows of earthly life with eternal joy. And in the prologue to Book XI the promised land is held up as worth more than any effort made by characters in his narrative to achieve temporal happiness: ‘Sen all this dyd he for a temporall ryng, / Press ws to wyn the kynryk ay lestyng’ (XI Prol. 182–183). Book VI deals with Aeneas’s visit to the Underworld and is therefore a Book in need of, and propitious for, Christian allegorical interpretation. Douglas therefore, in his prologue to this book, flags its ‘hyd sentence’ (VI Prol. 13), telling us that Vergil ‘writis lyke a philosophour natural’ (VI Prol. 38) dealing with issues touching our faith, including life after death. He also repeats Ascensius’s declaration that many of Vergil’s words are like apostolic saws. All in all, for Douglas, Vergil may rightly be styled ‘ane hie theolog sentencyus, / And maste profound philosophour’ (VI Prol. 75–76). The most extraordinary feature, to twenty-first-century eyes, in the whole of Douglas’s work, is the inclusion of Maffeo Vegio’s Book XIII. This inclusion, however, would not have looked so strange at the beginning of the 1500s, because Vegio’s late-coming Christian pastiche continuation met with such approval for its tying-up of loose ends of narrative and theme in Vergil’s text that it was speedily included in standard editions of the Aeneid.34 The strict 34  For an interesting discussion of how and why Douglas uses Maffeo Vegio, see Ghosh K., “‘The Fift Quheill’. Gavin Douglas’ Maffeo Vegio”, Scottish Literary Journal 22, 1 (1995) 5–21.

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scholarly and humanist side of Douglas that might deny Vegio his place in this work is circumvented by a memorable comic prologue, in which, within the added licence of dream vision, Maffeo Vegio cudgels his Christian way into Douglas’s Eneados: “Quhy schrynkis thou with [‘Why do you recoil from’] my schort Cristyn wark? For thocht it be bot poetry we say, My buke and Virgillis morall beyn [‘are’], bath tway [‘the two of them both’]: Len me a fourteyn nycht [‘fortnight’], how evir it be, Or, be the faderis sawle [‘soul’] me gat [‘that begot me’],” quod he, “Thou salt deir by [‘pay dearly’] that evir thou Virgill knew.” And, with that word, doun of the sete [‘seat’] me drew, Syne [‘Then’] to me with hys club he maid a braid [‘made a lunge’], And twenty rowtis apon my riggyng [‘blows on my back’] laid, Quhill [‘While’], “Deo, Deo, mercy,” dyd I cry, And, be my rycht hand strekit vp inhy [‘by my right hand raised aloft’], Hecht [‘Promised’] to translait his buke, in honour of God And hys Apostolis twelf. XIII Prol. 140–152

So, for all his tilting towards humanism and for all his genuinely humanistic and scholarly respect for the historicity and textual integrity of Vergil’s authoritative original – as palpably practised in his translating – Douglas still could not bring himself to reject the pressure to include this Christian addition. This, however, is not the only occasion on which Douglas violates the strict integrity of Vergil’s text; in order to emphasise Aeneas’s status as a hero and to detract from sympathy for Dido, Douglas (as Nicola Royan has so convincingly shown)35 repeatedly alters chapter boundaries (whilst still respecting the words of the literal text), time and time again pushing Aeneas to the fore at the beginnings of chapters so as to display him as possessing appropriate agency and prowess. By these deft boundary shifts, Douglas does not change Vergil’s message about Aeneas; he merely endeavours to make it more explicit. This, then, is not an alteration like adding Book XIII or adjusting the original by inserting Christian moralising; it is, on the contrary, a form of historicising and

35  Royan N., “Gavin Douglas’s Humanist Identity”, Medievalia et Humanistica 41 (2016) 119–136.

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ethical over-compensation – a bit like turning up the volume of the original higher than Vergil would have set it. 3 Conclusion With their own paratextual mixes of overt and implicit ambition, rhetorical ploy, generic revoicing, self-conceit, and self-positioning before an all-seeing and authorising God, this pair of eloquent, inventive, passionate, culturally central figures and their works have much to tell us about what was possible and at stake in vernacular self-commentary during what may be called ‘medieval early modernity’. The collocation ‘medieval early modernity’ does not threaten the separate utility of the terms ‘medieval’ or ‘early modern’, but it does serve as a reminder of hybrid contexts, identities, imperatives and opportunities at this transitional time. Vernacular self-commentary could, at this time, be tellingly hybrid. Douglas is a case in point – clearly humanist and classicising in so many ways, and also thoroughly medieval yet early modern as an eloquent translator relying on commentary tradition – and, then again, so thoroughly medieval in the ways in which his piety affects his literary activity and self-conception. Pecock is more obviously medieval but not entirely straightforwardly so. For all his scholasticism and for all his paraphernalia of late medieval textual formatting, he may have an uncanny touch of affinity with the clichés of so-called early modernity. He appropriates authority to himself and to his own voice, asserting de suo as if he were his own author, and he does not rely on palpable sources like other medieval writers; on the contrary, he pours forth his own prose from his own head in his own Pecockian style. No author of the age is more instantly recognisable from his style alone than Pecock. It could also be said of him, perhaps, that there may be an analogy with humanism that is not so far-fetched as to be immediately dismissible: whereas humanism held fast to close mastery over the linguistic details of authoritative textuality, Pecock held fast to a close mastery over the details and langue of the textuality of the doom of reason. What is clear enough in both writers, however, is that their creativity marks a heightened and productive hybridity and even confusability of the medieval and early modern that it would be unhelpful to deny.36 36  In recent years, there has been a greater willingness to see the productive potential in a culture negotiating between aspects of the medieval and the early modern, with particular reference to humanism. See Wakelin D., Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford: 2007); idem, “Humanism beyond Weiss”, in Rundle D. (ed.), Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe, Medium Ævum Monographs 30 (Oxford: 2012) 265–305;

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To sum up, both Pecock and Douglas sought in their self-commentary to show that each was returning to fons et origo. In Douglas’s case, this was Vergil and commentary tradition; in Pecock’s case it was the transcendent doom of divine reason. Both wished to show that their outputs could stand in for that from which they derived: Pecock’s oeuvre vis-vis divine reason and a whole tradition of church doctrine and catechesis, and Douglas’s magnum opus vis-a-vis Vergil-plus-commentary-tradition. The self-commentary of each has profound connections with issues of the articulation and formation of the self through textuality. Pecock’s self-commentary valorises himself as a shaping intermediary of divine reason and aims to enable, in his reader, a somewhat book-like and text-like human self to exercise the doom of reason. Douglas’s self-commentary valorises his own self as a wlgar Virgill but also participates in a project of helping to form educated Christian selves in the image of classical virtue and sentiment. Both Pecock and Douglas wished to tap, control and, to an extent, even impersonate the authority that they endeavour to obey. And each in his own way adds distinctively to the repertoire of vernacular selfcommentary during medieval early modernity. Selective Bibliography Texts

Chaucer Geoffrey, Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. Benson (Oxford: 1988) 3–328. Douglas Gavin, Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ Translated into Scottish Verse, ed. D.F.C. Coldwell, 4 vols., Scottish Text Society 25, 27, 28, 30 (Edinburgh – London: 1957–1964). Dove M. (ed.), The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate (Exeter: 2010). Gower John, The English Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 2 vols., Early English Text Society, E.S. 81, 82 (London: 1900–01). Henryson Robert, The Complete Works, ed. D.J. Parkinson (Kalamazoo: 2005) http:// d.lib.rochester.edu/teams. Henryson Robert, The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. D. Fox (Oxford: 1981). Pecock Reginald, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming the Clergy by Reginald Pecock, D.D., Sometime Lord Bishop of Chichester, ed. C. Babington, 2 vols., Rolls Series 19.1–2 (London: 1860). Rutledge T., “The Development of Humanism in Late-Fifteenth-Century Scotland”, ibidem 237–263.

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Pecock Reginald, The Donet by Reginald Pecock, D.D., Bishop of St Asaph and Chichester, Now First edited from MS. Bodl. 916 and collated with The Poore Mennis Myrrour (British Museum, Addl. 37788), ed. E.V. Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, O.S. 156 (London: 1921 [for 1918]). Pecock Reginald, Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. J.L. Morison (Glasgow: 1909). Pecock Reginald, The Folewer to the Donet, ed. E.V. Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, O.S. 164 (London: 1924 [for 1923]). Pecock Reginald, The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. W.C. Greet, Early English Text Society, O.S. 171 (London: 1927 [for 1926]). Walton John, Boethius: De Consolatione Philosophiae translated by John Walton Canon of Oseney, ed. M. Science, Early English Text Society, O.S. 170 (London: 1927). Wogan-Browne J. – Evans R. – Taylor A. – Watson N. (eds.), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: 1999).

Studies

Bawcutt P., Gavin Douglas (Edinburgh: 1976). Brockwell C.W. Jr, Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Lancastrian Church: Securing the Foundations of Cultural Authority, Texts and Studies in Religion 25 (Lewiston, NY: 1985). Campbell K., The Call to Read: Reginald Pecock’s Books and Textual Communities (Notre Dame: 2010). Cole A., “Heresy and Humanism”, in Strohm P. (ed.), Middle English, Oxford TwentyFirst Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: 2007) 421–437. Dove M., The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 66 (Cambridge: 2007). Ghosh K., “‘The Fift Quheill’. Gavin Douglas’ Maffeo Vegio”, Scottish Literary Journal 22, 1 (1995) 5–21. Green V.H.H., Bishop Reginald Pecock: A Study in Ecclesiastical History and Thought (Cambridge: 1945). Griffiths J., Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: 2014). Hudson A., Doctors in English. The Study of the Wycliffite Gospel Commentaries, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Liverpool: 2015). Lawton D., Voice in Later Medieval English Literature. Public Interiorities (Oxford: 2017). Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath – S.M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor – London: 1952–) http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. Minnis A.J., Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Att witudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: 1984).

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Minnis A.J. – Johnson I. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume II: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: 2005). Parkes M.B., Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: 1991). Pearsall D., “Gower’s Latin in the Confessio Amantis”, in Minnis A. (ed.), Latin and Vernacular. Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, York Manuscripts Conferences Proceedings Series 1 (Cambridge: 1989). Royan N., “Gavin Douglas’s Eneados”, in Copeland R., (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Volume 1: 800–1558 (Oxford: 2016) 561–580. Royan N., “Gavin Douglas’s Humanist Identity”, Medievalia et Humanistica 41 (2016) 119–136. Rutledge T., “The Development of Humanism in Late-Fifteenth-Century Scotland”, in Rundle D. (ed.), Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe, Medium Ævum Monographs 30 (Oxford: 2012) 237–263. Scase W., Reginald Pecock, Authors of the Middle Ages 8 (Aldershot: 1996). Wakelin D., “Humanism beyond Weiss”, in Rundle D. (ed.), Humanism in FifteenthCentury Europe, Medium Ævum Monographs 30 (Oxford: 2012) 265–305. Wakelin D., Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford: 2007).

chapter 4

On the Threshold of Poems: a Paratextual Approach to the Narrative/Lyric Opposition in Italian Renaissance Poetry Federica Pich In Renaissance manuscripts and printed books, lyric poems are sometimes introduced or accompanied by short prose headings (rubriche, ‘rubrics’) charged with an informative, explanatory, or more clearly exegetical function. When set up by authors or in agreement with them, these textual frames might be interpreted as forms of self-commentary. In the Italian tradition, rubriche can overlap with similar paratextual devices, namely argomenti (brief expositions of the ‘content’ of the relevant texts) and prose glosses such as dichiarationi (‘explanations’) and esplicationi (‘explications’), involving a form of explanatory glossing of the relevant text.1 A minor and perhaps marginal component of the Renaissance paratext, rubrics have never been the object of a systematic study, despite some excellent contributions on specific authors, such as Olimpo da Sassoferrato, Torquato Tasso, and Celio Magno.2 A general discussion about 1  See Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, founded by S. Battaglia and under the direction of G. Bàrberi Squarotti (Turin: 1961–2002), ad vocem ‘argomento’ (‘materia di un’opera lette­raria’, ‘breve esposizione del contenuto che precede l’opera’), where an example from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Comento de’ miei sonetti clarifies the difference between ‘esposizione’ and ‘argomento’. I quote from The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent: A Commentary on My Sonnets, critical text of Il comento by T. Zanato, trans. J. Wyatt Cook, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 129 (Binghamton: 1995), 54–55: ‘verremo alla exposizione de’ sonetti, fatto prima alquanto di argumento, che pare necessario a questi primi quattro so­netti’ (‘we shall pass on to the exposition of the sonnets, having first made whatever argument seems necessary to these first four’). A preliminary reflection on these and further terms such as ‘osservazione, dichiarazione, avvertimenti, annotazioni, […], considerazioni, interpretazioni’ in the context of commentaries has been proposed by Stierle K., “Les lieux du commentaire”, in Mathieu-Castellani G. – Plaisance M. (eds.), Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire: France/Italie (XIV e–XVIe siècles). Actes du colloque international sur le commentaire (Paris: 1990) 19–29 (25). 2  Rossi A., “Indicatori di lettura nelle Opere di Olimpo di Sassoferrato”, and Martignone V., “Esemplarità e distacco: l’autoesegesi tassiana alle rime d’amore”, in Danzi M. – Leporatti R. (eds.), Il poeta e il suo pubblico. Lettura e commento dei testi lirici nel Cinquecento, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 482 (Geneva: 2012) 483–498 and 399–406; De Maldé V., “Torquato Tasso. Auto-commento alle Rime (1591)”, in Caruso C. – Spaggiari W. (eds.),

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the status and possible functions of these textual thresholds should address – to a greater or lesser extent – the relationship between lyric form and its content, and the position of the poetic text with regard to given events, times, and places, whether they be true or imaginary. My particular concern in the pages that follow will be to start thinking about how authors may have wanted to model that relationship and set that position through their self-commentary in the form of prose rubrics. In doing so, my approach will be mainly historical and genealogical. I will sketch a tentative history of authorial rubrics, which is in no way intended as exhaustive – rather, as a preliminary reconstruction built around three turning points in the lyric tradition, such as Dante’s Vita Nova, Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, and Pietro Bembo’s Aldine edition of Petrarch’s Cose volgari (1501). In the first part of my chapter, I will refer to the structure of Dante’s prosimetrum – and in particular to the different components of its prose sections – in order to start addressing the relationship between the poems and the events that allegedly inspired them and to introduce the much-debated issue of lyric ‘narrativity’. With the help of recent contributions in the areas of narratology and literary theory, I will then evaluate how and to what extent the opposition between ‘lyricality’ and ‘narrativity’ can be used to interpret the relationship between lyric texts and prose rubrics. The same opposition will form the basis of the following two sections, devoted to the presence and possible functions of rubrics in post-Petrarchan lyric collections. In the fifteenth century, the dominant function of rubrics is to identify given circumstances and subjects, whereas the specific arrangement of contents into the lyric form is normally overlooked. However, in a post-Bembian context, the fortune of rubrics proves more complex, nuanced, and structurally ambivalent, contributing both to the unity and the dissolution of individual lyric collections. On the whole, the proliferation of prose rubrics reflects, by contrast and paradoxically, the inescapable singularity of Petrarch’s lyric book. Filologia e storia letteraria. Studi per Roberto Tissoni, Storia e Letteratura 248 (Rome: 2008) 239–250; Tomasi F., “Strategie paratestuali nel commento alla lirica del XVI secolo (1530– 1570)”, in idem, Studi sulla lirica rinascimentale, Miscellanea erudita. Nuova serie 80 (Padua: 2012) 95–147; Bruscagli R., “Paratesti del petrarchismo lirico cinquecentesco”, in Alfonzetti B. et alii (eds.), Per civile conversazione: con Amedeo Quondam, Studi (e testi) italiani 26 (Rome: 2014), vol. I, 273–290; Comiati G., “Componente paratestuale e didascalie nelle ‘Rime’ di Celio Magno”, in Arancibia P. et alii (eds.), Questioni filologiche: la critica testuale attraverso i secoli, University of Toronto Series Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies 3 (Florence: 2016) 143–159. See also Bossier Ph. – Scheffer R. (eds.), Soglie testuali. Funzioni del paratesto nel secondo Cinquecento e oltre / Textual Thresholds. Functions of Paratexts in the Late Sixteenth Century and Beyond. Atti della giornata di studi, Università di Groningen, 13 dicembre 2007, Cinquecento. Studi 36 (Rome: 2010).

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1 From prosimetrum to canzoniere: Dante and Petrarch The origin of prose headings as a form of lyric commentary can be plausibly traced back to medieval chansonniers, scribally compiled anthologies of troubadour poetry in which attributive rubrics were visually marked – in red ink, as the word rubrica itself suggests – and clearly separated from texts. The expansion of the biographical or pseudo-biographical component of these miscellanies through the addition of prose biographies of troubadours (vidas) was key to the process leading from multi-authored collections to individual poetry books, and so was the use of razos, explanatory commentaries in prose illustrating the circumstances of composition of poems.3 According to Maria Luisa Meneghetti, the function of vidas and razos should be understood in the context of the transition from a model of reception focused on performance to a model focused on writing and reading. The gradual separation of the text from the performance – in which the poem was a contingent object to be enjoyed there and then, even regardless of its author – placed a greater emphasis on the individual poetic personalities and ‘the intriguing pseudobiographical events that were seen as reflected in their texts, rather than on single poems, as it used to be’.4 With regard to the poet and poetic content, vidas and razos therefore contributed to undermine the distinction ‘between textual and extratextual reality’.5 Provençal vidas and razos notoriously exerted a significant influence on the prosimetrical structure of Dante’s Vita Nova (c. 1295), in which a number of sonnets and canzoni are inserted in a complex narrative and exegetical framework, constituting the book’s most innovative feature.6 Most crucially, 3  See Holmes O., Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book, Medieval cultures 21 (Minneapolis: 2000) 1–24; Meneghetti M.L., “La tradizione della lirica provenzale ed europea”, in Intorno al testo. Tipologie del corredo esegetico e soluzioni editoriali. Atti del Convegno di Urbino: 1–3 ottobre 2001, Pubblicazioni del Centro Pio Rajna. Studi e saggi 2 (Rome: 2003) 77–99. 4  Despite their technical complexity, lyric poems were considered occasional fragments, related to contingent circumstances and performances, in the first place by their authors. See Meneghetti M.L., “La forma-canzoniere fra tradizione mediolatina e tradizioni volgari” Critica del testo, 2 (1999) 119–140 (128). 5  ‘Since Zumthor, critics have generally seen the function of the vidas and razos as those of identifying the universalizing poetic “I” with a historical composer and of furnishing the nonreferential canso genre with “realistic” historical referents, thus breaking the boundary between textual and extratextual reality’ (Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self 28). 6  At least according to Domenico De Robertis, Il libro della ‘Vita nuova’, 2nd ed., Quaderni degli “Studi danteschi” 1 (Florence: 1970) 6. The bibliography on Vita Nova is far too vast to be summarised here, see for instance Alighieri Dante, Opere, vol. I, Rime, Vita Nova, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. C. Giunta – G. Gorni – M. Tavoni, I meridiani (Milan: 2011). On the important

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however, in Dante’s book the author of the poems is one with the author of the prose sections, so that the interaction between verse and prose can be interpreted in the perspective of self-commentary, although by no means exclusively.7 For each lyric insertion, the relevant prose section includes three elements:8 an episode that is part of the wider backdrop narrative framing the whole work (the overarching story of Dante the character falling in love with Beatrice, etc.); the equivalent of a razo referred to the inserted poem (with the specific term ‘ragione’ occurring in paragraphs 24–29); and a straightforward, content-based analysis of the poem (the so-called ‘divisioni’, ‘divisions’), performed through the subdivision of the text into its parts, according to the distribution of content.9 The distinction between the former two components of Dante’s prose framework and the latter was so evident to Giovanni Boccaccio that, in copying the Vita Nova, he extracted the ‘divisions’ from the main body of the work and placed them in the margins, as if they were authorial glosses (‘chiose’): connections between Dante’s prosimetrum, the accessus ad auctores tradition, and vidas and razos, see Todorovic J., Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange: Authorship, Manuscript Culture, and the Making of the ‘Vita Nova’, Dante’s World: Historicising Literary Cultures of the Due and Trecento (New York: 2016) 102–131 (106–108). 7  On the strong (and relatively unique) integration of verse and prose in the Vita Nova, examined in the light of prosimetrum as a form, see Trovato P., “Per il testo della Vita Nuova: Due edizioni a confronto”, in Comboni A. – Di Ricco A., (eds.) Il prosimetro nella letteratura italiana, Labirinti 49 (Trento: 2000) 13–56. Claudio Giunta observed that the information conveyed by Dante’s prose includes also elements that have nothing to do with the poems, suggesting the prose does not have a merely paraphrastic function. See Giunta C., Versi a un destinatario. Saggio sulla poesia italiana del Medioevo, Saggi 559 (Bologna: 2002) 438. For Dante’s ragioni and divisioni in the perspective of self-commentary and self-authorisation, see Ascoli A.R., “Auto-commentary: Dividing Dante”, in idem, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: 2008) 175–228 (178–200). 8  In seven instances out of twenty-eight, the third element (‘divisions’) is missing. For a useful map of ‘divisioni’, which either follow (1–17) or precede (18–30) the relevant poems, see Gorni G., “Tipologia delle divisioni”, in his edition of Alighieri Dante, Vita nova, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati 15 (Turin: 1996) 285–286. 9  Botterill S., ‘“Però che la divisione non si fa se non per aprire la sentenzia de la cosa divisa’ (V.N., XIV, 13): the Vita Nuova as Commentary”, in Moleta V. (ed.), La gloriosa donna de la mente: A Commentary on the ‘Vita nuova’, Italian Medieval and Renaissance Studies – Fontecolombo Institute 5 (Florence: 1994) 61–76, remarked that ‘the analytical principle on which the divisioni are based is one wholly concerned with, and operative upon, the individual poem’s content; questions of form (or what the twentieth century would recognize as form) are entirely disregarded’ (67). With regard to Vita Nova, XIV, 13, he argued that ‘First, it shows that the purpose of divisione is simply to “open up the meaning” of a text, that is above all an exposition of content, or rather of form-as-structured-content (forma tractatus). Second, it shows that the end of divisione need not necessarily be achieved through divisione as a means’ (ibidem 74–75). In other words, exegetical prose can be ‘narrative’, as in ragioni.

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le divisioni de’ sonetti manifestamente sono dichiarazioni di quegli: per che più tosto chiosa appaiono dovere essere che testo; e però chiosa l’ho poste, non testo, non stando l’uno con l’altre bene mescolato. Se qui forse dicesse qualcuno “e le teme de’ sonetti e canzoni scritte da lui similmente si potrebbero dire chiosa, con ciò sia cosa che esse sieno non minore dichiarazione di quegli che le divisioni”, dico che, quantunque sieno dichiarazioni, non sono dichiarazioni per dichiarare, ma dimostrazioni delle cagioni che a fare lo ’ndussero i sonetti e le canzoni. (since the divisions of the sonnets are clearly declarations of them, it appears that they should be gloss instead of text, and so I have placed them as gloss, not text, since the one is not well mixed with the other. If someone were perhaps to say that the explications of the sonnets and canzoni he wrote could similarly be called glosses, because they are no less declarations of them than are the divisions – I say that, insofar as they are declarations, they are not declarations made to declare, but rather demonstrations of the causes that led him to write the sonnets and canzoni.)10 However, in each paragraph these components were originally conceived as a tightly-knit continuum, as the earliest manuscripts seem to confirm.11 Strictly speaking, there are no rubrics in the literal sense, even though there is a strong echo of their visual and material existence, first of all on a metaphorical level. The book of memory, from which Dante the author is copying, has its own ‘rubrics’ and ‘paragraphs’, as famously suggested by his incipit:

10  I quote Boccaccio’s postilla from Dante, Vita nova, ed. Gorni, XXVIII, and the English translation from Eisner M., Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature. Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti and the Authority of the Vernacular, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 87 (Cambridge: 2013) 54. See Stillinger T.C., ‘Dante’s Divisions: Structures of Authority in the Vita Nuova’, in idem, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: 1992) 44–72 (57–59). As Sherry Roush argued, ‘the primary distinction between the two manifestations of self-commentary ([which she terms] prosimetrical and glossorial) resides in the more pronounced hierarchical relationship between verse and prose found in the self-gloss form. The verse occupies the central place on the page, while the prose gloss is displaced to the margins’. See Roush S., Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella, Toronto Italian Studies (Toronto: 2002) 11. 11  See Alighieri Dante, Vita nuova, ed. M. Barbi, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante (Florence: 1932). Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self 121, observes that in ms. K ‘the narrative portions, or “ragioni”, and the analytic portions, or “divisioni”, are not distinguished from each other in any way’.

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In quella parte del libro della mia memoria dinanzi alla quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice Incipit Vita Nova. (1[1]) (In that part of the book of my memory before which there would be little to read is found a chapter heading which says: ‘Here begins a new life’.)12 In the introductory essay to his edition of Dante’s prosimetrum, Guglielmo Gorni defines ‘ragione’ (razo) as ‘prosa narrativa, didascalia di contorno’ (‘narrative prose, marginal caption’) and, in the plural, ‘i motivi dichiarati, le occasioni addotte a illustrare il contenuto dei testi poetici’ (‘the stated reasons, the occasions put forward to clarify the content of poems’).13 Gorni’s labels highlight a number of elements that are relevant to my analysis of prose rubrics as a combination of narration, reference to contingencies, and identification of poetic themes. In fact, the Vita Nova raises at least two points that are central to any discussion of how self-commentary addresses the relationship between the lyric text and the extratextual event that allegedly ‘generated’ it, and more broadly between the form of the text and its content. The first point concerns the chronological relationship between an external, referential order of events, and the poetry inspired by them, and, additionally, between the composition of verse and that of the narrative-exegetical prose surrounding them. The critical debate is ongoing as to the possibility that Dante might have written a number of poems – or even all of them – from scratch for the Vita Nova, which would subvert the idea of its prose as a structure built around pre-existing poems.14 A similar kind of question comes to the fore for virtually any book of poetry in which texts are accompanied by rubrics, even though in most cases it is safe to assume that rubrics were written after texts (for instance for a dedication manuscript, or, in the case of printed books, in the second or third edition of a collection), or at the earliest at the same time as the texts. The second point regards the different ways in which the prose introducing the lyric text might 12  I quote the Italian text from Gorni’s edition and the English translation from Dante, La Vita Nuova, translated with an Introduction and Notes by M. Musa, The World’s Classics (Oxford: 1992), I [1] (3). See also 1[11]: ‘scripte nella mia memoria sotto maggiori paragrafi’ (‘[words] which are written in my mind under more important headings’, ibidem II, 5). 13  Dante, Vita Nova, ed. Gorni, XLI (my emphasis). Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature 60, has highlighted the connection between Dante’s use of ‘ragioni’ in the libello and Vita Nova 16 [8]. 14  See Leporatti R., “Ipotesi sulla Vita Nuova (con una postilla sul Convivio)”, Studi italiani 7 (1992) 5–36; idem, ‘“Io spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna’ (V.N., XLII, 2): la Vita Nuova come retractatio della poesia giovanile di Dante in funzione della Commedia”, in Moleta V. (ed.), La gloriosa donna 249–291.

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handle its content and the circumstances of its composition. For instance, in Vita Nova, 24 [4], the sonnet is said to include everything that has been narrated in the ‘ragione’, which in this case makes ‘divisions’ unnecessary: E però propuosi di dire uno sonetto nel quale io parlasse a·llei, e conchiudesse in esso tutto ciò che narrato è in questa ragione. E però che per questa ragione è assai manifesto, no·llo dividerò. (Thereupon I decided to write a sonnet in which I would address her and would include in it all that I have narrated in this account. And since through this account it is sufficiently clear, I shall not analyse it.)15 In lyric books, the extension and internal articulation of prose rubrics offer a great variety of options, so that they can share the function of the nonsynonymic ‘dichiarationi’, ‘esplicationi’, and ‘argomenti’: possibilities range from a single, title-like sentence, capturing the occasion or main subject of the poem (say, ‘on the journey of the lady to the countryside’), to an extended narrative, which can focus either on the events that inspired the text and that can be partly echoed in it (for instance, ‘the lady travelled to the countryside and got lost’, etc.), or on the composition proper (say, ‘the author/I composed this poem on the occasion of the lady’s journey to the countryside’), or on both. Both the points I raised with the help of Dante’s Vita Nova are strongly related to the problematic definition of the relationship between narrative and lyric. After a long silence on the subject, narratologists have recently started to examine lyric texts under the lens of ‘narrativity’, but results have so far proven unsatisfactory for pre-modern poetry.16 On the one hand, these studies show a clear imbalance in favour of modern and contemporary examples; on the other hand, they invariably downplay the role of prosody and metres,17 and 15  Dante, Vita Nova, ed. Gorni, 24 [4]; Dante, La Vita Nuova, trans. Musa, XXXV, 71. 16  See Hühn P., “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry”, in Muller-Zettelmann E. – Rubik M. (eds.), Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to Lyric, Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 89 (Amsterdam: 2005) 147– 172; and Hühn P. – Sommer R., “Narration in Poetry and Drama”, The Living Handbook of Narratology (2012) (accessed 19 August 2016). The scope and complexity of the current theoretical debate on the concept of ‘lyric’ is attested to by Hillebrandt C. et alii (eds.), “Theories of Lyric”, Journal of Literary Theory 11, 1 (2017) 1–11 and the diverse range of contributions collected in the same monographic issue. 17  This is particularly evident in the case of DuPlessis R., “Manifests”, Diacritics 26 (1996) 31–53, whose notion of ‘segmentivity’ was then taken up in the theory of poetic narrative tentatively sketched in McHale B., “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry”, Narrative 17, 1 (2009) 11–30. At the same time, any rigorous attempt at defining ‘liricality’

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some of their arguments are hardly applicable to medieval and Renaissance texts. Generally, the relationship between the poem and its content is tackled through the paradigm of ‘telling’, that is, it is interpreted as a relationship between some form of ‘primary material’ and ‘the message-text’.18 The combined analysis of prose rubrics and poems seems to foreground this issue even further. In fact, in most cases, rubrics address the ‘primary material’ that is allegedly at the origin of the relevant lyric text, either concisely pointing to the subject or re-‘telling’ with a higher degree of ‘narrativity’ what is told in the poem – be it ‘something that happened’, something ‘that is’, something ‘that is thought’, or a combination of the three. The latter three definitions can be inferred from James Phelan’s much-debated attempt at clarifying the distinction between ‘narrativity’ (‘somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose[s] that something happened’) and ‘lyricality’ (‘somebody telling somebody else […] on some occasion for some purpose that something is […] or about his or her meditations on something’).19 Despite its obvious limits, the distinction between ‘narrativity’ and ‘lyricality’ proves pragmatically more appropriate for the analysis of the relationship between texts and their rubrics than Peter Hühn’s detection of ‘narrative’ in the lyric expression of emotions, which conversely might help illuminate the difficult process of ‘authorisation’ of the lyric genre in late sixteenth-century poetics.20 First of all, Phelan’s definitions take into account addressers, addressees, and occasions (‘somebody […] somebody […] on some occasion’), whose role is prominent in pre-modern poetry.21 Second, they bring to the fore the dominant temporal focus of rubrics (the past – ‘something happened’) and poems (the present – ‘something is or is thought or felt’). What should be emphasised more, though, is that the lyric present often voices a reaction to and a meditation on the event narrated in the rubric, or, more rarely, re-enacts it from a subjective perspective, while details mentioned in the prose heading are omitted in the verse. In other words, as Jean-Jacques Marchand has suggested, the role of analepsis in Renaissance lyric poetry is very limited, with the against ‘narrativity’, should ‘avoid unwarranted identification of poetry with either verse or its typographical representation’. See Heiden B., “Narrative in Poetry: A Problem of Narrative Theory”, Narrative 22, 2 (2014) 269–283 (270). 18  Heiden, “Narrative in Poetry” 272. 19  Phelan J., Experiencing Fiction: Judgements, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Theory and Interpretation of Narrative (Columbus: 2007) 3 and 22 (my emphasis). 20  Hühn P., “The Problem of Fictionality and Factuality in Lyric Poetry”, Narrative, 22, 2 (2014) 155–168. 21  See, for example, Giunta, Versi a un destinatario 62–65; Alpers P., “Apostrophe and the Rhetoric of Renaissance Lyric”, Representations 122, 1 (2013) 1–22.

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partial exception of capitoli, which can have a stronger narrative component.22 While further significant exceptions to this trend can certainly be detected, especially in canzoni, from the Middle Ages to the late Renaissance, it seems fair to highlight a correspondence between rubrics, use of the past tense, and ‘narrativity’ on the one hand, and poems, use of the present, and ‘lyricality’ on the other. The gradual development of the individual lyric collection as a form involves also a different dimension of ‘narrativity’, arising from the interaction of a number of carefully arranged texts, namely a narrative articulated by means of a lyric sequence. According to Marco Santagata, the poems included in the Vita Nova display intertextual connections in and of themselves, that would set up an ordered unity even without the prose sections.23 However, the most significant contribution to the individual book of poems in the Italian tradition must be attributed to Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–1374), whose legacy is crucial to the European lyric tradition as a whole. Despite the significance of precedents such as Guiraut Riquer and Nicolò de’ Rossi,24 Petrarch’s sophisticated use of anniversary poems is unique in tracing a ‘canzoniere of a lifetime’ as opposed to a ‘canzoniere of a youth’, and the dominant mode of his poetry book promotes a shift from the lyric text as ‘poetic letter’, outward-looking and focused on the addressee, to the poem as ‘poetic diary’, more introverted and self-reflexive.25 In the case of Petrarch, introversion itself fuels the narrative dimension through a strong and pervasive emphasis on time as a theme and as a structuring principle.26 Significantly, we find no rubrics as such in the autograph-idiograph manuscript of his Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (ms. Vat. Lat. 3195). However, in the so-called codice degli abbozzi (ms. Vat. Lat. 3196), a manuscript in which the poet kept track of his progress and which was not meant for circulation, one can find several indications, in Latin and in the vernacular, relevant to the times and circumstances of compositions, dated transcriptions and texts sent 22  Marchand J.-J., “Le ‘disperate’ di Antonio Tebaldeo dall’elegia al racconto dell’io”, in Crivelli T. (ed.), Feconde venner le carte. Studi in onore di Ottavio Besomi, Studi. Testi. Strumenti (Bellinzona: 1997) 160–171. 23  Santagata M., Dal sonetto al canzoniere: ricerche sulla preistoria e la costituzione di un genere, Scartabelli (Padua: 1979). 24  See Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self 149. 25  Giunta, Versi a un destinatario 449–453. 26  To my mind, the most insightful pages on time in Petrarch’s canzoniere can be read in Barolini T., “The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’”, Modern Language Notes 104 (1989) 1–38. A different but no less valuable investigation of the connections between issues of narrativity, temporality, and lyric ‘voice’ in the Fragmenta is Soldani A., “Voce e temporalità nel Canzoniere”, in idem, Le voci della poesia. Sette capitoli sulle forme discorsive, Lingue e letterature 95 (Rome: 2010) 49–65.

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to friends and admirers.27 If vidas, extended prose rubrics, and even miniatures in chansonniers can be interpreted as additions gravitating around the biographically oriented, particularising pole of the lyric spectrum, it comes as no surprise that Petrarch left neither rubrics nor plans for illustrations to his book of poems, despite his extraordinary control of mise en page.28 His choice would be consistent with the creation of an exemplary poetic autobiography, in which individualising details are deleted to the advantage of symbolic and universalising possibilities,29 and narration is entirely entrusted to a sequence of poems that ‘reflect the inner life of the subject, in its dialectic of reflection and memory’, for which, by contrast, the Vita Nova largely relied on the prose sections.30 In fact, as Gorni pointed out, the theoretical status of a canzoniere supplied with authorial rubrics is contiguous to that of a prosimetrum.31 2

Prose Rubrics in Fifteenth-Century ‘poesia cortigiana’: Gasparo Visconti and Filenio Gallo

It has long been acknowledged that mid- and late-fifteenth-cent ury lyric poets, who write in the vernacular and consciously build on Petrarch’s Fragmenta, in fact do not keep too strictly to either his structural choices or his linguistic selection.32 While confirming and even furthering Petrarch’s focus on the 27  See Petrarca Francesco, Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi, ed. V. Pacca – L. Paolino, I meridiani (Milan: 1996). Stefano Carrai notes that Petrarch’s postille in ms. Vat. Lat. 3196 at times constitute rubrics proper. See Carrai S., “Il commento d’autore”, in Intorno al testo 223–241 (226). 28  On the ‘graphic revolution’ of Petrarch’s autograph see Storey W.H., Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric, Garland Studies in Medieval Litetature 7 (New York: 1993). On the absence of illustrations in ms. Vat. Lat. 3195, see Battaglia Ricci L., “Illustrare un canzoniere: appunti”, Cuadernos de Filología Italiana, Número Extraordinario (2005) 41–54. 29  Here I am essentially following the interpretation of Rico F., “Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Para el titulo y el primer soneto del Canzoniere” Medioevo Romanzo 3 (1976) 101–138; idem, “Prologos al Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, I–III)”, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, s. III, 18 (1988) 1071–1104; Santagata M., I frammenti dell’anima. Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca, Saggi 387 (Bologna: 1992), which however needs to be integrated with Rosanna Bettarini’s commentary – Petrarca, Francesco, Canzoniere, ed. R. Bettarini, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati 20 (Turin: 2005). 30  Giunta, Versi a un destinatario 453. 31  Gorni G., “Le forme primarie del testo poetico”, in Asor Rosa A. (ed.), Letteratura Italiana, III/1, Le forme del testo. Teoria e poesia (Turin: 1984) 439–518 (513). 32  Santagata M. – Carrai S., La lirica di corte nell’Italia del Quattrocento, Letteratura 17 (Milan: 1993). For an updated catalogue of fifteenth-century poetry books, including

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amorous theme, they open the lyric field to a wider range of situations and occasions, on the model of Latin elegy.33 Concurrently, prose headings reappear, in some significant cases being certainly inserted and controlled by poets themselves. The use of rubrics is consistent both with the widening of the spectrum of lyric situations and with the social context in which these poets operate. The poetry of authors such as Gasparo Visconti, Angelo Galli, and Serafino Aquilano was produced mainly at the courts and for the courts, in a context in which one-off live performances, often improvised, and the private reading of dedicated copies coexisted. An exemplary case is that of rubrics reading A l’improvista, that is to say ‘improvised’, composed on the spur of the moment: on the written page of a dedication manuscript, such a rubric signals and paradoxically records the ephemeral nature of the relevant poem. Far from hiding it, this form of self-annotation emphasises the contingent origin of the poem as springing almost without artifice or second thought from a concrete occasion – of which it constitutes a celebration or a concise chronicle. The ever-growing gulf between the actual events that originated the composition and performance and the isolated text written on the page could account for the need to provide a background and keep the memory of those circumstances alive for later readings of the same poems. Of course a number of events recorded by rubrics may have never taken place, but it remains a significant choice in terms of self-commentary for a poet to privilege a fiction of contingency and historicity over a symbolic or allegorical set-up. Regardless of the actual circumstances of composition, the stronger ‘narrativity’ of prose glosses reinforces the allegedly causal relationship between the event and the poem, ensuring the connection is not missed. The abundance of rubrics in the so-called poesia cortigiana attests to the habit of connecting verse to detailed contexts and situations – as if that connection were essential to the experience of reading poems and to the pleasure that could be gained from them. One might wonder whether the Petrarch commentary tradition exerted any specific kind of influence on the presence and development of these details on rubrics, see Comboni A. – Zanato T. (eds.), Atlante dei canzonieri in volgare del Quattrocento, Edizione Nazionale “I Canzonieri della lirica italiana delle origini” (Florence: 2017). 33  Rossi A., Serafino Aquilano e la poesia cortigiana (Brescia: 1980). Further examples of rubrics are found, for example, in the collections of Giovan Antonio Petrucci (ibidem 103), Bernardo Accolti (131), Diomede Guidalotti (143), Antonio Ricco (149), and Guidotto Prestinari, and in about half of the 96 canzonieri examined in Comboni – Zanato (eds.), Atlante dei canzonieri in volgare del Quattrocento (XXVI). For the latter poet, see Dilemmi G., “Agli antipodi del Canzoniere: le Rime di Guidotto Prestinari. Varia struttura di un libro d’autore”, in Lo Monaco F. – Rossi L.C. – Scaffai N. (eds.), “Liber”, “fragmenta”, “libellus” prima e dopo Petrarca, Traditio et renovatio 1 (Florence: 2006) 239–250.

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paratextual structures, at a time when commentaries were produced for the court and responded mainly to the expectations of the court itself.34 A striking if anomalous example is the extraordinary incunabulum G.V. 15, of the Queriniana library in Brescia, an illuminated and dedicated copy of the princeps of Petrarch’s Rime and Triumphi (Venice, Vindelino da Spira: 1470) whose miniatures and glosses have been dubiously attributed to the Venetian poet and courtier Antonio Grifo. Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti argued that the illustrative corpus places the situations of Petrarch’s poetry book in a scenery that is very similar to that of the Milanese court, extracting from his poems whatever they allowed, no matter how little, to replicate the ‘referentiality’ typical of the poetry of Grifo’s times.35 In other words, Grifo adopts a late-fifteenth-century approach to Petrarch’s fragmenta, which seems consistent with the poetry of his contemporaries, suggesting a similar interest in embedding poems in ‘detailed circumstances’ and ‘everyday life settings’.36 This attitude is confirmed, for instance, in the canzonieri of Gasparo Ambrogio Visconti (1461–1499), of a cadet branch of the Visconti family, active at the court of Ludovico il Moro in Milan and certainly familiar with Grifo himself. Paolo Bongrani’s critical edition of the canzonieri for Beatrice d’Este and Bianca Maria Sforza – the latter collection being a reprise and extension of the former – suggests that the rubrics formed an integral part of Visconti’s poetic project.37 In the dedication manuscript of the Canzoniere for Beatrice d’Este (Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, ms. 2157), initials and rubrics are given great emphasis through decoration,38 and in the so-called manuscript A (Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, ms. 1093) there is 34  The courtly destination and biographism of the main fifteenth-century commentaries are discussed, among others, by Marcozzi L., “Tra Da Tempo, Filelfo e Barzizza: biografia sentimentale e allegoria morale nei commenti quattrocenteschi al Canzoniere di Petrarca”, Italianistica 33, 2 (2004) 163–177 (164). 35  I paraphrase from Tissoni Benvenuti A., “Il commento per la corte”, in Intorno al testo 195– 222 (209). See Mariani Canova G., “Antonio Grifo illustratore del Petrarca Queriniano”, in Frasso G. – Mariani Canova G. – Sandal E. (eds.), Illustrazione libraria, filologia e esegesi petrarchesca tra Quattro e Cinquecento. Antonio Grifo e l’incunabolo queriniano G V 15, Studi sul Petrarca 20 (Padua: 1990) 147–200. 36  As pointed out by Tissoni Benvenuti, “Il commento per la corte” 209–210, in fifteenthcentury love poetry, events are realistically embedded in detailed circumstances and set in everyday settings, building on the tradition of Latin elegy. 37  Visconti Gasparo, I canzonieri per Bianca Maria Sforza e Beatrice d’Este, ed. P. Bongrani, Testi e strumenti di filologia italiana. Testi 2 (Milan: 1979), XXXV–XXXIX and XLVI–LXV. See Bongrani P., “Gasparo Visconti”, in Comboni – Zanato (eds.), Atlante dei canzonieri in volgare del Quattrocento 605–614, also with reference to Visconti’s autographic addition of rubrics (611). 38  The manuscript was transcribed in Milan around 1495–1496 (ibidem XXIII–XXIV). See: http://manus.iccu.sbn.it/opac_SchedaScheda.php?ID=50174, and:

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autographic evidence of the author’s direct intervention on the rubrics proper, ranging from minor amendments to more substantial additions. In the presence of a high number of rubrics (for about 66% of the poems, 143 out of 216 in Bongrani’s edition), clearly controlled by the author, it is possible to draft a classification of rubric types and explore how each of them acts as a self-exegetical frame. Rather than trying to force each rubric into a given category, I have broken them down into their basic components, which are recurrent but can be combined in several different ways.39 Normally, the short prose fragments placed on the threshold of poems include references to one or more of the following elements: the poem’s addressee, be it historical or conventional (‘Al s[igno]re Ieronimo Tuttavilla’; ‘Ad una bellissima donna che poco stima faceva de virtù’, ‘To a very beautiful lady who did not attach much importance to virtue’);40 the addresser, by which I mean the addresser ‘inside’ the book, who is not necessarily one with the poet (‘Uno amante a la amata che più del solito se monstrava austera’, ‘A lover to his beloved, who looked more stern than usual’; ‘Un capretto parla, de la cui pelle si era facto uno paro di guanti’, ‘A kid [young goat] speaks, from whose skin a pair of gloves had been made’);41 the topic and/or occasion (‘Questi sei sonetti sequenti furno facti per un ventaglio’, ‘The following six sonnets were written about a hand-held fan’);42 and the metre. Many different combinations are possible, for instance metre and addressee (‘Sonetto al suo medesmo core’, ‘Sonnet to his own heart’),43 addressee and occasion (‘A la p[refa]ta ill[ustrissi]ma Duchessa, per exposizione d’un certo recamo’, ‘To the above-mentioned most illustrious Duchess, as an explanation of a certain embroidery’; ‘A la duchessa Isabella per la morte del duca Io[anne] Galeaccio suo marito’, ‘To duchess Isabella, for the death of her husband, the duke Io[anne] Galeaccio’),44 or just a concise reference to the fact that the poem was commissioned by someone (‘Risposta per comission […]’, ‘Answer on commission’).45 It is fair to say that, by pointing at addressee, addresser, and circumstances, introductory glosses provide the basic coordinates to locate the lyric text in time and space, to anchor it to a net of events   http://graficheincomune.comune.milano.it/GraficheInComune/immagine/Cod.+Triv .+2157,+piatto+anteriore (accessed 31 July 2016). 39  A concise classification of rubrics is proposed in the introduction of Comboni – Zanato (eds.), Atlante dei canzonieri in volgare del Quattrocento (XXVI) and in a number of entries, for instance for Felice Feliciano (308) and Angelo Galli (333). 40  Visconti, I canzonieri XXI (11); XL (25). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 41  Ibidem LXXXIII (62); CXIX (206). 42  Ibidem XII (175). 43  Ibidem XCV (69). 44  Ibidem CLXXXIX (141); CX (84). 45  Ibidem CVII (81). See CLXXVII (132) ‘Risposta per commission […]’.

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and relations, grounding it with details that often could in no way be extracted from the text itself. In the perspective of both patrons and poets, this form of self-commentary ensures both the effectiveness of the poetic record and its potentially endless survival. In rubrics, the distinction between topic and occasion is predictably the least clear-cut. Glosses mainly focusing on the subject of the poem may identify it either concisely (‘In pictam tabellam’, ‘On a painted panel’; ‘In laude de Amore’, ‘In praise of Love’)46 or expand on it in a more developed prose, at times extended to the point of resembling a long argomento or a short novella: Sonetto facto per una molto virtuosa, bella e galante dama che, essendo stata per caso veduta una matina prima che ella si avesse acconzia la testa né posti li soliti ornamenti, mostrò averne alquanto di erubescenzia. Nel qual s(onetto) se gli dice che come una facella che se accenda non leva il lume dal fuoco che l’ha accesa, e come il sole aluma le stelle senza minuire il lume suo, così la p(refa)ta dama non solamente non cresce le sue bellezze cum ornamenti, ma infonde ad epsi molto lume senza minuire alcuna minima parte del splendor di se stessa.47 (Sonnet composed for a very virtuous, beautiful and gallant lady, who one morning, being seen by chance before she had her hairdressing done and adorned herself with the usual ornaments, blushed quite violently. In the sonnet she is told that, just as the lighting of a small flame does not deprive the fire that lit it of its light, and just as the sun lights up the stars without losing any of its own light, so the above mentioned lady not only does not improve her own beauties with ornaments, but actually infuses them [i.e. the ornaments] with a great deal of light without diminishing her own radiance in any way.) In this case, beside alluding to the occasion that inspired the sonnet (‘essendo stata per caso veduta una matina […]’), the prose refers to the content of the poem proper, indirectly identifying the lady as its addressee (‘se gli dice’). The juxtaposition between ragione (‘Sonetto facto […]’) and divisione (‘Nel qual sonetto se gli dice […]’) foregrounds the difference between, on the one hand, the explanatory act implied in the definition of the circumstances that originated the composition (‘Sonetto facto […]’), and, on the other, the selfexegetical process of stating what the poem actually says with respect to those 46  Ibidem III (188); CXXXVIII (108). 47  Ibidem CLXVI (169).

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circumstances (‘Nel qual sonetto se gli dice […]’). Conceptually, the whole rubric comes after the sonnet, as it obviously looks back on the poem as an accomplished object (regardless of when the verse and the prose were actually composed), but the two sections of self-commentary focus respectively on the time before the sonnet and on the internal time of the sonnet proper, replicating the opposition between past and present that I discussed with reference to Phelan. The distinction between ragioni and divisioni becomes even more evident when considering the following poem, where the ‘protagonist’ and the subject do not change, but the diction is different, as in a variation (‘Sonetto di quella medesma e d’un medesmo subiecto, ma dicto per altro modo’, ‘Sonnet on the same lady and on the same subject, yet phrased differently’).48 About 40% of the rubrics in Visconti’s Canzonieri introduce texts in which the poet lends his voice to other subjects, a process that in the fifteenth century was not at odds with the idea of collecting an authorial poetry book, or even a ‘canzoniere’ clearly marked by significant poems at both ends, as is the case for Visconti.49 Moreover, as Stefano Pezzè has suggested, his extension of the amorous matter to a diverse range of surprising or risqué ‘cases’ unknown to Petrarch seems to respond to the tastes of the Milanese court and, I add, to the need to entertain the same elegant audience that we see reflected in the garrulous miniatures attributed to Grifo.50 In the case of sonnet CXLVII (111), the rubric states that the sonnet has been composed for a lover who is distinct from the poet and who is voiced in the text: ‘S(onetto) facto per uno povero amante al qual la inamorata era facta monaca. Lo amante parla’ (‘Sonnet composed for a wretched lover, whose beloved had become a nun. The lover speaks’).51 Again, the event that is identified as the origin of the poem (the beloved’s decision of taking orders) is not one with the content of the poem, which only briefly hints at the fact (‘quel mio bene è imprigionato’, ‘that love of mine [i.e. the lady, more literally “my good”, “my dear”] is imprisoned’) and then moves on to express the lover’s painful condition in the present. In a particularly sophisticated example, the poet claims to be writing ‘in the persona of a young man’, on the very sheet that the man’s beloved lady sent to him: 48  Ibidem CLXVII (170) (my emphasis). 49  If we consider Visconti’s preface, he refers to his own amorous experience and the way poetry helped him to cope with the suffering by giving vent to his burning heart: ‘questi poetici studii dove alquanto exercitato, ben che non con molto fructo, per disfogare il core ardente talora componendo, tra le altre mie compositure ho facto quelle che qui seguono’ (ibidem 7). 50  Pezzè S., Per un commento al Canzoniere per Bianca Maria Sforza di Gasparo Visconti, MA Thesis (Università di Ca’ Foscari, Venice: 2012–2013) 19–20. 51  Visconti, I canzonieri, CXLVII (111).

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Una galante si sforzava de persuader a un giovene che ella molto lo amava, e per farlo più certo di questo cum novo advedimento li mandò un foglio di carta bianca, in sul quale in persona del giovene se scrivono li sequenti dui s(onetti).52 (A gallant lady was trying to convince a young man that she loved him very much, and, in order to make him more assured of this, she sent him a sheet of white paper, onto which the following two sonnets are written, in the persona of the young man.) When the characters evoked in the rubric are distinct from the persona of the poet, the opposition between the narrative and the lyric handling of the same ‘primary material’ comes centre stage, and so does the act of writing undertaken by the poet-ventriloquist. The lending of the poet’s voice to other subjects can remain implicit or be more or less explicitly emphasised. Here is an example of the ‘implicit’ kind: Uno amante vede una seggia vacua ne la quale più volte avea visto seder la inamorata sua; per suo amore va a sedere in quella medesma, e subito si sente avampare. In questa seggia ove suavemente viddi posar mia donna alta e gradita, a riposar mei membri Amor me invita, […] Ma, oimè, che novo e che strano accidente è questo, […]? Che foco immenso e che fiamma infinita è questa, che ’l mio corpo intorno sente?53 (A lover sees an empty chair, on which several times he had seen his beloved sitting; on account of his love for her, he goes and sits down on that chair and immediately feels himself burning. On this chair, on which I saw my noble and pleasant lady gracefully sit, Love invites me to rest my limbs, […] But, alas, what an unexpected and strange accident is this […]? What immense fire and infinite flame is the one my body feels?) 52  Ibidem XXXIII (18). 53  Ibidem iv (189), lines 1–3, 5–8 (my emphasis).

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As usual, the rubric provides the premise in the form of a short narrative, whereas the poem is spoken in the person of the lover and articulates his reaction as if it were set in the present, and voiced as it is happening. After the reference to the past occasions on which he saw her sitting there (‘viddi’, ‘I saw’), verbs shift to the present, re-enacting the scene from a subjective perspective. Here are two instances of the ‘explicit’ kind, in both of which the lover is clearly distinguished from the poet and identified with the speaker: In questi dui sequenti s(onetti) uno amante lauda una felicissima nocte.54 (In the following two sonnets a lover praises a very happy night.) Una dama con dolci sguardi et altri acti amorosi aveva indutto un povero giovene non solo ad amarla, ma in extrema passione; e come ella più presto si accorse del misero stato ove esso era conducto, ella mostrosse non altramente seco come se li fusse stato inimico mortalissimo. In persona d(e)l giovene se scrive questo s(onetto).55 Come arcier reponendo la saetta non sana altrui la facta già ferita […] così l’anima mia […] de le piaghe d’amor non è guarita ben che la vista tua li sia interdetta. Abassa il sguardo e fugge quanto vòi […] ché mai non mi potrai oltregiar tanto (perfin che dura la mia vita e poi) ch’io non adori il tuo bel lume santo. (With sweet glances and other amorous acts a lady had persuaded a miserable young man not only into loving her, but into extreme passion; as soon as she realised the condition to which he had been driven, she started behaving towards him as if he had been her worst enemy. This sonnet is written in person of the young man. As an archer does not heal someone’s wound by putting his arrow aside, […] so my soul […] has not recovered from the wounds caused by love, 54  Ibidem LVI (217) (my emphasis). 55  Ibidem XCI (66), lines 1–2, 5–9, 12–14 (my emphasis).

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even though it is not permitted to see you. Lower your gaze and escape as much as you like, […] because you will never be able to offend me [as long as I live, and beyond] to the extent that I would not adore your beautiful and celestial light [i.e. gaze].) The latter sonnet seems to voice an inner condition and challenge the lady rather than translate into verse the backdrop story narrated in the rubric, while the importance of the ‘ventriloquising’ process is attested to by the autographic correction Visconti made to the rubric: his intervention transformed the original ‘il giovene scrive’ (‘the young man writes’) into ‘i(n) p(er)sona d(e)l giovene se scrive questo S(onetto)’ (‘this sonnet is written in person of the young man’), making the shift of voice clearer.56 Without rubrics, it would be almost impossible to identify these ‘ventriloquised’ poems, so at least in these cases we can assume the prose has the function of ensuring the original commission and occasion – or the fiction of an occasion – are not deleted or forgotten. In terms of self-commentary, thematic rubrics direct the reader to a topic and situation, ruling out a number of interpretations that the freestanding poem might suggest. At the same time, they provide contextual information that does not merely ensure acknowledgment of names and facts, but also enhances the ‘narrativity’ of poetry. As I have just shown, the distribution of materials between the rubric and the poem is very significant in this respect: in most cases, the actual poems do not follow the narrative sketched, ex post, in the rubric; rather they voice the reaction to the events described in the rubric, which therefore provides an essential backdrop for the narrative understanding of the poem. If we move from the level of individual poems to that of the canzoniere as a whole, rubrics seem to work towards different possible effects, depending on the more or less unitary structure of the book itself. When love poems voiced by the poet-lover proper are interspersed with amorous poems written in the person/voice of others – at times openly on commission – the overall structures of a unitary love story fall apart, undermined by a myriad of micro-narrations unconnected to each other and amplified by prose headings. This can happen despite the presence of an overall design, clearly marked by an opening and closing poem, and of intertextual connections that ensure the poetic sequence is thought-through and meaningful, as in the case of Visconti’s canzonieri. In setting the scene for the poems, rubrics seem to highlight the absence of a unitary lyric narration – of the kind held together by overarching symbolic or chronological structures, as in Petrarch’s book. No doubt with some simplification, we could compare this kind of poetry book to a collection of short novelle, as opposed to a longer, unitary proto-novel. 56  This same rubric has other minor variants in the dedicatory manuscript ‘P’ (Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, ms. 2157), see ibidem LXXIV.

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Conversely, when the identification between the poet and the poetic persona runs through the entire book of poems, rubrics give substance to the figure of the poet-character and reinforce the narrative breadth of the story. In the case of the Tuscan Filenio (pseudonym of Filippo) Gallo (d. 1503) and his canzoniere for Lilia, a lady from the region of Venice, once again manuscript evidence confirms the distinctive role conferred to rubrics by the author.57 The modern editor, Maria Antonietta Grignani, observed that rubrics, which in the London esemplare di dedica are penned in red and blue ink, convey information that could not possibly be inferred from the poems. As opposed to what happens when poets do not control these prose frames, in authorial rubrics the gap between the information provided in the paratext and in the text is planned and in a sense necessary. The strategy in place seems to be that of providing more information to the reader – even the special reader that is the dedicatee or more generally a local courtly environment – probably so that their enjoyment of poems may be enhanced by the re-evocation of given circumstances, places, and people, which is very much in line with what Mariani Canova conjectured for the illustrations attributed to Grifo. The lyric book of a friend of Filenio’s, Giuliano Perleoni (c. 1445–post 1492), better known as Rustico Romano and active at the Aragonese court in Naples, includes rubrics and a sort of introductory ‘table of contents’, which seems to encourage a thematic and discontinuous approach to the collection: Qualunque si dilectarà in lo presente Canzoneri e prenderà piacere haver notitia de tucti li sugecti e le materie tractate non se indigne trascorrere ante omnia la sequente Tavola et ad quella quando bisogna per sua introductione recorrere.58 (Whoever will enjoy the present songbook and be pleased to have information on all the subjects and matters dealt with [in the book], should not disdain to look at the following table first of all and make use of it whenever an introduction is needed.) 57  Gallo Filenio, Rime, ed. M.A. Grignani, Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria”. Studi 27 (Florence: 1973). See Quintiliani M.M., “Filenio Gallo”, in Comboni – Zanato (eds.), Atlante dei canzonieri in volgare del Quattrocento 340–347. 58  Perleoni Giuliano, Compendio di sonecti et altre rime de varie texture intitulato lo Perleone […] (Naples: Ariolfo de Cantono, 1492), fol. A1v. The transcription is quoted from Vecce C., “Echi contiani nella Napoli Aragonese”, in Pantani I. (ed.), Giusto de’ Conti di Valmontone. Un protagonista della poesia italiana del ’400, Biblioteca del Cinquecento 137 (Rome: 2008) 297–315 (306). On Perleoni’s rubrics see Rossi, Serafino Aquilano 102–103; Addesso C.A., “Giuliano Perleoni”, in Comboni – Zanato (eds.), Atlante dei canzonieri in volgare del Quattrocento 441–460, who offers a different transcription of the quoted passage; on his friendship with Filenio, see Corti M., “Per un fantasma di meno”, in eadem, Nuovi metodi e fantasmi, Campi del sapere (Milan: 2001) 325–367 (355–357).

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However, one important feature of Filenio’s canzoniere for Lilia is that all of its 129 texts are accompanied by rubrics and all of the rubrics include the name of the poet-character Filenio, performing ‘a clear function of narrativediaristic connection’59 and implying a more consistent narration. The regular presence of rubrics gives them a stronger structural role, as in a thoroughly prosimetrical set, all the more so because most of the rubrics end with the third-person verb ‘dice’ (‘says’), with the grammatical subject of the statement being Filenio himself. For example: Filenio a la sua anima andata via con madonna Lilia dice (Filenio says to his soul, who left with lady Lilia); Filenio parlando al suo core el quale è con Lilia dice (Filenio, speaking to his heart, which is with Lilia, says); Filenio volendo dimostrare esser tutto di madonna Lilia dice (Filenio, so as to show that the whole of his self belongs to lady Lilia, says.)60 The verb bridges the gap between the rubric and the poem by placing the verse in a situation. In other cases, the text as an object – composed, sent, or exchanged – becomes part of the ‘story’ told by the rubrics: Filenio avendo vista Lilia con due altre nobili compagne ricamente ornate fa a·llor compiacenzia questa canzone (Filenio, having seen Lilia with other two noble companions, richly adorned, presents them with this canzone); Filenio mandando e’ sopra scritti versi a Lilia a essi versi dice (On sending the above-written verse to Lilia, Filenio says to the verse.)61 Both the meta-textual strategies I described attribute a role to the poems within an overarching love narrative, no matter how tenuous. Details of space and time are still there – but the much rarer instances of ‘ventriloquising’ produce a more cohesive narration, more akin to the unity of an amorous canzoniere. On the whole, in the prose rubrics of both Gasparo Visconti and Filenio Gallo, the identification of topics and circumstances largely dominates over the description of the poems’ content proper. In fact, the balanced combination of ragioni and divisioni in Dante’s Vita Nova is hardly repeated in the 59  See Gallo, Canzonieri, ed. Grignani, 50. 60  Ibidem 13, 15 and 29 (my emphasis). 61  Ibidem 6 and 12 (my emphasis).

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history of the lyric genre, with one prominent and illustrious exception: the self-commentary in prose that Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent (1449– 1492), arranged around his sonnets in his Comento de’ miei sonetti.62 While the extensive prose sections of this work (a prosimetrum proper) cannot be compared to rubrics, a closer look at their structure may shed light on the relationship between lyric form and its content as articulated in the rubric-poem nexus. Lorenzo’s book of poems consists primarily of love sonnets, referred to the persona of the poet-lover to the extent that it has been treated as an autobiography.63 A rather regular pattern underpins the prose sections: a short introduction or general premise; a sort of detailed razo, which narrates the situation that inspired the verse and is normally connected to the introduction by a rhetorical and thematic bridge; finally, a more analytical exposition of the content of the poem proper (divisioni). For example, chapter XXVII is devoted to a diptych of sonnets ‘on the lady sleeping beneath an oak tree’.64 Immediately after the poems, the introduction refers to the ‘amorous history’ of the poet and his beloved, then the razo connects the sonnets to an occasion, which is the one mentioned in the rubric. Finally, divisions engage with the way in which the lyric form accommodates content through its constraints. In particular, the distinctive brevity of the sonnet is said to account for the omission of two details (the meadow and the breeze), which could not be included in the first poem and are hence mentioned in the second: Se io potessi a uno a uno gli atti e amorosi accidenti della donna mia proseguire, certamente molto maggiore ornamento ne riceverebbe 62  See de’ Medici Lorenzo, Comento de’ miei sonetti, ed. T. Zanato, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. Studi e testi 25 (Florence: 1991). On the rubrics in Lorenzo’s Canzoniere see Zanato T., “Lorenzo de’ Medici” in Atlante dei canzonieri in volgare del Quattrocento 398–406 (400–401). Tomasi, “Strategie paratestuali” 96, connects the exceptionality of Lorenzo’s experiment to his intention to put forward ‘a radical redefinition of the reasons of vernacular lyric poetry in the light of the sapiential acquisitions of Florentine Neoplatonism’. 63  According to Roush Hermes’ Lyre 79, by ‘remaking’ Vita nova Lorenzo assumed he would have ‘the best opportunity of communicating his poetic message concerning love, wisdom, death, and the possibility of transcendence’. In his attempt at reconstructing the chronology of the book, Zanato gives credit to the ‘didascalie’ in his edition of De’ Medici Lorenzo, Comento de’ miei sonetti 123–129. 64  The sonnets are number 113 (‘Più dolce sonno o placida quïete’) and 114 (‘Odorifera erbetta e vaghi fiori’) in the canzoniere, with the rubrics ‘In dormientem sub quercu’ and ‘In eandem’ respectively; see de’ Medici Lorenzo, Canzoniere, ed. T. Zanato, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. Studi e testi 24 (Florence: 1991). Zanato, “Lorenzo de’ Medici” 401 notes that, exceptionally, these two sonnets taken up from the Canzoniere are annotated with a single gloss in the Comento.

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questa nostra amorosa istoria e molto più laude la donna mia. [from what I term ‘introduction’] (If I could in an orderly fashion go on with the acts and amorous qualities of my lady one by one, certainly this amorous history of ours would gain greater ornament, and my lady would receive much more praise from it); Era, come nel precedente sonetto abbiamo detto, la donna mia , come monstra averla io cercata assai cogli occhi e solo trovatola col pensiero. […] Questo atto amoroso intendendo io, giudicai degno delli sopra scritti due sonetti, delli quali el primo contiene che, poi che la natura concesse sonno agli occhi umani, più dolce sonno o più quieto riposo non serrò occhio mortale, né anche il sonno mai chiuse più belli occhi che quelli della donna mia. [razo] (My lady, as we have said in the preceding sonnet, was absent, as my having so diligently sought her with my eyes but having only found her with my thoughts reveals. […] I, having knowledge of this amorous act, judged it worthy of the two sonnets written above, the first of which suggests that, since nature granted sleep to human eyes, no sweeter sleep nor quieter repose ever sealed a mortal eye, nor also did sleep ever close more beautiful eyes than those of my lady); E perché nel primo sonetto non è fatta menzione alcuna del praticello sopra el quale giaceva la donna mia, né dell’aura soavissima, due cagioni, secondo abbiamo detto, assai efficaci di quello bellissimo sonno, perché è difficile fare capace la brevità del sonetto di molte cose, se ne fa menzione nel seguente che comincia: “Odorifera erbetta”, etc. [from divisioni] (Because the first sonnet makes no mention of the little meadow upon which my lady reclined, nor of the most gentle breeze [two very effective causes, as we have said, of that most lovely sleep], [and] because it is difficult to have room in the brevity of a sonnet for many things, I mention them in the following sonnet that begins “O fragrant little plants” etc.)65 The latter sentence implies a subtle but crucial shift from the mere identification of content – through the analytical mapping of its distribution – to the meta-textual description of its specific integration into the lyric form. In the 65  The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici 200–205.

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later developments of the genre, the analytical drive of divisions was normally downplayed in favour of the narrative component of ragioni, but – as we will see – the self-exegetical legacy of divisions re-emerged, significantly transformed, in the second half of the sixteenth century. 3

Prose Rubrics after the Aldine Petrarch (1501)

In his study of paratexts in printed editions of the poetic works of Olimpo da Sassoferrato (Caio Baldassarre Olimpo degli Alessandri, 1486–post-1533),66 Antonio Rossi has noted the proliferation of headings of various subject and length, contrasting this hyperbolic expansion to the absence of any form of prose gloss in the famous Aldine editions of Petrarch (1501, Le cose volgari) and Dante (1502) edited by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). In Olimpo’s books, on the one hand, frequent prose frames and printed maniculae turn collections of poems into overcrowded repertoires of oddities and variations, to be navigated randomly and at one’s own pleasure. The aim of these rubrics seems to be that of entertaining readers and arousing their curiosity, while clearly marking beginnings and endings, and identifying poems by their metre and genre, so as to make texts easy to find and ‘consume’ on any occasion. Consistently, comments on formal aspects of poems do not seem to reflect a more sophisticated stylistic awareness on the side of the poet, rather a marketing strategy based on the boasting of quantity and variety (‘beautiful strambotto’, etc.). On the other hand, the bare model adopted by Bembo in his editions and in his own Rime (1530) is both faithful to Petrarch’s own choices and consistent with the strong emphasis on the text derived from Bembo’s identification of the Fragmenta as the perfect model for vernacular poetry in his Prose della volgar lingua (1525).67 Bembo’s Aldines constitute an elegant and influential model for subsequent printed editions of both individual lyric books in ottavo and collective anthologies, such as those published by Giolito between 1545 and 1560, where

66  See Rossi, “Indicatori di lettura” 483–498. The paratextual frames in Olimpo’s works are not stable across different prints and cannot be attributed to the author with the same certainty. Rubrics are present at multiple levels – at book level, at series level and at the level of single compositions – and they include references to: times, places and occasions of composition; subject matter and motifs; information on revisions and additions; metres and genres; techniques of composition and tropes. 67  For the subsequent evolution of Bembo’s lyric collection, up to the 1548 posthumous edition, see Albonico S., “Come leggere le ‘Rime’ di Pietro Bembo”, in idem, Ordine e numero. Studi sul libro di poesia e le raccolte poetiche nel Cinquecento (Alessandria: 2006) 11–28.

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rubrics are used only to identify authors and addressees.68 However, rubrics and argomenti are not absent from mid- and especially late sixteenth-century poetry books and anthologies;69 on the contrary, they tend to reappear and even increase in number and prominence. With a view to a more comprehensive study, even a preliminary survey of collections printed in the second half of the Cinquecento will suffice here to suggest that the new success of rubrics is inseparable from the transformations of the lyric book as a form and, more broadly, from the evolution of the lyric genre in the last decades of the century. At a superficial glance, the short headings or longer prose glosses present in the individual collections of poets as different as Alessandro Piccolomini, Anton Francesco Raineri, Giovan Battista Pigna, Diomede Borghesi, and Muzio Manfredi – to name but a few – might seem fundamentally comparable to the rubrics attested in the pre-Bembian poesia cortigiana, their main function being that of identifying themes and occasions for each poem: Quando l’Autore s’innamorò la seconda volta. (When the Author fell in love for the second time.) Nel ritorno suo di Roma a Siena, a la sua Donna. (On returning from Rome to Siena, [the author] to his Lady.)70 Trovandosi ove la donna faceva ricci i capegli di Renata Nigrisuola, dama di madama Leonora di Este, descrive questo fatto; e mostra che a lei fosse ornato il capo, e a lui levata l’anima. ([The poet], finding himself where the lady was curling the hair of Renata Nigrisuola, lady of madama Leonora d’Este, describes this process and shows that her [Renata’s] head was adorned and his soul was stolen.)71 68  See Cannata N., Il canzoniere a stampa (1470–1530). Tradizione e fortuna di un genere fra storia del libro e letteratura, Filologia materiale 1 (Rome: 2000) 71–73; Bianco M. – Strada E. (eds.), ‘I più vaghi e i più soavi fiori’. Studi sulle antologie di lirica del Cinquecento, Manierismo e barocco 2 (Alessandria: 2001). 69  For instance, annotations are present in the anthologies edited by Girolamo Ruscelli (1558) and Dionigi Atanagi (1565), significantly at a time when the kind of Petrarchism promoted by Bembo was already giving way to new forms. See Zaja P., “Intorno alle antologie. Testi e paratesti in alcune raccolte di lirica cinquecentesche”, in Bianco – Strada (eds.), ‘I più vaghi e i più soavi fiori’ 113–145; Tomasi F., “Le ragioni del ‘moderno’ nella lirica del XVI secolo tra teoria e prassi”, in idem, Studi sulla lirica rinascimentale 3–24. 70  Piccolomini Alessandro, I cento sonetti, ed. F. Tomasi, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 553 (Geneva: 2015) 43 and 77. 71  Pigna Giovan Battista, Il ben divino, ed. N. Bonifazi, Scelta di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare dal secolo XIII al XIX 264 (Bologna: 1965) CIV; the poem is annotated in Lirici Europei del Cinquecento. Ripensando la poesia del Petrarca, ed. G.M. Anselmi – K. Elam – G. Forni – D. Monda, BUR. Classici (Milan: 2004) 485–486. The translation is adapted from the one provided by Anthony Newcomb in Luzzaschi Luzzasco, The Complete Unaccompanied

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Mentre che la Donna dello Svegliato [Diomede Borghesi], con gran di­ letto de gli ascoltanti, cantava dolcissimamente, fu da una vespa aspramente ferita nel collo. (The lady loved by the Svegliato [lit. ‘the Awoken’] was singing most sweetly, for the great pleasure of her listeners, when her neck was harshly stung by a wasp.)72 Le morì un babuino bellissimo. (A most beautiful baboon of hers died.) Ogni volta che l’Autore la scontrava, ella diveniva rossa. (Whenever the Author ran into her, she blushed.)73 On closer inspection, though, the structural and conceptual reasons for their presence seem to tell a more nuanced story. To some extent, the social and encomiastic role of ‘ephemeral’ poetry can still account for rubrics briefly alluding to specific circumstances. At this stage, the printing press has partly changed the scene of writing and reading, but the practice of commissioning verse to be recited or exchanged on specific occasions is still common.74 Besides ensuring that the celebratory and memorial function of poetry is performed fully, in the context of the wider circulation allowed by the printed book, these rubrics seem to sketch an episodic narrative revolving around the social persona of the poet, a sort of selective record of the author’s poetic and social achievements. This is particularly evident in the case of Anton Francesco Raineri’s Madrigals, Part 4. Il primo libro de’ madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1571), Secondo libro de’ madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1576), ed. A. Newcomb, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renassaince 156 (Middleton: 2010) lxi, n. 39. 72  Borghesi Diomede, Rime amorose del Sig. Diomede Borghesi Gentilhuomo sanese, et accademico intronato. Novellamente poste in luce. Con alcuni brievi argomenti di M. Cesare Perla (Padua: Pasquati, 1585) 71, with reference to 26. The ‘brievi argomenti’ added in this edition are attributed to Cesare Perla. 73  Manfredi Muzio, Cento donne cantate da Mutio Manfredi il Fermo Academico Innominato di Parma. Al serenissimo principe di Mantova (Parma, Viotti: 1580) fols. Liiij v and Lv v, with reference to the madrigals ‘Accorto animaletto’ (103) and ‘Basta pur troppo il foco’ (118) respectively. In the short prose address ‘To the readers’ (‘A’ lettori’) that precedes the closing index (‘Tavola delle rime’), where some incipit are accompanied by ‘argomenti’, Francesco Tebaldini claims that he asked the author to explain (‘dichiarare’) the texts that seemed to need some clarification and then presented those explanations in a shorter form, for the benefit of the readers: ‘mi ho di mano in mano fatto dichiarare tai passi, et questi, con la occasione della detta Tavola, gli ho similmente a voi dichiarati con quella maggior brevità però, c’ha comportato il non volere accrescer troppo il volume’ (fol. Liiij r). 74  See Richardson B., Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: 2009); idem, “The Social Connotations of Singing Verse in Cinquecento Italy”, The Italianist 34, 3 (2014) 362–378.

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Cento sonetti (Milan, Borgo: 1554), accompanied by a ‘very short exposition of their subjects’ (‘brevissima espositione dei soggietti loro’).75 The exposition is attributed to the author’s brother, Girolamo, who claims a great familiarity with the author, and in particular with his successful practice as an admired poet, to whom lords and princes commissioned poems on given subjects.76 However, it is reasonable to believe that the prose was penned by Anton Francesco himself.77 Some of the longest and most detailed entries in the exposition cast Raineri as a much sought-after poet and a member of refined elites, so that readers might be able to reconstruct a sort of ‘public biography’ of the author, through vignettes, by binding together all the occasions and commissions mentioned in the ‘esposizione’. The structure of the book places the exposition at some length from the poems. On the one hand, the separation of glosses from texts allows for the cento sonetti to be read in a clean, empty format, along the lines of Bembo’s editions; on the other, the clear order of the entries in the brevissima espositione, which follows the sequence of the collection, encourages a prompt reconstruction of contexts.78 Significantly, the reading of these poems that the dedicatee of the Espositione, cardinal Innocenzo de’ Monti, is invited to enjoy in his idle time is described as a ‘praiseworthy and honourable game’ (‘giuoco lodevole et honorato’),79 a pastime in which the exposition offered the entry point for a discontinuous experience of the lyric book.

75  Raineri Anton Francesco, Cento sonetti, altre rime e pompe. Con la brevissima esposizione di Girolamo Raineri, ed. R. Sodano, Feronia 5 (Turin: 2004). For Raineri’s poetry, see Gorni G., “Un’ecatombe di rime. I ‘Cento sonetti’ di Antonfrancesco Rainerio”, Versants 15 (1989) 135–152; Casu A., “Romana difficultas. I ‘Cento Sonetti’ e la tradizione epigrammatica”, in Cremante R. (ed.), La lirica del Cinquecento. Seminario di studi in memoria di Cesare Bozzetti (Alessandria: 2004) 123–154. 76  Raineri, Cento sonetti 190. 77  See Tomasi, “Strategie paratestuali” 136. 78  A similar ‘double’ outcome was achieved by the Venetian poet Celio Magno in his Rime (1600), which include a number of short prose captions placed in the alphabetical index of poems (for about 40 out of 137 texts). For a thorough study of these captions and their function see Comiati, “Componente paratestuale” 153–155. Magno decided to remove the ‘argumenti’ (in verse) that he had originally placed before each poem in response to advice received from his friend and collaborator Ottavio Menini, whose comments can be read in Erspamer F., “Lo scrittoio di Celio Magno”, in Santagata M. – Quondam A. (eds.), Il libro di poesia dal copista al tipografo, Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, Ferrara. Saggi (Modena: 1989) 243–250 (247). The rich implications of Menini’s comments deserve a very detailed analysis, which I aim to carry out in a more comprehensive study of prose rubrics in lyric books. 79  I quote from Girolamo Raineri’s dedicatory letter (Raineri, Cento sonetti 190).

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A different form of ‘social’ narrative involving the poet is set up by the rubrics of Il ben divino, one of the manuscript lyric collections of Giovan Battista Pigna (Giovan Battista Nicolucci, 1529–1575), in which the amorous and celebratory dimensions of poetry coalesce. The main story of the poet’s love for Lucrezia Bendidio (hence the book’s title, literally ‘the divine good’) is placed against the wider backdrop of life at the court of Ferrara, so that the chronicle of love and the enumeration of social occasions go hand in hand.80 The rubric referred to the third sonnet in the book establishes a comparison between the poet’s love and Petrarch’s love, while marking a significant distinction: Dimostra in che sia conforme e differente l’amor suo con quello e da quello del Petrarca: l’uno e l’altro principiò del mese di aprile, ma questi di donna d’un luogo vile di Francia, nel Venerdì Santo, quegli nella corte di Ferrara, di donna altamente allevata e ne i dì del tremuoto, ch’erano pieni d’ogni divozione.81 ([The poet] shows in what his love is similar and different from that of Petrarch: both loves began in the month of April, but the latter for a woman from a humble place in France, on Good Friday, the former at the court of Ferrara, for a highly-bred lady and in the days of the earthquake, which were filled with every devotion.) The shift in the geographical and chronological setting is one of importance, because the solitude of Vaucluse is replaced by the animated scenery of the Este court, and the universalising, symbolic implications of Good Friday are reshaped in the particularising reference to a local dramatic event. In fact, Pigna’s collection allows for the multiplication of themes and circumstances, while displaying traces of an overarching design and a distinctive attention to the contents as articulated in the poems proper. This combination attests to the tense coexistence of a peak in the socially driven production of poetry and a growing authorial control over book structures, working against ephemerality.82 80  On this collection, which would deserve a chapter of its own, see Tomasi F., “Osservazioni sul libro di poesia nel secondo Cinquecento (1560–1602)”, in Metlica A. – Tomasi F. (eds.), Canzonieri in transito. Lasciti petrarcheschi e nuovi archetipi letterari tra Cinque e Seicento, L’Ippogrifo: Quaderni dell’Associazione Alumni della Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori (Milan – Udine: 2015) 11–36 (30–31). Tomasi’s excellent contribution provides a thorough and updated bibliography on the subject of late sixteenth-century books of poetry. 81  Pigna, Il ben divino, III. 82  This tension has been analysed most effectively by Bruscagli R., “La preponderanza petrarchista”, in Da Pozzo G. (ed.), Storia letteraria d’Italia, Il Cinquecento, vol. 3, La

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In this context, rubrics and more generally paratextual elements have convincingly been interpreted as features meant to enhance ‘macrotextual cohesion’.83 If we read Pigna’s prose sections in their sequence, they tend to form a narrative or at least to provide frequent connections between a number of episodes set in Ferrara. At the same time, Il ben divino makes room for a proliferation of motifs akin to the poesia cortigiana, although interpreted in a more decidedly bizarre way,84 verging on the ‘concettoso’, and often supported by a paraphrastic focus on what poems actually say: Prima che s’affezionasse alla donna, avea cantato d’un neo, che sta nel volto di Anna, sorella di lei. Ora scrivendo ad essa donna, dice che quel poco detto da lui per quel neo, fu quasi un presagio di quel molto che dovea cantare di lei; la quale, perché meritava più degno scrittore, potrà fare concetto, della debolezza di queste rime, fatte nel soggetto del neo, ch’egli non sia per riuscire nel celebrare le altissime bellezze sue.85 (Before he fell in love with the lady, he [the poet] had sung of a mole on the face of Anna, her sister. Now, writing to the lady, he says that the few lines he had written about the mole were a sort of presage of the many lines he was to sing about her [the lady]; the lady, since she deserved a worthier writer, will be able to conclude, from the weakness of these poems composed on the subject of mole, that he will not be able to celebrate her excellent beauties.) Canzone sopra il salasso nel piè della donna. Nella prima parte, chiamando Amore ch’intravenga a quell’atto, propone di cantarne. Nella seconda descrive il piè, la gamba e la vena, e come il barbiere non tirasse sangue al primo colpo. Nella terza pone le circostanze del salasso esseguito. Nella quarta richiama Amore che soccorra alla donna addolorata; mostrando che il caso voglia ch’ella muti il nome di Lucrezia in quello di Euridice. Nella quinta replica pur ad Amore che fermi il sangue e lo svenimento che appare in quegli occhi, col rimetterle il proprio spirito di lei, perché per altro non potrebbe pigliar vita. Nella sesta prega pur Amore che non letteratura tra l’eroico e il quotidiano. La nuova religione dell’utopia e della scienza (1573– 1600) (Padua – Milan: 2007) 1559–1615 (1567). 83  Tomasi, “Osservazioni” 16. 84  Ibidem 31. 85  Pigna, Il ben divino XIV. The following eight texts (XV–XXII) are precisely the ‘eight madrigals composed on the subject of the above-mentioned mole’ (‘otto madrigali composti in materia del sopra detto neo’).

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lasci cadere in terra una sola goccia di quel sangue. Nella settima gli dice che raccogliendol nella benda, e spiegandola, sarà vittorioso di ogni cuore. Nell’ottava e nell’ultima gli fa conoscere che la donna medesima gli servirà di benda, non in accecare, ma in allumare il mondo. Nella chiusa comanda alla canzone che debba dire alla sua donna che nel volto di lei sì come Amore s’estinse, così s’avivò.86 (Canzone on the bloodletting from the foot of the lady. In the first part, calling on Love to intervene, [the poet] proposes to sing about it. In the second, he describes the foot, the leg, and the vein, and how the barber did not [was unable to] drain blood on his first attempt. In the third, he sets the circumstances of the bloodletting. In the fourth, once again he calls upon Love, begging him to help the lady in pain, showing that, as the situation dictates, she could change her name from Lucretia to Eurydice. In the fifth, again he addresses Love, asking him to stop the blood and the fainting that is apparent in her [the lady’s] eyes, by returning her own spirit to herself, for she could not regain life through another. In the sixth, he begs Love not to let a single drop of her blood fall to the ground. In the seventh, he tells him [Love] that, by gathering her blood in a strip of bandage and then unfolding it, he will triumph over every heart. In the eighth and final part, he tells Love [traditionally represented as blindfolded] that the woman herself will serve as a bandage, not to blind but rather to illuminate the world. In the closing lines, he commands the canzone to tell his lady that in her face Love was both deprived of life and brought to life again.) In the latter case, the distribution of content into the different sections of the text is analysed explicitly, as in ‘divisions’, but the distance of this prose from Lorenzo’s Comento and Dante’s Vita Nova could not be more evident. Here, each stanza of the canzone could be seen as a poem in its own right or even as a variation on the same theme, due to an extremely extended treatment of a minimal subject. The same pattern of invention could in fact give raise to long sequences of poems explicitly presented as variations. For instance, the second part of Annibal Guasco’s Rime (1581) features a long polymetric series devoted to the departure of a beautiful lady from Alessandria, including two canzoni, twenty sonnets – twelve of which arranged into a corona – and one madrigal. In this case, the continuity of the subject is established through multiple prose annotations listed in the ‘breve dichiaratione’: 86  Ibidem XXXVI.

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Nella presente canzone, nella quale il primo verso di tutte le stanze è tolto da una canzone del Petrarca, di soggetto molto differente, loda l’Autore una bellissima gentildonna, et si duole della partenza di lei d’Alessandria, dove haveva parecchi giorni albergato. […] Questi sette sonetti sono anch’essi fatti alla partenza di detta Gentildonna. […] Questi dodeci sonetti tessuti in una corona indirizzati al Signor Giuliano Goselini furono parimente composti dall’Autore al partir che fece quella Signora d’Alessandria per andar a Milano, dove esso Signor Goselini si ritrovava. […] Fu questo sonetto mandato al Signor Filippo Binaschi insieme con la copia della corona scritta al Signor Giuliano, per la medesima occasione […] In lode della istessa Signora, dolendosi pur della partenza di lei. Fu composto il presente madrigale pure al medesimo proposito.87 (In the present canzone, in which the first line of each stanza is taken from a canzone by Petrarch on a very different subject, the Author praises a most beautiful lady and laments her departure from Alessandria, where she had spent several days. […] These seven sonnets are themselves composed on the departure of the aforementioned lady. […] These twelve sonnets, interwoven in a wreath and addressed to Giuliano Goselini, were equally composed by the Author on the departure of that lady from Alessandria to Milan, where Goselini himself happened to be. […] This sonnet was sent to Filippo Binaschi alongside a copy of the wreath addressed to Giuliano, for the same occasion […] In praise of the same lady, lamenting her departure. The present madrigal was composed on the same topic.) Elsewhere, the topic of a sequence is identified through a single annotation, as in the case of the lengthy prose referring to forty sonnets inspired by the letters that the poet received from a lady (‘[…] l’Autore si pose a celebrar quelle lettere et palesar l’allegrezza, che ne haveva presa con questi quaranta sonetti’, 87  Il primo volume delle Rime del Signor Annibal Guasco alessandrino, academico affidato, ristampato, et riveduto dall’auttore, et insieme il secondo volume [Pavia, Girolamo Bartoli, 1579, ad instanza di Gio. Andrea Viano], pur delle rime d’esso Signor Guasco, con una breve dichiaratione de i concetti loro. Appresso una oratione, un discorso sopra la bellezza, et un’apologia sopra un suo sonetto del medesimo auttore (Pavia, Viani: 1581) 6–8.

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‘[…] the Author committed himself to celebrating those letters and showing the joy he had gained from them with these forty sonnets’).88 Guasco pushed this practice to an extreme in his ‘Cento madrigali a due sue figliuole, tutti d’un medesimo soggetto’ (‘One hundred madrigals addressed to two daughters of his, all on the same subject’).89 This process reveals a loss of interest in the occasion or theme per se, while the degree of ‘narrativity’ of the textual unit composed by the poem and its rubric decreases in favour of a more abstract ‘lyricality’, dominated by the ingenuity of the poetic experiment. In terms of self-commentary, this suggests a clear shift of emphasis from the ‘primary material’ to its poetic handling, including references to literary models. Consistently, both Pigna and Raineri acknowledge their sources for specific poems, as Torquato Tasso himself will do.90 The interchangeability of themes paradoxically coexists with – and gives way to – the interchangeability of texts. Namely, the motif exposed in the rubric can constitute a mere pretext and at the same time provide the main access to the poem itself, due to a different arrangement of lyric collections. For instance, in the collective Gareggiamento poetico (Venice, Barezzi: 1611), the index of subjects precedes the index of authors.91 At this stage, rubrics make up a sort of repertoire of types and situations, through which collections can be enjoyed randomly by readers and used instrumentally by other poets. Alessandro Martini has pointed out the climax of the process of reversal by which themes rather than authors become the guiding principle of a collection: the creation of thematic repertoires explicitly identified as such.92 The paratextual subversion of the traditional relationship between the text and its subject can also be detected in a transformation that affects rubrics themselves. Namely, a shift from ‘argomenti’ to titles, from short narrative proses to non-narrative labels, such as ‘gelosia’ (‘jealousy’) or ‘donna bella e povera’ (‘beautiful and poor lady’).93 88  Ibidem 10. 89  Guasco Annibal, Opera del Signor Annibal Guasco in ottava rima, per la Natività del Signore […] con cento madrigali a due sue figliuole, tutti d’un medesimo soggetto, notato in principio d’essi (Alessandria, Ercole Quinciano: 1599) 151–176. 90  See Martini A., “Amore esce dal caos. L’organizzazione tematico-narrativa delle rime amorose del Tasso”, Filologia e critica 9 (1984) 78–121; De Maldé, “Torquato Tasso. Autocommento alle Rime (1591)” 249–250. 91   The hierarchy between authors and themes is therefore subverted; see Tomasi, “Osservazioni” 24. 92  Martini A., “Rilievi sul Tesoro di concetti poetici di Giovanni Cisano”, in Quondam A. (ed.), Petrarca in Barocco. Cantieri petrarcheschi. Due seminari romani, Biblioteca del Cinquecento 108 (Rome: 2004) 11–32 (15). 93  Martini A., “Ritratto del madrigale poetico tra Cinque e Seicento”, Lettere italiane 33, 4 (1981) 529–548.

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Most post-Bembian lyric collections supplied with rubrics can be described as polycentric, centrifugal structures, whose internal variety is normally held together by a thematic arrangement or by a merely numeric criterion (Cento, ‘one hundred’, for instance, is a number frequently adopted in their titles). However, in the poetry of Alessandro Piccolomini, Ludovico Domenichi, Girolamo Muzio and Anton Francesco Raineri, the broadening of the thematic palette was not at odds with the survival of a fundamentally unitary structure of the canzoniere and was part of a project aimed at advocating the moral utility of poetry, precisely in the decades in which the first theories of the genre were developed in Italy.94 Conversely, the dissolution of the authorial book of poetry into thematic subgroups performed by later poets such as Torquato Tasso, Battista Guarini, and Giovan Battista Marino encouraged and accelerated the pulverisation of lyric books into repertoires.95 To some extent, this brings us back to the situation that preceded the rise of the authorial poetry book, although in completely different historical conditions. If Petrarch’s Fragmenta bore no rubrics, after more than two centuries of Petrarchism, rubrics seem to stand alone, while a proper canzoniere is nowhere to be found. Selective Bibliography Texts

Alighieri Dante, Vita nuova, ed. M. Barbi, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante (Florence: 1932). Alighieri Dante, Vita nova, ed. G. Gorni, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati 15 (Turin: 1996). Alighieri Dante, La Vita Nuova, trans. M. Musa, The World’s Classics (Oxford: 1992). Borghesi Diomede, Rime amorose del Sig. Diomede Borghesi Gentilhuomo sanese, et accademico intronato. Novellamente poste in luce. Con alcuni brievi argomenti di M. Cesare Perla (Padova, Pasquati: 1585). 94  In Piccolomini’s own words, ‘Buona parte de miei Sonetti […] vedrete fondata in diverse materie morali e piene di gravità, ad imitazion d’Orazio, il quale ammiro grandemente e tengo in pregio’ (‘A significant number of my sonnets […] as you will see, is based on several moral and serious subjects, in imitation of Horace, whom I greatly admire and praise’). See Piccolomini, I cento sonetti, ed. Tomasi, 55. On this topic, see Refini E., “Le ‘gioconde favole’ e il ‘numeroso concento’: Alessandro Piccolomini interprete e imitatore di Orazio nei Cento sonetti (1549)”, Italique 10 (2007) 15–57. 95  The dissolution of the ‘forma-canzoniere’ in the seventeenth century has been interpreted as a crisis determined by the ‘abundance’ and ‘overproduction’ of lyric poems by Giunta C., “Sulla morfologia dei libri di poesia in età moderna”, in Lo Monaco F. – Rossi L.C. – Scaffai N. (eds.), “Liber”, “fragmenta”, “libellus” 445–457 (449).

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De’ Medici Lorenzo, Comento de’ miei sonetti, ed. T. Zanato, Istituto Nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento. Studi e testi 25 (Florence: 1991). De’ Medici Lorenzo, Canzoniere, ed. T. Zanato, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. Studi e testi 24 (Florence: 1991). De’ Medici Lorenzo, The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent: a commentary on my sonnets together with the text of Il comento in the critical edition of T. Zanato, translated with an introduction by J. Wyatt Cook, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 129 (Binghamton: 1995). Gallo Filenio, Rime, ed. M.A. Grignani, Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria”. Studi 27 (Florence: 1973). Guasco Annibal, Il primo volume delle Rime del Signor Annibal Guasco alessandrino, academico affidato, ristampato, et riveduto dall’auttore, et insieme il secondo volume [Pavia, Girolamo Bartoli: 1579], pur delle rime d’esso Signor Guasco, con una breve dichiaratione de i concetti loro. Appresso una oratione, un discorso sopra la bellezza, et un’apologia sopra un suo sonetto del medesimo auttore (Pavia, Viani: 1581). Guasco Annibal, Opera del Signor Annibal Guasco in ottava rima, per la Natività del Signore […] con cento madrigali a due sue figliuole, tutti d’un medesimo soggetto, notato in principio d’essi (Alessandria: Ercole Quinciano, 1599). Manfredi Muzio, Cento donne cantate da Mutio Manfredi il Fermo Academico Innominato di Parma. Al serenissimo principe di Mantova (Parma: Viotti, 1580). Perleone Giuliano, Compendio di sonecti et altre rime de varie texture intitulato lo Perleone [...] (Naples: Ariolfo de Cantono, 1492). Petrarca Francesco, Trionfi, rime estravaganti, codice degli abbozzi, ed. V. Pacca – L. Paolino, I meridiani (Milan: 1996). Petrarca Francesco, Canzoniere, ed. R. Bettarini, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati 20 (Turin: 2005). Piccolomini Alessandro, I cento sonetti, ed. F. Tomasi, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 553 (Geneva: 2015). Pigna Giovan Battista, Il ben divino, ed. N. Bonifazi, Scelta di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare dal secolo XIII al XIX 264 (Bologna: 1965). Raineri Anton Francesco, Cento sonetti, altre rime e pompe. Con la brevissima esposizione di Girolamo Raineri, ed. R. Sodano, Feronia 5 (Turin: 2004). Visconti Gasparo, I canzonieri per Bianca Maria Sforza e Beatrice d’Este, ed. P. Bongrani, Testi e strumenti di filologia italiana. Testi 2 (Milan: 1979).

Studies

Albonico S., “Come leggere le ‘Rime’ di Pietro Bembo”, in idem, Ordine e numero. Studi sul libro di poesia e le raccolte poetiche nel Cinquecento (Alessandria: 2006) 11–28. Alpers P., “Apostrophe and the Rhetoric of Renaissance Lyric”, Representations 122, 1 (2013) 1–22.

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Ascoli A.R., Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: 2008). Barolini T., “The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’”, Modern Language Notes 104 (1989) 1–38. Battaglia Ricci L., “Illustrare un canzoniere: appunti”, Cuadernos de Filología Italiana, Número Extraordinario (2005) 41–54. Bianco M. – Strada E. (eds.), ‘I più vaghi e i più soavi fiori’. Studi sulle antologie di lirica del Cinquecento, Manierismo e barocco 2 (Alessandria: 2001). Bossier Ph. – Scheffer R. (eds.), Soglie testuali. Funzioni del paratesto nel secondo Cinquecento e oltre / Textual Thresholds. Functions of Paratexts in the Late Sixteenth Century and Beyond. Atti della giornata di studi, Università di Groningen, 13 dicembre 2007, Cinquecento. Studi 36 (Rome: 2010). Botterill S., “‘Però che la divisione non si fa se non per aprire la sentenzia de la cosa divisa’ (V.N., XIV, 13): the Vita Nuova as Commentary”, in Moleta V. (ed.), La gloriosa donna de la mente: A Commentary on the ‘Vita nuova’, Italian Medieval and Renaissance Studies – Fontecolombo Institute 5 (Florence: 1994) 61–76. Bruscagli R., “La preponderanza petrarchista”, in Da Pozzo G. (ed.), Storia letteraria d’Italia, Il Cinquecento, vol. 3, La letteratura tra l’eroico e il quotidiano. La nuova religione dell’utopia e della scienza (1573–1600) (Padua – Milan: 2007) 1559–1615. Bruscagli R., “Paratesti del petrarchismo lirico cinquecentesco”, in Alfonzetti B. et alii (eds.), Per civile conversazione: con Amedeo Quondam, Studi (e testi) italiani 26 (Rome: 2014), vol. I, 273–290. Cannata N., Il canzoniere a stampa (1470–1530). Tradizione e fortuna di un genere fra storia del libro e letteratura, Filologia materiale 1 (Rome: 2000). Casu A., “Romana difficultas. I ‘Cento Sonetti’ e la tradizione epigrammatica”, in Cremante R. (ed.), La lirica del Cinquecento. Seminario di studi in memoria di Cesare Bozzetti (Alessandria: 2004) 123–154. Comboni A. – Zanato T. (eds.), Atlante dei canzonieri in volgare del Quattrocento, Edizione Nazionale “I Canzonieri della lirica italiana delle origini” (Florence: 2017). Comiati G., “Componente paratestuale e didascalie nelle ‘Rime’ di Celio Magno”, in Arancibia P. et alii (eds.), Questioni filologiche: la critica testuale attraverso i secoli, University of Toronto Series Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies 3 (Florence: 2016) 143–159. Eisner M., Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature. Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti and the Authority of the Vernacular, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 87 (Cambridge: 2013). Giunta C., Versi a un destinatario. Saggio sulla poesia italiana del Medioevo (Bologna: 2002). Gorni G., “Le forme primarie del testo poetico”, in Asor Rosa A. (ed.), Letteratura Italiana, vol. III/1, Le forme del testo. Teoria e poesia (Turin: 1984) 439–518.

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Heiden B., “Narrative in Poetry: A Problem of Narrative Theory”, Narrative 22, 2 (2014) 269–283. Hillebrandt C. et alii, “Theories of Lyric”, Journal of Literary Theory 11, 1 (2017) 1–11. Holmes O., Assembling the Lyric Self. Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book, Medieval cultures 21 (Minneapolis: 2000). Hühn P., “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry”, in Muller-Zettelmann E. – Rubik M. (eds.), Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to Lyric, Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 89 (Amsterdam: 2005) 147–172. Hühn P. – Sommer R., “Narration in Poetry and Drama”, in The Living Handbook of Narratology (2012) [Accessed 19 August 2016]. Intorno al testo. Tipologie del corredo esegetico e soluzioni editoriali. Atti del Convegno di Urbino: 1–3 ottobre 2001, Pubblicazioni del Centro Pio Rajna. Studi e saggi 2 (Rome: 2003). Lo Monaco F. – Rossi L.C. – Scaffai N. (eds.), “Liber”, “fragmenta”, “libellus” prima e dopo Petrarca, Traditio et renovatio 1 (Florence: 2006) 445–457. Marchand J.-J., “Le ‘disperate’ di Antonio Tebaldeo dall’elegia al racconto dell’io”, in Crivelli T. (ed.), Feconde venner le carte. Studi in onore di Ottavio Besomi, Studi. Testi. Strumenti (Bellinzona: 1997) 160–171. Marcozzi L., “Tra Da Tempo, Filelfo e Barzizza: biografia sentimentale e allegoria morale nei commenti quattrocenteschi al Canzoniere di Petrarca”, Italianistica 33, 2 (2004) 163–177. Mariani Canova G., “Antonio Grifo illustratore del Petrarca Queriniano”, in Frasso G. – Mariani Canova G. – Sandal E. (eds.), Illustrazione libraria, filologia e esegesi petrarchesca tra Quattro e Cinquecento. Antonio Grifo e l’incunabolo queriniano G V 15, Studi sul Petrarca 20 (Padua: 1990) 147–200. Martini A., “Ritratto del madrigale poetico tra Cinque e Seicento”, Lettere italiane 33, 4 (1981) 529–548. Martini A., “Rilievi sul Tesoro di concetti poetici di Giovanni Cisano”, in Quondam A. (ed.), Petrarca in Barocco. Cantieri petrarcheschi. Due seminari romani, Biblioteca del Cinquecento 108 (Rome: 2004) 11–32. Meneghetti M.L., “La forma-canzoniere fra tradizione mediolatina e tradizioni volgari”, Critica del testo 2 (1999) 119–140. Phelan J., Experiencing Fiction: Judgements, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Theory and Interpretation of Narrative (Columbus: 2007). Richardson B., Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: 2009). Richardson B., “The Social Connotations of Singing Verse in Cinquecento Italy”, The Italianist 34, 3 (2014) 362–378. Rossi A., Serafino Aquilano e la poesia cortigiana (Brescia: 1980).

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Rossi A., “Indicatori di lettura nelle Opere di Olimpo di Sassoferrato”, in Danzi M. – Leporatti R. (eds.), Il poeta e il suo pubblico. Lettura e commento dei testi lirici nel Cinquecento, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 482 (Geneva: 2012) 483–498. Roush S., Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella, Toronto Italian Studies (Toronto: 2002). Santagata M., Dal sonetto al canzoniere: ricerche sulla preistoria e la costituzione di un genere, Scartabelli (Padua: 1979). Santagata M. – Carrai S., La lirica di corte nell’Italia del Quattrocento, Letteratura 17 (Milan: 1993). Soldani A., “Voce e temporalità nel Canzoniere”, in idem, Le voci della poesia. Sette capitoli sulle forme discorsive, Lingue e letterature 95 (Rome: 2010) 49–65. Stierle K., “Les lieux du commentaire”, in Mathieu-Castellani G. – Plaisance M., Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire: France/Italie (XIVe–XVIe siècles). Actes du Colloque international sur le commentaire (Paris: 1990) 19–29. Stillinger T.C., “Dante’s Divisions: Structures of Authority in the Vita Nuova”, in idem, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: 1992) 44–72. Todorovic J., Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange: Authorship, Manuscript Culture, and the Making of the ‘Vita Nova’, Dante’s World: Historicising Literary Cultures of the Due and Trecento (New York: 2016). Tomasi F., Studi sulla lirica rinascimentale, Miscellanea erudita. Nuova serie 80 (Padua: 2012). Tomasi F., “Osservazioni sul libro di poesia nel secondo Cinquecento (1560–1602)”, in Metlica A. – Tomasi F. (eds.), Canzonieri in transito. Lasciti petrarcheschi e nuovi archetipi letterari tra Cinque e Seicento, L’Ippogrifo: Quaderni dell’Associazione Alumni della Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori (Milan – Udine: 2015) 11–36. Trovato P., “Per il testo della Vita Nuova: Due edizioni a confronto”, in Comboni A. – Di Ricco A. (eds.), Il prosimetro nella letteratura italiana, Labirinti 49 (Trento: 2000) 13–56.

chapter 5

Self-Commentary on Language in SixteenthCentury Italian Prefatory Letters Brian Richardson Writers in Renaissance Italy regularly sought to pave the way towards a favourable reception of their works in print by prefacing them with one or both of two kinds of letters: those addressed to readers in general, and letters of dedication that were addressed to an individual but that would normally also be seen by other readers. The functions of the letters can include introducing the primary work, explaining its significance, positioning it in relation to the tradition to which it belongs, justifying the methods used by the writer (sometimes anticipating possible criticisms) and drawing attention to any obstacles faced by him or her. Unlike commentaries or essays, letters naturally use the secondperson singular or plural, and they thus allow the writer to seek to establish a cultural relationship with one or more intended readers who, it is implied, represent the writer’s ideal and most sympathetic audience. Letters of dedication also associate an edition or a version of a work with an individual who was usually of high rank, so that, in all readers’ eyes, the status of the text would be enhanced by his or her authority.1 One of the topics that can be mentioned and discussed in these introductory letters, and a characteristic feature of self-commentary during the Italian Renaissance, is that of the language and style used within the work in question. The presence of such discussions is to be expected in a period of conflicting approaches to the formal use of written language. In the years around 1500 in Italy, some writers in the vernacular began to experiment with a particularly close imitation of the language of the great Tuscan authors of the fourteenth century, excluding features characteristic of the contemporary spoken tongues of the peninsula, while other writers reacted against the restrictions that such imitation imposed on both language and metric form. From the second and third decades of the sixteenth century onwards, the perplexities and anxieties created by this conflict of approaches and practices led to the publication in 1  Dunn K., Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford: 1994), studies ‘prefatory authority’ with particular reference to Germany, England, and France.

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print of a series of works that discussed the principles underlying the use of a formal vernacular and the name by which it should be called. Some of these works took up a topic already discussed in previous centuries, the worth of the vernacular as a literary language, in comparison with Latin. In these contexts, authors of original works (both literary and, as we shall see, of a practical nature), translators and the editors who were preparing texts for the printing press could all feel the need to influence readers’ reception of the language used in their texts, and liminary letters provided a good opportunity for them to anticipate and respond to potential criticisms. Since these letters introduce specific texts, they do not usually contain extensive debates, and hence they have attracted relatively little attention in discussions of the questione della lingua, with few exceptions such as a fine essay by Paolo Trovato that focuses on non-literary works.2 However, the linguistic self-commentary found in these letters can be considered an integral part of the questione. They are valuable in showing us, first, how much the questione mattered in a pragmatic way at a grassroots level, in the linguistic decision-making that had to take place at every phase of formal writing, from the earliest stages of composition through revision to publication in manuscript or print. Second, these letters serve to indicate how literary usage was in fact developing, whatever lofty ideals the theorists were expounding in their treatises. 1

Authors and Translators

Among the paratexts written by authors, we can see in some cases anxiety about their linguistic choices, and in other cases a confident defence of them. Giovan Francesco Fortunio is absolutely certain, in the preface of his Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua (1516), addressed ‘Agli studiosi della regolata volgar lingua’ (‘To students of the regulated vernacular’), that the best contemporary authors imitate Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio closely, and of course his grammar book goes on to give detailed advice on how to do this: Se vogliamo ben considerare il parlar delli già detti auttori et quello che tra huomeni scienti hora si usa, ritrovaremo assai poco l’uno dall’altro 2  Trovato P., “Prefazioni cinquecentesche e ‘questione della lingua’”, in L’ordine dei tipografi. Lettori, stampatori, correttori tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Biblioteca del Cinquecento 79 (Rome: 1998) 143–161. A helpful outline of the theoretical positions set out in these debates is Marazzini C., “Le teorie”, in Serianni L. – Trifone P. (eds.), Storia della lingua italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: 1993–1994) vol. 1, 231–329 (241–279).

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differente; et se noi poniamo ben mente, vederemo che tutti li pellegrini italici ingegni di qualunque si voglia regione che di scriver rime prendano diletto, quanto più possono il stile del Petrarcha et di Dante se ingegnano con quelle istesse loro tosche parole di seguitare.3 (if we wish to consider carefully the language of the authors mentioned [Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio] and that used now by learned men, we shall find that the one differs very little from the other; and if we look closely, we shall see that all the elegant Italian minds from whichever region who take pleasure in writing verse, endeavour to follow the style of Petrarch and Dante as far as they are able, using their same Tuscan words.) However, Baldassarre Castiglione took a very different view from Fortunio’s in the dedicatory letter, addressed to Miguel da Silva, of Il libro del cortegiano, in the first edition of 1528, rejecting criticisms that he had neither imitated Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Tuscan nor followed the Tuscan of his own day: Ad alcuni che mi biasimano perch’io non ho imitato il Boccaccio, né mi sono obligato alla consuetudine del parlar thoscano d’hoggidì, non restarò di dire che, ancorché ’l Boccaccio fusse di gentil ingegno, secondo quei tempi, e che in alcuna parte scrivesse con discrettione ed industria, nientedimeno assai meglio scrisse quando si lassò guidar solamente dal ingegno ed instinto suo naturale, senz’altro studio o cura di limare i scritti suoi, che quando con diligentia & fatica si sforzò d’esser più culto, & castigato. […] E perché (al parer mio) la consuetudine del parlare dell’altre città nobili d’Italia, dove concorrono homini savii, ingeniosi ed eloquenti e che trattano cose grandi di governo de stati, di lettere, d’arme e negocii diversi, non deve essere del tutto sprezzata, dei vocabuli che in questi lochi, parlando, s’usano, estimo haver potuto ragionevolmente usar, scrivendo, quelli, che hanno in sé gratia ed elegantia nella pronuntia e son tenuti communemente per boni e significativi, benché non siano thoscani ed anchor habbiano origine di fuor d’Italia. (So to those who blame me for not having imitated Boccaccio or followed current Tuscan usage I shall not hesitate to answer that although Boccaccio was a man of noble discernment by the standards of his time, 3  Fortunio Giovan Francesco, Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua, ed. B. Richardson, Scrittori italiani commentati 6 (Rome – Padua: 2001), “Proemio”, 6–7. Translations are mine unless stated otherwise.

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and although to some extent he wrote with discrimination and ability, nevertheless he wrote far better when he let himself be guided solely by his natural genius and instinct, without care or concern to polish his writings, than when he went to great pains to correct and refine his work. […] Moreover, in my opinion we should not simply reject the language in use in the other noble cities of Italy, where one finds men who are talented, wise and eloquent, and who are concerned with important political subjects as well as with literature, warfare and business affairs. I think that of the words current in such centres I have been justified in employing those which are graceful, euphonious and generally accepted as valid and expressive, even though they are not Tuscan and may even have originated outside Italy itself.)4 This case is particularly interesting from our point of view because of the contrast between the paratext, in which the author states his views in the firstperson singular in a very outspoken way, and the dialogue, which includes a debate between a representative of the viewpoint of Pietro Bembo, who favoured a strict imitation of the best Tuscan models of the fourteenth century, and Castiglione’s own, more eclectic, viewpoint (Book I, chapters 28–39). In the structure of this debate, we detect an evident bias towards the latter, but no firm conclusion is reached, since the discussion has become ‘troppo lunga, & fastidiosa’ (‘over-long and tedious’), in the words of Emilia Pia (I, 39). Many poets aspired to write in literary Tuscan. Ippolita Clara of Alessandria in Piedmont, who published only in manuscript, was anxious that her command of the language was imperfect. In 1533, she asked Francesco II Sforza, dedicatee of her verse translation of part of the Aeneid, to accept it ‘ben […] ch’io veda anchora tal mia opera povera del florido toscano parlare et forse con migliaia d’errori che ’l mio debil occhio non vede’ (‘although I still perceive that this work of mine is poor in the flourishing Tuscan tongue and perhaps has thousands of errors that my weak eye does not see’).5 But poets could also express a desire for freedom in their usage, and in particular the freedom not to imitate the language of Petrarch. Between 1505 and 1511, Giovanni Muzzarelli, a young Mantuan follower of Pietro Bembo, was clear about his linguistic options, but still very uncertain about the decisions he had taken, when he sent 4  Castiglione Baldassare, Il Libro del Cortegiano, ed. A. Quondam, 3 vols. (Rome: 2016), vol. 1, 13–14, 15; idem, The Book of the Courtier, trans. G. Bull, Penguin classics (Harmondsworth: 1976) 33, 34. 5  Madrid, Real Biblioteca del Escorial, MS f-IV-17, fol. IIIr. The letter of dedication is published in Albonico S., “Ippolita Clara e le sue rime”, in idem, Ordine e numero. Studi sul libro di poesia e le raccolte poetiche nel Cinquecento (Alessandria: 2006) 95–122 (120–121).

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a manuscript copy of his Amorosa opra, a composition in prose and verse (like Bembo’s Gli Asolani, which was first printed in 1505), to Elisabetta Gonzaga, duchess of Urbino. In his letter of dedication, he predicts that ‘tanti censori de l’altrui fatiche, tanti riprensori, tanti Momi’ (‘so many censors of others’ labours, so many critics, so many Momuses’) may condemn him for using Tuscan rather than another form of the vernacular, but that others might reproach him for including a few small non-Tuscan words: Questi cotali, excellentissima signora mia, vedevo io tutti preparati a con rabiosi morsi assalir questa mia presente fatica, et alcuni imputarla d’ignoranza, alcuni di rozzezza di stilo, alcuni di troppa affettazione, molti accusarla d’affettata immitazione e citarla di furto, non advertendo i furti, oltra che da tutti i scrittori nostri et externi sanza infamia fussero frequentati, esser di molta gloria stati cagione al nostro poeta, il quale suolea vantarsi esser maggior fatica a rubar un verso ad Omero che la mazza ad Ercole. Assai altri ne conoscevo dever dannar la lingua tosca, in ch’ella averà parlato; altri trovar in essa due o tre paroluzze che non saranno cossì a suo parer tosche, quasi non sia lecito allo scrittore di lunga opera questo fare. Sariano similmente di quelli che riprenderiano l’idioma, per non gli piacer altro che ’l latino, il quale per aventura non intenderiano; come se non fusse cossì lecito, e con tant’onore, agli presenti moderni lasciar di seguir le vestige latine, come agli antichi latini le grece, e parlar ne la lor lingua patria, che mai non fu vetato ad alcuno.6 (I saw these persons, my most excellent lady, all ready to attack this labour of mine with their rabid jaws. It would be accused by some of ignorance, by some of crudeness of style, by some of excessive affectation. Many would accuse it of affected imitation and cite it for theft, not realising that thefts have often been used blamelessly by all our own and foreign writers, and were moreover a cause of much glory to our poet [Vergil], who used to boast that it was harder to steal a verse from Homer than the club from Hercules.7 I knew that very many others were bound to condemn the Tuscan language in which [my work] will speak; others were bound to find in it two or three little words that in their opinion will 6  Muzzarelli Giovanni, Amorosa opra, ed. E. Scarpa (Verona: 1982) 4. 7  In his life of Vergil, Aelius Donatus attributes to the poet a retort to those who accused him of plagiarism: ‘cur non illi quoque eadem furta temptarent? verum intellecturos facilius esse Herculi clavam quam Homero versum subripere’ (‘Why do they, too, not attempt the same thefts? Certainly, they will find it easier to steal Hercules’ club than a line from Homer’). See Vita Donati, in Vitae Vergilianae antiquae, ed. C. Hardie (Oxford: 1957) 14.

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not be Tuscan, as if the writer of a long work were not allowed to do this. Similarly, there would be those who would criticise the language used, since they like nothing other than Latin, which they perhaps would not understand; as if the moderns of our day were not allowed, and with such honour, to stop following in Latin footsteps, as the ancient Latins did in respect of the footsteps of the Greeks, and to speak in their own native tongue, something that was never forbidden to anyone.) Among those who, later in the century, reacted strongly against the doctrine of a rigid imitation of Petrarch’s poetic language were the Florentines Francesco Berni and Anton Francesco Grazzini. The latter introduces a collection of burlesque poetry by Berni and others, Il primo libro dell’opere burlesche (1548), with two sonnets to the readers in which he praises Berni and his non-Petrarchan use of language. The second poem, a parody of the opening sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, extols Berni’s ‘stil senz’arte, puro, et piano’ (‘artless style, pure and plain’) that avoids linguistic archaisms from the fourteenth century: Non offende gli orecchi della gente colle lascivie del parlar Toscano, unquanco, guari, maisempre et sovente.8 (it does not offend people’s ears with the recherché intemperances of the Tuscan tongue: unquanco [never], guari [(not) much], maisempre [always] and sovente [often].) In the 1530s and 1540s, other authors sought to open vernacular verse to the influence of the forms of verse found in classical Greek and Latin, and some set out to justify their innovations in their paratexts. The Florentine exile Luigi Alamanni dedicated both volumes of his Opere toscane (1532–1533) to the French king, François I, and in his first letter he defended his right to compose Tuscan verse in ways that had been acceptable in classical Latin poetry: Se pur alcun dicesse che io in alcuna delle elegie, o in altro luogo, fussi stato alquanto più licentioso di quel che furon gli antichi nostri Toscani, non saprei che altro rispondermi, ma credo ben certo che in mia difesa risurgerebbero Tibullo et Propertio, i miei primi maestri, a’ quali se per 8  “Il Lasca a chi legge”, in Il primo libro dell’opere burlesche (Florence, Bernardo Giunta: 1548) fol. A7r; see also Poeti del Cinquecento, vol. 1, Poeti lirici, burleschi, satirici e didascalici, ed. G. Gorni – M. Danzi – S. Longhi, La letteratura italiana 23 (Milan – Naples: 2001) 992.

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aventura fusse detto che lo stil Latino portasse naturalmente seco più di licenza che il Toscano, credo che in mio favor risponderebbero che tutte le lingue son le medesime, sol che da persone discrete (tra le quali non dirò per ciò d’esser io) sieno esercitate.9 (But if anyone were to say that in some of my elegies or elsewhere I had been somewhat freer than our Tuscans of old, I would not know how else to respond, but I certainly believe that Tibullus and Propertius, my first masters, would spring to my defence. If they had by chance been told that the Latin style was by nature more licentious than that of Tuscany, I believe they would reply in my favour that all languages are the same as long as they are used by persons of discretion [and I shall not therefore say that I am one of these].) Others, writes Alamanni, may accuse him of using verse without rhyme. However, he believes that rhyme is inappropriate in compositions that have interlocutors, such as eclogues, and that it deprives verse of majesty, variety and gravity; in any case, it dates only from the time of the Provençal poets.10 Bernardo Tasso discusses his use of the Tuscan language and of verses without rhyme in the dedicatory letter of his books of amorous verse from the edition of 1534 (containing books I and II) onwards, up to the edition of his Rime in 1560.11 Addressing his patron Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno, he begins:

9  Alamanni Luigi, Opere toscane, 2 vols. (Lyon, Sébastien Gryphe: 1532–1533) fol. *2v. 10  Ibidem, fol. *3r. 11  Tasso Bernardo, Libro primo de gli Amori (Venice, Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio and brothers: 1534) fols. A2r–A6v. See also idem, Rime, 2 vols., 1: I tre libri degli amori, ed. D. Chiodo; 2: Libri quarto e quinto, Salmi e Ode, ed. V. Martignone (Turin: 1995), vol. 1, 5–13. Recent contributions on the poetics of Tasso’s first books of lyric verse include Cremante R., “Appunti sulle rime di Bernardo Tasso”, in Albonico S. – Comboni A. – Panizza G. – Vela C. (eds.), Per Cesare Bozzetti. Studi di letteratura e filologia italiana, Testi e strumenti di filologia italiana. Strumenti 2 (Milan: 1996) 393–407; Saletti C., “Un sodalizio poetico. Bernardo Tasso e Antonio Brocardo”, ibidem 409–424; Ferroni G., “‘Viver al par delle future genti.’ Poetica in versi di Bernardo Tasso”, in Venturi G. – Cappelletti F. (eds.), Gli dei a corte. Letteratura e immagini nella Ferrara estense, Ferrara paesaggio estense 3 (Florence: 2009) 415–447; idem, ‘Dulces lusus.’ Lirica pastorale e libri di poesia nel Cinquecento, Manierismo e barocco 16 (Alessandria: 2012) 148–151. See also Zampese C., Tevere e Arno. Studi sulla lirica del Cinquecento, Letteratura italiana 14 (Milan: 2012) 21–71, especially 34–36 on Bembo as a probable target of some of Bernardo Tasso’s remarks.

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Porto fermissima opinione, illustrissimo Signor mio, che la novità de’ miei versi, cosa non meno invidiosa che dilettevole, moverà molti a vituperarli: et di questa novella tela altri le fila, altri la testura biasimerà, parendoli forse mal convenirsi alla lingua volgare, posto da canto le Muse thoscane, alle greche et alle latine accostarsi, et quelle oltre il loro costume in varie et strane maniere di rime, hinni, ode, egloghe et selve, quasi per viva forza constringer a favellare.12 (I am utterly convinced, my most illustrious Lord, that the novelty of my verses, which is something no less invidious than pleasurable, will move many to revile them. Some will reproach the threads of this new cloth, others the weaving, perhaps in the belief that it is unfitting for the vernacular language to put aside the Tuscan Muses and approach the Greek and Latin ones, obliging them as if by brute force to speak unaccustomedly in varied and strange kinds of lyric verse, hymns, odes, eclogues and silvae.) It is worth quoting at some length the passage, in effect a manifesto for the renewal of the forms and language of vernacular lyric poetry, in which Bernardo Tasso puts a forceful case in defence of his limited imitation of the language of the two great poetic models of the fourteenth century (a practice that goes against the recommendations of Bembo’s treatise and grammar in dialogue form, the Prose della volgar lingua of 1525), and in favour of his imitation of classical literary schemes: Non dubito punto che molti, più curiosi che non si conviene, mi riprenderanno perc’habbia ne’ miei scritti introdutte alcune poche parole dal Petrarcha, nè da Dante, nè forse da altri usate giamai, ripigliate alle volte in un solo poema in varii luoghi una rima, et altre cotai cose: alle quali obiettioni, tutto che havendo riguardo alla dignità della lingua, qual esser dovrebbe, non qual è tenuta, è bassa cura il porvi mente, non mi rimarrò però brevemente di rispondere che le parole, o sono ricevute da l’uso et degne della compagnia dell’altre, overo necessarie, più almeno che miserere, delibo et bibo13 et altri simili non sarebbeno; nè ho la rima ripigliata, se non tanto lontano che già è uscito della memoria di chi legge d’haverla udita un’altra volta. Nè credo però che ad alcuno debba cader nell’animo 12  Tasso Bernardo, Libro primo de gli Amori (1534) fol. A2r. 13  “Miserere” is used in the first and last poems of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and “delibo” and “bibo” are rhyme words in his sonnet 193.

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me esser di sì folle ardimento ch’io sdegni d’imitare i duo lumi della lingua thoscana, Dante et Petrarcha. Ma havendo que’ gloriosi con un loro raro et leggiadro stile volgare sì altamente ritratti i lor divini concetti che impossibile sarebbe hoggimai con quelli istessi colori depinger cosa che ci piacesse, vana mi parrebbe ogni fatica ch’io usassi, non pur per passar avanti, ma per andarli vicino, caminando di continuo dietro l’orme loro. Oltre di ciò, sendo tanto ampio et spatioso il campo della poesia, et segnato da mille fioriti et be’ sentieri, per li quali quegli antichi famosi greci et latini caminando le charte di meravigliosa vaghezza depinsero, non è forse dicevole que’ due soli o tre, ove quelli le vestigia del loro alto intelletto hanno lasciate, di continuo premendo, dir quelle istesse cose con altre parole, o con quelle istesse parole altri pensieri ch’eglino i loro divinamente scrissero: anzi pietoso uffitio sarebbe di ciascuno questa anchor giovene lingua per tutti que’ sentieri menare che i Latini e i Greci le loro condussero, et la varietà de’ fiori mostrandole de’ quali l’altre due ornandosi sì vaghe si scopreno a’ riguardanti, et come si colgano apparandole, a quella perfettione condurla che dal mondo si desidera, et nell’altre due si ammira. Alla qual cosa desideroso (quanto le debili forze del mio ingegno si estendeno) donar compimento, novi et inusitati dissegni fingendo, i peregrini excellenti, quanto ho saputo, mi sono ingegnato d’imitare, sperando pur, che sì come altra volta le Muse di Grecia a’ Latini di poetare insegnarono, così hora potesse avenire che quelle et queste di compagnia vaghezza accrescessero alle volgari, la quale ci fosse a grado almeno non altrimenti che ne’ sontuosi conviti, fra i cibi più delicati et più pretiosi, frutto o altra vil cosa volentieri solemo gustare. Ben è vero che, ciò facendo, sommamente desiderava che alle bellezze di Virgilio, di Theocrito, d’Horatio et d’altri cotali l’habito delle parole thoscane si conformasse in maniera che mostro a caso fatto non ci paresse, il che non essendo ad effetto recato, altri per aventura di maggior virtute ch’io non son io surgerà dopo me, il quale con non minor utilità della lingua volgare che con honor di se stesso l’opra al volere aguaglierà, dando a divedere alle genti la poesia de gli antichi, colta dalle mani moderne, esser atta a rinovellarsi fra noi di fiori et di frutti d’altrettanta bellezza di quanta Roma o Athene gli producesse giamai. Nè sia chi dica la lingua thoscana non esser degna de l’honore et degli ornamenti delle due prime, però che veruna lingua mortale, qual che si sia, non hebbe, nè havrà mai privilegio da sé di sovrastare alle altre, ma ogni sua excellentia è sola gratia et gentilezza del donatore. Per la qual cosa accadendo una volta ch’alcun saggio et liberale intelletto toglia a favorir la volgare, facilmente ella a tale aggiungerà che nè la greca nè la latina ch’ella sia loro sorella si potranno sdegnare. Et

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chiunque ciò niega, rimembrisi un poco questo cotale della Griselda, la quale tolta poco inanzi dalla casa di Giannucciolo suo padre, ove nacque et crescette, alle nozze del signor di Saluzzo, non altrimenti che se la cortesia di Gualtieri l’havesse in virtù convertita, a guisa di gemma dal fango raccolta illustrò il mondo del suo valore.14 Et veramente è malfatto, essendo piena la scrittura volgare d’aspirationi et d’apostrophi, cose tutte peregrine et soverchie all’intendimento di lei, i soggetti, le figure et gli ornamenti dell’altre due, necessarii alla bellezza et alla dignità sua, non curar d’imitare.15 (I have no doubt that many, more solicitous than they should be, will criticise me for introducing into my writings some few words never used by Petrarch or Dante, or maybe by anyone else, for sometimes repeating a rhyme word in different places within a single poem, and for other such things. Attending to these objections – with regard to the dignity of the language as it should be, not as it is considered to be – is a menial matter. However, I shall not refrain from replying briefly that words are either received by usage and worthy of the company of others, or else necessary, at least more so than miserere, delibo and bibo and the like would be. Nor have I repeated a rhyme word unless it was so distant that the reader has already forgotten hearing it before. I do not believe, however, that anyone should consider me so foolishly daring that I would disdain to imitate the two beacons of the Tuscan language, Dante and Petrarch. But those glorious poets portrayed their divine ideas, with their rare and elegant vernacular style, so loftily that it would be impossible nowadays to depict anything that pleased us with those same colours. It would thus seem vain for me to strive, not just to overtake them, but even to approach them by always walking in their footsteps. Furthermore, the field of poetry is so wide and spacious, and marked by a thousand flower-bedecked and beautiful paths, along which those famous ancient Greeks and Latins walked and painted their pages with marvellous beauty. So it is perhaps not fitting to tread in the steps of those [vernacular authors], who are only two or three in number, and to say those selfsame things with other words or to say other thoughts with those selfsame words with which they wrote their own divinely, when those [classical authors] have left behind the footsteps of their lofty intellect. Rather, it would be a devoted task for everyone to lead this still young language along all those same 14  In the last tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron. 15  Tasso Bernardo, Libro primo de gli Amori (1534) fols. A2v–A4r.

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paths where the Latins and Greeks led theirs and, by showing it the variety of flowers with which the two other languages, adorning themselves so beautifully, reveal themselves to onlookers, and by teaching it how to gather these flowers, to lead it to that perfection that everyone desires and admires in the other two. Since I wish to achieve this aim [in so far as the weak strength of my intellect allows], I have done my best to imitate outstandingly elegant writers, creating new and unusual designs. At the same time, I hope that, just as the Muses of Greece once taught the Latins to write poetry, so now it may come to pass that both the Greek and Latin Muses might, in company, add to the vernacular ones the beauty that we appreciate, similar to the fruit or some other humble thing that we are used to tasting in sumptuous banquets in the midst of the most delicate and precious foods. It is certainly true that, in so doing, I strongly wished that the clothing of the Tuscan words would conform to the beauties of Vergil, Theocritus, Horace and the like, in such a way that it did not seem to us a monster made by chance. If this has not been achieved, someone else with greater prowess than mine will perhaps arise after me and match his deeds to his desire, serving the vernacular no less than he does honour to himself. He will show people that the poetry of the ancients, plucked by modern hands, is suited to be renewed among us with flowers and fruits of beauty equalling anything ever produced by Rome or Athens. Let no one say that the Tuscan language is unworthy of the honour and adornments of its two predecessors, since no mortal tongue of any kind had or will ever have the privilege on its own to stand above the others; rather, all of its excellence comes only from the grace and nobility of the giver. Therefore, whenever some wise and liberal intellect undertakes to favour the vernacular tongue, it will easily reach such a point that neither Greek nor Latin will be able to disdain her as their sister. And if anyone denies this, let him pause to remember the tale of Griselda who, soon after being taken from the house of her father Giannuccolo, where she was born and grew up, to marry the lord of Saluzzo, illuminated the world with her worth like a jewel gathered from the mud, just as if the courtesy of Gualtieri had turned her to virtue. And it is truly an injustice not to take care to imitate the subject matter, figures and adornments of the two other languages, which are essential to the beauty and dignity of vernacular writing, when this writing is full of aspirations and apostrophes, things entirely foreign and superfluous to understanding it.) Tasso goes on to defend his use of blank hendecasyllables as a means of emulating the models of Greek and Latin hexameters.

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Alessandro Piccolomini, on the other hand, mounts a complex argument in defence of rhyme, as a distinguishing feature of vernacular verse, within the dedicatory letter of his Cento sonetti. The letter, dated 9 December 1548, is addressed to Vittoria Colonna, daughter of Ascanio Colonna and Giovanna d’Aragona, and niece of the renowned poet who shared her name.16 Most of the letter is taken up by an elaborate eulogy of ‘Poesia’. After outlining the extent of scientific and other knowledge that a poet must have, Piccolomini writes of the civilising usefulness (‘utile’) of poetry, and of the pleasure (‘diletto’) that it provides, in the conventional Horatian pairing, and suggests that this pleasure is derived from its two strengths: Noi confessaremo chiaramente che con altr’arte non era possibile che [quei primi antichi nostri] sotto a giogo di leggi e dentro a cerchio di mura a la conversation civile e mansueta si riducessero, sennò col mezo de la Poesia, mentre che Anfione, Orfeo e altri Poeti accorti, col suono de i versi loro, quelli huomini rozzi a la civiltà reducendo, quasi fiere, sassi e arbori a sé tiravano. Util dunque si può concludere che la Poesia sopra tutte l’altre facultà stimar si debbi […]. Senza che per le fatighe e travagli che, vivendo noi al mondo, è forza che ci accaschino alcuna volta, nissuno spasso o ricreation d’animo si può trovare più dolce e più onesto che quello che da i versi degli honorati e ben costumati Poeti si possa prendere. Col cui diletto e riposo d’animo si rinfresca a l’attioni virtuose la mente nostra, e in un tempo medesimo si conferma nel ben operare. […] E che il diletto possa in quella [Poesia] tanto agevolmente potrem conoscere, se a i due nervi suoi, per cui ella da l’altre facultà differisce, consideraremo: i quali sono l’imitatione e la misura proportionata de le parole. Le quai due cose – se ben la prima, che ne la natura de le cose stesse consistendo, vien ad esser una stessa in tutte le lingue, e l’altra, essendo radicata ne le parole medesime, vien per questo a variarsi secondo che le lingue si van cangiando – nondimeno ambedue, l’una penetrando, come più naturale, con la sententia de le parole, fin nel centro de l’intelletto, e l’altra poi, col concento che da ben misurato suono de le sillabe ne risulta, toccando dolcemente il senso de l’odito nostro, d’incredibil diletto ci sono cagione.17

16  Piccolomini Alessandro, Cento sonetti (Rome, Vincenzo Valgrisi: 1549) fols. *4r–A8r. See also idem, Cento sonetti, ed. F. Tomasi, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 553 (Geneva: 2015) 47–56. 17  Piccolomini, Cento sonetti (1549) fols. *7v–A1r.

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(We shall clearly admit that poetry was the only art with which it was possible to bring those first ancestors of ours under the yoke of laws and into civil and peaceful social intercourse, while Amphion, Orpheus and other skilful poets brought those coarse men to civilization, drawing them to themselves as if they were wild beasts, rocks and trees. One can therefore conclude that poetry should be considered the most useful of all faculties. […] Moreover, because of the toil and torments that are bound to befall us from time to time during our lives in this world, there is no enjoyment or recreation of the spirit that is sweeter and more honourable than that which can be taken from the verses of honoured and refined poets. With the pleasure and repose of the spirit that they provide, our mind is refreshed for virtuous actions and at the same time is confirmed in its good actions. […] And we can understand that pleasure is so powerful in poetry, if we consider its two sinews, through which it differs from the other faculties, namely imitation and the proportionate measure of words. The first of these two things, consisting in the nature of things themselves, comes to be one and the same in all languages, and the second, rooted in words themselves, thus varies as languages change. Nevertheless, both cause us incredible pleasure, the one by penetrating, as more natural, to the very centre of the intellect with the meaning of words, and the other then touching sweetly our sense of hearing with the harmonious blend that derives from a well-measured sound of syllables.) Listening to poetry is thus an essential part of the pleasure that it gives.18 Piccolomini goes on to discuss the differences between Greek and Latin metrics, based on syllabic quantity, and Italian verse, based on syllabic stress and rhyme. The two traditions grew apart: Ma ne la nostra lingua, doppo che da la corrottione de la latina nacque vicino a molti anni sono, per la imperfettione di quella misura di tempo che ne le nostre parole si truova, non si son potute appropriare diverse misure a diverse materie di Poesie.19 18  On oral aspects of lyric verse in this period, see Richardson B., “Sixteenth-Century Italian Petrarchists and Musical Settings of their Verse”, in Dall’Aglio S. – Richardson B. – Rospocher M. (eds.), Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (London: 2017) 124–133; idem, “‘Voi ch’ascoltate.’ Reciting Petrarchan Verse in Renaissance Italy”, in Jossa S. – Pieri G. (eds.), Chivalry, Academy, and Cultural Dialogues. The Italian Contribution to European Culture (Cambridge: 2016) 167–180. 19  Piccolomini, Cento sonetti (1549) fol. A3r–v.

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(But in our language, after it was born from the corruption of Latin many years ago, it has not been possible to apply different measures to different poetic subjects, because of the imperfection of that measure of quantity found in our words.) Piccolomini concludes that, in the Italian vernacular, it is rhyme that compensates for this difference.20 In works of a practical nature, authors could defend a language that drew on Tuscan, but they sought above all to be understandable to readers throughout Italy. Antonino Venuto, of Noto in Sicily, tells the reader that he composed his work on the cultivation of fruit trees and vines, De agricultura opusculum, in 1510 specifically for the conditions of Sicily, since existing works on agriculture, from Varro and Pliny to Pietro de’ Crescenzi, did not offer appropriate advice. He intended it to be circulated only within the island and to be written in Sicilian, yet with the use of some Tuscan terms in order to make it comprehensible if it were to go elsewhere in Italy: Hebi animo a questo mio librecto aprire le porte, et per el regno de Sicilia solamente donarle libertà che trascorrendo vada, et in siculo idioma constructo per esser in queste nostre parti con più facilità da tucti inteso, nobilitato ancora d’alcuni vocaboli de quella ecelsa et principal lengua toscana, acioché quando accadesse che contra el mio instituto ne le Italice parti se trasportasse non fosse per la basseza del patrio parlare del tucto vilipenso.21 (I intended to open the doors to this little book of mine and allow it to travel only across the kingdom of Sicily, and I created it in the Sicilian language since this is more easily understood by all in these regions of ours, yet ennobled by some words of that lofty and pre-eminent Tuscan language. Thus, if the book were to be taken against my intention into Italian regions, it would not be completely vilified for the baseness of its native tongue.)

20  On the paratexts discussed above by Alamanni, Bernardo Tasso and Piccolomini, see also Tomasi F., “Strategie paratestuali nel commento alla lirica del XVI secolo (1530–1570)”, in Studi sulla lirica rinascimentale, Miscellanea erudita. Nuova serie 80 (Rome – Padua: 2012) 95–147, at 102–106 (Alamanni), 107–111 (Tasso), 112–115 (Piccolomini). 21  Abbamonte R.P., Il ‘De Agricultura opusculum’ di Antonino Venuto: edizione diplomaticointerpretativa, Studi e ricerche 62 (Alessandria: 2008) 6 (punctuation and accents modified). The date of composition may have been 1511: see xv, n. 7. The first edition was printed in Naples by Sigismondo Mayr, 1516.

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In another practical work, this time addressed to musicians, we find a desire to use a language that is generically Italian rather than ‘too’ Tuscan, so that it will be accessible to readers who have not yet reached a high level of specialisation. Giovanni Maria Lanfranco of Terenzo, near Parma, author of a Rimario novo di tutte le concordanze del Petrarcha (1531) as well as a musician, explains to Bartolomeo Mascara of Brescia at the end of the dedicatory letter of his Scintille di musica […] che mostrano a leggere il Canto Fermo, et Figurato (1533) that he plans to publish another, lengthier, treatise on musical theory and practice ‘con l’osservanza (al meglio che sappiamo) della lingua Toscana’ (‘following the Tuscan language, to the best of our ability’). In the present work, however, he has not wished to follow the same path, per non offendere con alcune parole troppo Toscanamente dette l’orecchie de i più, avisandomi che esse Scintille siano più tosto richieste alli osservatori della universale Italiana favella et a principianti, che a gli introdotti di questa arte et osservatori della Toscana lingua.22 (so as not to offend the ears of the majority with some words spoken in too Tuscan a manner, realising that these Scintille [Sparks] are more suited to followers of the universal Italian tongue and to beginners than to experts in this art and followers of the Tuscan language.) Domenico Manzoni, from Oderzo, who was very probably the accountant of the Venetian patrician Alvise Vallaresso, declares in the preface of his Libro mercantile, a book of instruction on accountancy and handwriting, that he has chosen to avoid Tuscanising affectation and to use instead ‘common Italian’, because this is appropriate to his subject matter: In quanto poi alla lingua, io ho procurato d’usar modo di parlare non ri­ strettamente, et affettatamente Toscano, ma Italiano puro et commune, et qual si conviene et usa in maneggi di mercantie, et di faccende, avendo ogni sorte di professione il suo modo di parlare, et le parole o i termini propri, i quali chi volesse lasciare, per usar quelli del Petrarca o del Boccaccio, saria degno di riso, o almeno di compassione, se non vogliamo dir di biasimo et riprensione.23 22  Lanfranco Giovanni Maria, Scintille di musica […] che mostrano a leggere il Canto Fermo, et Figurato (Brescia, Lodovico Britannico: 1533) fol. +3r. See also Trovato, “Prefazioni cinquecentesche” 147. 23  Cited from the edition of Venice, [Comin da Trino]: 1574, in Lucchi P., “Leggere, scrivere e abbaco: l’istruzione elementare agli inizi dell’età moderna”, in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura. Convegno internazionale di studi (Firenze, 26–30 giugno 1980), Istituto

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(As for language, I have ensured that I use a manner of speech not narrowly and affectedly Tuscan, but pure and common Italian, as is fitting and normal in trading and business matters. Every kind of profession has its manner of speaking and its own words and terms. Anyone who wished to ignore them in favour of those of Dante and Petrarch would deserve laughter, or at least pity, not to say reproach and reprehension.) The pragmatic assessments of authors such as Venuti and Manzoni avoid theoretical discussions and focus solely on the question of what will be comprehensible and welcome to their readers in Italy. The use of language in vernacular translations from Greek or Latin posed the general problem of the capacity or otherwise of the younger language to express what had been written in the classical languages, and then the problem of linguistic choices within the vernacular. Giannozzo Manetti had argued in his treatise on biblical translation, Apologeticus, composed around 1455–1459, that ‘Est […] interpretatio recta idonea quedam et commoda de quacunque celebrata ac preceptis et regulis instituta lingua in aliam pariter vel pene simile, iuxta subiectam de qua tractatur materiam, conversio’ (‘correct translation is a suitable and appropriate conversion from one distinguished language with established rules and precepts into another language equally established and more or less similar, in accordance with the subject matter being treated’). It was therefore impossible to translate correctly ‘ex quatuor celeberrimis idiomatibus (Hebreo, Caldeo, Greco ac Latino)’ (‘from the four most distinguished languages – Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin’) into any vernacular language: ‘recta quippe conversio certam quondam eloquii illius lingue, in quam traducitur, dignitatem exigere et postulare videtur’ (‘For a correct conversion seems to require and demand a certain elevation of the diction of that language into which it is done’).24 In response to attitudes such as Manetti’s, those faced with the challenge of vernacularising texts frequently discuss and defend their linguistic decisions in their introductory paratexts. Even within sixteenth-century Tuscany, it is natural to encounter a sense that the vernacular still needs to grow and develop in order to equal the classical languages in expressiveness. This is the case with the letter to readers that prefaces the version of Livy by Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (Florence: 1982), 101–119 (119), and (from the 1565 edition) in Trovato, “Prefazioni cinquecentesche” 148. For some other contemporary references to a “common” language, see Richardson B., “The Concept of a lingua comune in Renaissance Italy”, in Lepschy A.L. – Tosi A. (eds.), Languages of Italy: Histories and Dictionaries, Il portico 142 (Ravenna: 2007) 13–30. 24  Manetti G., A Translator’s Defense, ed. M. McShane, trans. M. Young, The I Tatti Renaissance Library 71 (Cambridge, MA: 2016) 234–235.

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the Florentine Iacopo Nardi, printed in 1540. He begins by arguing that translations should not be made ‘voce per voce’ (‘word for word’). He himself has sometimes been a ‘libero espositore’ (‘free interpreter’) rather than a ‘schietto traduttore’ (‘exact translator’), ‘non perciò diversificando il sentimento del testo, ma torcendolo un poco per necessità, per tirare il modo del parlare Latino sotto la figura del parlar Toscano’ (‘not therefore altering the meaning of the text, but twisting it a little out of necessity, to fit the Latin expression into the shape of the Tuscan tongue’).25 Nardi then makes a subtle distinction that would be unusual in any of the theoretical expositions of the questione. He rejects a total imitation of ‘[i] nostri antichi auttori’ (‘our ancient authors’). He has, he writes, avoided words that are no longer used at all, but he does make some sparing use of words that are less used. What is original here is that Nardi stresses that, in looking backwards in this way, he is also looking forwards. If he retains some little-used terms, he does so not in order to follow those who are over-fond of archaisms, but because one should be inclusive and try to enrich the language. All living languages need to develop, while not cutting themselves off from the past: Quanto alla lingua, non mi è paruto dover essere superstitioso osservatore di tutte le voci et modi di parlare de’ nostri antichi auttori; ma mi sono astenuto da quelle cose, le quali sono hoggi interamente disusate. Et così le meno usate, ho usato meno, et qualcuna d’esse 26 non più per conformarmi col parere di coloro, che hoggi ne sono curiosi osservatori, quanto per non esser quegli io che dia loro bando di questa lingua: la quale deve più tosto essere nostra intentione, oltra il conservare in uso quei che vi sono buoni, di ampliare, et arricchire di nuovi vocaboli: come fecero i nostri antichi, et così i Greci, et i Latini le lingue loro, secondo la novità delle cose, et secondo che variava l’uso del parlare, mentre che furono vive dette lingue. Vive chiamiamo noi quelle, le quali anchora nella loro propria siede, et patria si parlano: come hora è la nostra, et l’altre tante, in diverse parti del mondo: nelle quali ogni dì nascono nuovi nomi, secondo che nascono nuove cose.27

25  L e deche delle historie Romane di Tito Livio padovano, tradotte nuovamente nella lingua toscana, da Iacopo Nardi cittadino fiorentino (Venice, heirs of Lucantonio Giunta: 1540) fols. +3r–+4r (fol. +3r). 26  A phrase such as this may have been omitted in error by a scribe or compositor. 27  Le deche delle historie Romane di Tito Livio, fol. +3r.

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(As for the language, I thought I should not be a superstitious follower of all the words and expressions of our old authors, but I have avoided things that have completely fallen out of use today. And so I have made less use of things that are less used, and some of them, not so much to conform with the opinion of those who are solicitous followers of them today, as not to be the person who banishes them from this language. Rather, it must be our intention, as well as keeping in use words that are good, to widen and enrich this language with new words, just as our ancestors did, and as did the Greeks and the Latins with their languages, as new things appeared and as linguistic usage varied, while those languages were living. We term living languages those that are still spoken in their native place and land, just as ours is today, and so many others in different parts of the world, in which new nouns are born daily as new things are born.) Nardi’s definition of living languages is exactly contemporary with Alessandro Citolini’s explicit contrast between living and dead languages in his Lettera in difesa de la lingua volgare.28 We should also note here two adjectives used to describe rigid supporters of archaisms: ‘superstizioso’, which implies an irrational, fetishising belief in the supernatural powers of a certain kind of language, and ‘curioso’, which can suggest excessive zeal, and has already been encountered in Bernardo Tasso’s apologia for his innovations. Bernardino Daniello of Lucca, in his translation of Vergil’s Georgics (1545), uses his letter of dedication to Lunardo di Antonio Mocenigo chiefly to praise agriculture.29 However, this letter is followed by another, addressed to readers, that anticipates and rebuts criticism of his translation, which is written in blank hendecasyllables.30 As well as justifying the practice of translating verse into verse, Daniello argues that he is writing for those who have not studied Greek and Latin, and that in any case the language in which we first learn to speak is not to be despised. Those who neglect Tuscan writers and especially Petrarch cannot be called truly learned. The use of Tuscan might even spread 28  Citolini Alessandro, Lettera in difesa de la lingua volgare scritta a m. Cosmo Pallavicino (Venice, Francesco Marcolini: 1540). See Faithfull R.G., “The Concept of ‘Living Language’ in Cinquecento Vernacular Philology”, Modern Language Review, 48, 3 (1953) 278–292 (281–282). 29  La Georgica di Virgilio, nuovamente di latina in thoscana favella, per Bernardino Daniello tradotta, e commentata (Venice, Giovanni Farri and brothers: 1545) fols. a2r–a4r. 30  Ibidem, fols. b1r–b4r. See also Guthmüller B., Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare. Forme e funzioni della trasposizione in volgare della poesia classica nel Rinascimento italiano, I saggi di letteratura italiana antica 13 (Fiesole: 2008) 256–259.

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across a wider area, just as the use of Latin expanded together with the expansion of the Roman empire, ‘se la bella Italia (mercè de le sue discordie e divisioni hora a le nationi barbare soggetta) de la sua antica gloria e del valore ricordevole, unita si trovasse’ (‘if fair Italy, currently subject to barbarian nations thanks to its discords and divisions, were to become unified, mindful of its ancient glory and worth’).31 As for the possible accusation that he has used too many Latinisms, Daniello points out that Dante and Petrarch employed some (such as Petrarch’s delibo and bibo, mentioned earlier), that lexical borrowings for objects from the ancient world are preferable to circumlocutions, and that their occasional use can add adornment and grace to writings. A sense that translation would help the literary Tuscan vernacular to develop is found in the letter of dedication of the second edition (1546) of the translation of Polybius by Lodovico Domenichi.32 Addressing the duke of Florence, Cosimo I de’ Medici, Domenichi defends translation on the grounds that it is useful to humanity. In this case, he is metaphorically bringing the fairest plants from the gardens of Greece to those of Italy. One should encourage those who translate, he writes, ‘così per crescere dignità et ornamento alla lingua Toscana, come per far giovamento a gli huomini che, forse inutilmente, non hanno consumato gli anni loro in apparare le lingue’ (fol. a3r; ‘both to increase the dignity and adornment of the Tuscan language and to benefit those who, perhaps without profit, have not spent their years in learning languages’). Domenichi highlights the role of Cosimo in promoting the study of Tuscan and its literature: ‘havendo col suo giustissimo imperio ritornato la bella Etruria da morte a vita, ogni dì più s’ingegna anchora di risuscitare, ampliare et ornare la favella Toscana; premiando, essaltando et honorando tanti begli spiriti che in ciò virtuosamente s’affaticano’ (‘having brought fair Etruria back to life with your most just rule, every day you strive more to revive, broaden and adorn the Tuscan language by rewarding, exalting and honouring so many fine spirits who labour virtuously on this task’).33 A detailed case in defence of greater linguistic flexibility and liberty is made in the letter to readers that Michelangelo Florio added to his translation of the De re metallica by Giorgio Agricola (Georg Bauer), printed in 1563.34 Florio was 31  L a Georgica di Virgilio, fol. b2v. 32  Polibio historico greco tradotto per m. Lodovico Domenichi […] con due fragmenti, ne i quali si ragiona delle republiche, et della grandezza di romani (Venice, Gabriele Giolito: 1546) fols. a2r–a4r. 33  Ibidem, fol. a4r. 34  Opera di Giorgio Agricola de l’arte de metalli partita in XII libri (Basel, Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius: 1563). See Firpo L., “Giorgio Agricola e Michelangelo Florio”, in Scritti sulla Riforma in Italia, Biblioteca del Corpus reformatorum Italicorum (Naples:

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Tuscan by birth, but his support for the Reformation had forced him to leave Italy, and at this late stage of his life he was living in Soglio in the Val Bregaglia. He anticipates four objections concerning his language on the part of ‘alcuni capricciosi, della lingua Toscana studiosi’ (‘some bizarre people, students of Tuscan’): Diranno primieramente che io non habbia osservate a puntino tutte quelle regole del parlare e de lo scrivere, le quali essi o nel Bembo o nel Fortunio si trovano haver studiate et apparate. Dipoi che io non mi sia servito, sicome harei potuto fare, di molti vocaboli usati dal Boccaccio, dal Petrarca e da Dante. Diranno ancora che ad alcuni stromenti nominati in questo libro, io non habbia dato que’ nomi a punto che fa la lingua Fiorentina: e forse anche si lasceranno uscir di bocca che in qualche passo questa mia tradozzione sia molto scura, e dico tanto che alcuni non ne potranno, con quella agevolezza che vorrebbano, cavar costrutto.35 (They will say, first, that I have not followed precisely all those rules of speaking and writing that they find they have studied and learned in Bembo or Fortunio. Then that I have not used, as I might have done, many words used by Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante. They will say, too, that I have not given the exact terms from the Florentine language to some instruments named in this book; and perhaps they will also let slip that in some passages this translation of mine is very obscure, so much so that some will not be able to benefit from it as easily as they would wish.) In response, Florio makes it clear that his priority as a translator is clarity of communication. He wants his language to be understood, in so far as the obscurity and erudition of the author permit, even by the uneducated (‘i semplici’). His translation is to be read in the present day, not in the fourteenth century, and not only by those who have pored over the canonical authors, but also by those who have been taught Italian (‘la lingua Italiana’, not Tuscan) by nature, practice, or art. His third argument, about non-Florentine terminology, 1996) 245–259. Firpo notes the probable influence of contacts between Florio and Lodovico Castelvetro, who was in nearby Chiavenna (259). On this translation, see also Peyronel Rambaldi S., “Esuli italiani ‘religionis causa’ e questione della lingua”, in Idee in cerca di parole, parole in cerca di idee, Incontro di studio 73 (Milan: 2014) 67–99 (87–90); Bocchi A., “I Florio contro la Crusca”, in Daniele A. – Nascimben L. (eds.), La nascita del vocabolario. Convegno di studio per i quattrocento anni del Vocabolario della Crusca, Udine, 12–13 marzo 2013, Filologia veneta. Testi e studi 8 (Padua: 2014) 51–80 (54–58). 35  Opera di Giorgio Agricola de l’arte de metalli, fol. *5v.

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is particularly interesting in that it offers a rare mention of commerce as one of the driving forces that lay behind linguistic decisions made in the context of the printing industry: ‘gl’honorati Frobenii, per li quali l’ho tradotto, si sarebbeno potuti giustissimamente dolere di me, con dirmi che essi non me l’hanno fatto tradurre per venderlo solamente a Firenze, ma in ogni altra parte d’Italia’ (‘the honourable Frobens, for whom I translated [the book], could very justly have complained about me, telling me that they did not have it translated to sell it in Florence alone, but everywhere else in Italy’).36 As for the question of obscurity, Florio writes that his task was to translate Agricola ‘ne la mia lingua Fiorentina’ (‘into my Florentine language’), not to write a commentary on him. He goes on to justify his use of some Latinisms or even Latin words for technical terminology, so that every nation can understand what is meant, when vernacular equivalents are so varied and may not even exist. If, finally, his spelling is not the same as Bembo’s, he asks forgiveness on the grounds that his usage (such as -zi- rather than -ti- before a vowel) corresponds with pronunciation. As the example of Florio demonstrates, translators were well positioned to understand that, in practical matters of language, they had to be flexible, to take account of the needs of the full range of their readers and (if they had been commissioned) of the needs of their publishers, and to avoid a doctrinaire approach to the selection of their language. There was particularly strong cause for them to ensure that their vernacular was easily comprehensible in the case of texts that were used for religious devotions by readers who were likely to include women. In 1539, Antonio Brucioli, a Florentine working in Venice who was sympathetic to a reformation of the Church, dedicated an edition of his vernacular translation of the New Testament to the young Anna d’Este, daughter of Renée de France and Duke Ercole II of Ferrara, and he made use of his letter to her to defend his use of the vernacular ‘accio che quegli della Italia, che altra lingua non sanno, possino gustare questo pane celestiale, con lo aiuto di Dio’ (‘so that Italians who know no other language can taste this heavenly bread, with God’s help’).37 An example, discussed by Trovato, of a reform-minded translator’s concern to avoid obscure and off-putting linguistic affectation is a letter addressed ‘Al pio lettore’ (‘To the pious reader’) of La Bibia, che si chiama il vecchio Testamento, nuovamente tradutto in lingua volgare 36  Ibidem, fol. *6r. 37  Il Nuovo Testamento di Christo Giesù signore et salvatore nostro, di greco nuovamente tradotto in lingua toscana, per Antonio Brucioli (Venice, Francesco Bindoni and Maffeo Pasini: 1539) fols. *2r–***7r (fol. ***6v). The edition is described in Barbieri E., Le Bibbie italiane del Quattrocento e del Cinquecento, 2 vols., Grandi Opere 4 (Milan: 1992), vol. 1, 274–275. See also Sanson H., Women, Language and Grammar in Italy 1500–1900, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs (Oxford: 2011) 40–41.

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secondo la verità del testo Hebreo, printed by François Du Ron in Geneva in 1562. It is probable that in this case, too, the translator was a Tuscan, Filippo Rustici of Lucca. He has, he writes, avoided clumsy Tuscanisms and any excessively reverent obedience to rules (like Nardi, he uses the term ‘superstizioso’), in favour of usage that is widely accepted, and this is especially important in translating the Scriptures: Havendo lasciati da parte tutti i mal composti et importuni toscanismi, ci siamo contentati, senza obbligarci a le strette e superstitiose regole de la volgar lingua, di seguitare un parlare e stile comune e vario ancora, tanto ne le voci quanto ne l’ortografia, da molti e diversi però hoggi usitato et accettato, e ciò per satisfare a i vari gusti che d’ogni hora si ritrovano. […] [R]iputiamo di grande importanza, che nel tradur la Santa Scrittura si debba usare ogni semplicità e facilità di parole e frase per darla bene ad intendere a le persone semplici […], lasciando l’affettationi e toscanismi a quelli che si metteno a ridurre i libri profani ne la volgar lingua boccacesca.38 (Having put aside all ill-formed and intrusive Tuscanisms, we have contented ourselves, without being bound by the narrow and superstitious rules of the vernacular language, with following a speech and style that are common and also varied, both in words and in spelling, therefore used and accepted today by many different people, in order to satisfy the various tastes that are continuously found. […] We consider it very important, in translating Holy Scripture, to use complete simplicity and easiness of words and sentences, so that ordinary people can understand it well […], leaving affectations and Tuscanisms to those who set about turning profane books into the Boccaccesque vernacular.) The Augustinian archbishop and preacher Gabriele Buratelli dedicated to Vittoria Farnese della Rovere, duchess of Urbino, his collection of sermons on the Seven Penitential Psalms, which was printed in 1573, two years after his death. His letter to the duchess points out that he has avoided ‘quel flusso di parole scelte Toscane, che suol delettare, et allettare tanto gli animi d’alcuni’ (‘that flood of select Tuscan words that habitually delights and attracts the spirits of some’) and ‘la gonfiezza’ (‘bombast’).39 38  Barbieri E., Le Bibbie italiane, vol. 1, 152–153, 352–360; Trovato, “Prefazioni cinquecen­ tesche” 156–158. 39  Buratelli Gabriele, Prediche […] sopra i sette salmi penitentiali di David profeta, accomodate a gli Evangeli quadragesimali secondo l’uso della S.R. Chiesa: opera utilissima a predicatori,

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2 Editors In parallel to authors, editors could make use of their introductory paratexts to state the linguistic principles on which they had based their preparation of texts. These men were usually working for printers, or in partnership with printers, and thus, as with most translators, their approaches were inevitably driven in part by considerations of profitability. Their statements represent, in the first place, specific positions on the questione della lingua as applied to textual editing, but they also have wider implications as a reflection of contemporary linguistic practice; after all, most editors were also authors of original works and some were translators.40 A paratext that is philological in the first instance, but also expresses a view on correct usage, is the letter signed ‘Aldo a gli lettori’ that is found in many copies of the edition of Petrarch’s vernacular poetry printed by Aldo Manuzio in 1501.41 The author of the letter is generally considered to be Pietro Bembo, editor of the volume. Here Bembo defends his text of Petrarch, which uses forms such as volgare rather than the Latinising vulgare, and the plural canzoni rather than canzone, both of which he considers correct (fourteenth-century) Tuscan, and he justifies the recovery of archaisms such as senonse (‘except for’): E prima, dove essi m’appongono quelle due voci, “volgari” e “canzoni”, priegogli che essi mi perdonino se io loro dimesticamente favellerò. E dico così: che prima che essi leggendo più avanti passino di questo poeta, bene sarà che essi qualche poca di cognitione apprendano della Thoscana lingua et insegnare se la facciano, poscia che essi, per quello che io ne scorga hora, niente ne hanno da per loro appreso. […]. [I]o

et ascoltatori della parola d’Iddio (Venice, Francesco and Gaspare Bindoni and brothers: 1573) fol. a3v. On this collection, see Boillet E., “Vernacular Sermons on the Psalms Printed in Sixteenth-Century Italy: An Interface between Oral and Written Cultures”, in Dall’Aglio et alii, Voices and Texts 200–211 (205–207). 40  Studies that discuss the work of the sixteenth-century editors mentioned below include Di Filippo Bareggi C., Il mestiere di scrivere. Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento, Biblioteca del Cinquecento 43 (Rome: 1988); Trovato P., Con ogni diligenza corretto. La stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna: 1991); Richardson B., Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History (Cambridge: 1994). 41  Aldo Manuzio editore. Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, intro. C. Dionisotti, ed. and trans. G. Orlandi, 2 vols. (Milan: 1976), vol. 1, 52–55. See also Frasso G., “Appunti sul ‘Petrarca’ aldino del 1501”, in Avesani R. – Ferrari M. – Foffano T. – Frasso G. – Sottili A. (eds.), Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich, 2 vols., Storia e letteratura 162–163 (Rome: 1984), vol. 1, 315–335.

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meno mi maraviglio se ad essi quella voce “senonse” è paruta nuova, ché pare nuova a gli Thoschi d’hoggi dì, quantunque si sia ella vecchissima non meno che altra. […] La qual parola, sì come antichetta, pose il Poeta per più gratia delle sue rime, seguendo in ciò lo stile di tutti e più chiari e più lodati auttori, che nelle loro scritture alcuno antico vocabolo vanno alle volte spargendo tra gli usati; che poi risplendono, quasi vaghe stelle nell’ampio cielo. (And first, where they object to my use of those two words, “volgari” and “canzoni”, I ask their pardon if I talk to them familiarly. And I say this: that before they read more of this poet, they will do well to acquire some small knowledge of the Tuscan language and have it taught to them, since as far as I can see now they have not learned any of it by themselves. […]. I am less surprised if that word “senonse” seemed new to them, for it seems new to the Tuscans of today, even though it is no less old than others. […] The Poet placed this word, as a rather ancient one, to give his verse more grace, following in this respect the manner of all the most renowned and most praised authors, who in their writings occasionally scatter some ancient words among the usual ones – words that then shine like beautiful stars in the wide sky.) Importantly, Bembo argues here that he is defending the style of all the best authors, including by implication modern authors as well as those from the past. This literary style was, of course, also his own, as he was to demonstrate to the general public four years later in the first edition of his dialogue Gli Asolani. Bembo’s practices as editor and author were broadly supported by Fortunio’s Regole grammaticali, and then of course by Bembo’s own Prose della volgar lingua. Their combined influence spread beyond the philological study of canonical works of the Trecento and was brought to bear on the editing of works from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, as is evident from several paratexts. In 1522, even before the publication of Bembo’s Prose, the title page of a Venetian edition of works by the living Florentine poet Girolamo Benivieni (1453–1542) announces that his works have been ‘novissimamente rivedute et da molti errori espurgate’ (‘very recently revised and purged of many errors’).42 The editor, a certain Cassiodoro Ticinese, explains in his dedicatory letter to Bernardino Patavino how he has restored the text’s original purity:

42  O  pere di Girolamo Benivieni firentino novissimamente rivedute et da molti errori espurgate (Venice, Niccolò Zoppino and Vincenzo di Paolo: 1522).

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Tolsi l’impresa (benché laboriosa) ad istirpare gli errori nell’opera già detta pullulati, qual per avanti in stampa meno che ben corretta, non altrimenti che rutilante gemma in vilissimo sterco giacceva, onde all’auttor suo eccellente più dishonor assai che lode partoriva. Io nondimeno quanto le facultadi del mio debol ingegno sono state bastevoli, l’ho con accurata vigilanza alla primiera nitidezza ridotta, non posponendo l’osservatione delle Regoli [sic] del Volgar più terso idioma. (I took on the task, laborious though it was, of eradicating the errors that had multiplied in this work, which previously languished in a less than correct printed edition, no different from a glittering jewel in the vilest dung, thus generating much more dishonour than praise for its excellent author. None the less, I have brought it back to its original clarity, in so far as the abilities of my weak intellect have allowed, not neglecting respect for the rules of the purest vernacular language.) Of course, there is a contradiction here: the imposition of grammatical rules based on fourteenth-century practice actually took later works further away from their original state, represented in Benivieni’s case by the Florentine edition of 1519.43 The same distorting philological approach is found in many other editions, for example Domenichi’s version of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante (1545). The editor’s letter to Ercole Bentivoglio explains that he would have liked to restore the work’s purity, but that he has at least “clothed” it better: Il meglio ch’io ho saputo, presa la penna in mano, ho tolta la cura di ridurlo a quell’ornamento che la mia ignorantia li può dare. L’harei tornato alla candidezza che si conviene al suo merito, se ’l mio valore havesse saputo farlo. Così rivestitolo un poco meglio, da che egli andava dattorno lacero, et male in arnese, lo mando a V.S. […] Et ancho crederà, che i sacri misteri della lingua Toscana possono essere compresi da gli huomini nati dentro i termini d’Italia, et nodriti nella lettione de i buoni libri, senza altrimenti haver ricorso a gli oracoli et a i sacerdoti di quella provincia.44

43  On the Florentine edition, see Di Benedetto S., “L’edizione giuntina delle ‘Opere’ di Girolamo Benivieni”, ACME (Annali della Facoltà di Studi Umanistici dell’Università degli Studi di Milano), 63, 1 (2010) 165–204. 44  Pulci Luigi, Morgante Maggiore di Luigi Pulci, nuovamente stampato, et corretto per m. Lodouico Domenichi (Venice, Girolamo Scotto: 1545) fol. A2r.

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(To the best of my ability, picking up my pen, I have taken it upon myself to restore it to whatever adornment my ignorance can bestow on it. I would have brought it back to the purity that it deserves, if my ability had been sufficient. Having thus clothed it a little better, since it was circulating in tatters and looking shabby, I send it to your lordship. […] And you will also believe that the sacred mysteries of Tuscan can be understood by men born within the bounds of Italy and brought up in the reading of good books, without further recourse to the oracles and priests of that province.) Cassiodoro’s ‘nitidezza’ was supposedly that of the author’s text, but there is some equivocation about the ‘candidezza’ at which Domenichi is aiming: is it that of Pulci’s original or just the spotless clothing to which, he believes, any respectable work of literature should aspire? Domenichi, from Piacenza, is also claiming here that knowledge of the Tuscan language is not a mystery reserved for Tuscans alone, but is accessible to all well-read Italians. With this apparently casual remark, he is both adding another strong hint that there is some superstition involved in following Tuscan blindly, and making a stand against the contention of Tuscan contributors to the questione della lingua that, as one speaker, the Florentine Alessandro de’ Pazzi, puts it in Claudio Tolomei’s dialogue Il Cesano (datable to around 1527–1528), ‘[la lingua] in Fiorenza è nata, ivi ha fatto il nido suo, ivi è nutrita, ivi cresciuta, ivi si parla, ivi s’usa perfettamente’ (‘the language was born in Florence, there it has made its home, there it is nourished, there it has grown up, there it is spoken, there it is used perfectly’).45 Another influential sixteenth-century editor from outside Tuscany who used his paratexts in order to argue in various ways that the modern literary language should exclude archaic and obscure terms was the Venetian Lodovico Dolce. In his case, too, objective textual criticism is compromised by his desire to impose preconceived rules on a text. He explains to readers of one of his editions of the Decameron (1552, in quarto) that ‘non è verosimile che egli [Boccaccio] volesse empir le carte di parole antiche, che sogliono rendere oscurità, o abiette o vile; le quali si usarono nella età sopra lui’ (‘it is not plausible that Boccaccio wished to fill his pages with old words, that tend to create obscurity, or ones that are despicable or base, which were used in the age before his’). Dolce therefore replaces old Tuscan forms that he considers inaccurate readings, but are in fact genuine, such as ‘stea’ or ‘amenduni’, with ‘le

45  In Discussioni linguistiche del Cinquecento, ed. M. Pozzi, Classici italiani (Turin: 1988) 185– 275 (211–212).

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[voci] più belle e le più comuni’ (‘more beautiful and more common words’): ‘stia’, ‘amendue’ and so on.46 These examples of linguistic self-commentary, addressed to the reader in general or to a specific reader, come from the crossroads between theory and practice. They reveal what was in the minds of authors, translators and editors who were preparing a range of different kinds of texts, most of which were intended to be printed and (crucially) to be sold, at the point where abstract notions about the best form of language, or the best way of establishing correct texts, were no longer sufficient. In some of the statements that we have seen, the views of opponents are dismissed curtly and with some degree of mockery, and this succinctness seems to reflect the urgency of the choices that had to be made. Several of the letters are of additional interest because they allow us to hear the voices of some relatively minor figures who do not otherwise contribute to the questione della lingua. After the early decades of the sixteenth century, these voices tell a story of gradual compromise, of a move towards a modified form of purism, distinct from the restrictiveness of the close imitation of fourteenth-century models that had been advocated by Fortunio and Bembo. By the second half of the century, most Italians were tending to read and write in a language, sometimes described as a ‘lingua comune’, that did not correspond exactly with any one of the rigid viewpoints – archaising Florentine, courtly, contemporary Florentine or contemporary Tuscan – that we associate with the questione della lingua at the level of theoretical debate. This language was based largely on fourteenthcentury literary Tuscan, yet flexible enough to be accessible to non-Tuscans. It did not have a grand theorist within what is normally considered to be the ambit of the questione. However, letters to the reader and letters of dedication can provide us with a unique insight into the responses of users of the Italian language to the issues raised by this debate, and into the ways in which over time writers, bearing in mind the needs of their readers, reached a pragmatic resolution of these issues. Selective Bibliography Texts

Agricola Giorgio, Opera di Giorgio Agricola de l’arte de metalli partita in XII libri (Basel, Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius: 1563). Alamanni Luigi, Opere toscane, 2 vols. (Lyon, Sébastien Gryphe: 1532–1533). 46  I l Decamerone di m. Giovanni Boccaccio, nuovamente alla sua vera lettione ridotto (Venice, Gabriele Giolito: 1552), in quarto, fol. *4r.

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Benivieni Girolamo, Opere di Girolamo Benivieni firentino novissimamente rivedute et da molti errori espurgate (Venice, Niccolò Zoppino and Vincenzo di Paolo: 1522). La Bibia, che si chiama il vecchio Testamento, nuovamente tradutto in lingua volgare secondo la verità del testo Hebreo (Geneva, François Du Ron: 1562). Boccaccio Giovanni, Il Decamerone di m. Giovanni Boccaccio, nuovamente alla sua vera lettione ridotto (Venice, Gabriele Giolito: 1552). Buratelli Gabriele, Prediche del r. p. Gabriel Buratelli anconitano dottor teologo, dell’ord. eremitano di Santo Agostino sopra i sette salmi penitentiali di David profeta, accomodate a gli Evangeli quadragesimali secondo l’uso della S.R. Chiesa: opera utilissima a predicatori, et ascoltatori della parola d’Iddio (Venice, Francesco and Gaspare Bindoni and brothers: 1573). Castiglione Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier, trans. G. Bull, Penguin classics (Harmondsworth: 1976). Castiglione Baldassare, Il Libro del Cortegiano, ed. A. Quondam, 3 vols. (Rome: 2016). Citolini Alessandro, Lettera in difesa de la lingua volgare scritta a m. Cosmo Pallavicino (Venice, Francesco Marcolini: 1540). Discussioni linguistiche del Cinquecento, ed. M. Pozzi, Classici italiani (Turin: 1988). Fortunio Giovan Francesco, Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua, ed. B. Richardson, Scrittori italiani commentati 6 (Rome – Padua: 2001). Lanfranco Giovan Maria, Scintille di musica di Giovan Maria Lanfranco da Terentio parmegiano, che mostrano a leggere il canto fermo, & figurato, gli accidenti delle note misurate, le proportioni, i tuoni, il contrapunto, et la divisione del monochordo, con la accordatura de varii instrumenti, dalla quale nasce un modo, onde ciascun per se stesso imparare potrà le voci di ut re mi fa sol la la sol fa mi re ut (Brescia, Lodovico Britannico: 1533). Livy, Le deche delle historie Romane di Tito Livio padovano, tradotte nuovamente nella lingua toscana, da Iacopo Nardi cittadino fiorentino (Venice, heirs of Lucantonio Giunta: 1540). Manetti G., A Translator’s Defense, ed. M. McShane, trans. M. Young, The I Tatti Renaissance Library 71 (Cambridge, MA: 2016). Aldo Manuzio editore. Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, intro. C. Dionisotti, ed. and trans. G. Orlandi, 2 vols. (Milan: 1976). Muzzarelli Giovanni, Amorosa opra, ed. E. Scarpa (Verona: 1982). Il Nuovo Testamento di Christo Giesù signore et salvatore nostro, di greco nuovamente tradotto in lingua toscana, per Antonio Brucioli (Venice, Francesco Bindoni and Maffeo Pasini: 1539). Piccolomini Alessandro, Cento sonetti (Rome, Vincenzo Valgrisi: 1549). Piccolomini Alessandro, Cento sonetti, ed. F. Tomasi, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 553 (Geneva: 2015).

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Polybius, Polibio historico greco tradotto per m. Lodovico Domenichi et nuovamente da lui riveduto & corretto, con due fragmenti, ne i quali si ragiona delle republiche, et della grandezza di Romani (Venice, Gabriele Giolito: 1546). Poeti del Cinquecento, ed. G. Gorni – M. Danzi – S. Longhi, vol. 1, La letteratura italiana 23 (Milan – Naples: 2001). Il primo libro dell’opere burlesche (Florence, Bernardo Giunta: 1548). Pulci Luigi, Morgante Maggiore di Luigi Pulci, nuovamente stampato, et corretto per m. Lodouico Domenichi (Venice, Girolamo Scotto: 1545). Tasso Bernardo, Libro primo de gli Amori (Venice, Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio and brothers: 1534). Tasso Bernardo, Rime, 2 vols., 1: I tre libri degli amori, ed. D. Chiodo; 2: Libri quarto e quinto, Salmi e Ode, ed. V. Martignone (Turin: 1995). Vergil, La Georgica di Virgilio, nuovamente di latina in thoscana favella, per Bernardino Daniello tradotta, e commentata (Venice, Giovanni Farri and brothers: 1545). Vitae Vergilianae antiquae, ed. C. Hardie (Oxford: 1957).

Studies

Abbamonte R.P., Il ‘De Agricultura opusculum’ di Antonino Venuto. Edizione diplomatico-interpretativa, Studi e ricerche 62 (Alessandria: 2008). Albonico S., Ordine e numero. Studi sul libro di poesia e le raccolte poetiche nel Cinquecento (Alessandria: 2006). Albonico S. – Comboni A. – Panizza G. – Vela C. (eds.), Per Cesare Bozzetti. Studi di letteratura e filologia italiana (Milan: 1996). Avesani R. – Ferrari M. – Foffano T. – Frasso G. – Sottili A. (eds.), Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich, 2 vols., Storia e letteratura 162–163 (Rome: 1984). Barbieri E., Le Bibbie italiane del Quattrocento e del Cinquecento, 2 vols., Grandi Opere 4 (Milan: 1992). Dall’Aglio S. – Richardson B. – Rospocher M. (eds.), Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (London: 2017). Daniele A. – Nascimben L. (eds.), La nascita del vocabolario. Convegno di studio per i quattrocento anni del Vocabolario della Crusca, Udine, 12–13 marzo 2013, Filologia veneta. Testi e studi 8 (Padua: 2014). Di Benedetto S., “L’edizione giuntina delle ‘Opere’ di Girolamo Benivieni”, ACME (Annali della Facoltà di Studi Umanistici dell’Università degli Studi di Milano) 63, 1 (2010) 165–204. Di Filippo Bareggi C., Il mestiere di scrivere. Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento, Biblioteca del Cinquecento 43 (Rome: 1988). Dunn K., Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford: 1994).

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Faithfull R.G., “The Concept of ‘Living Language’ in Cinquecento Vernacular Philology”, Modern Language Review 48, 3 (1953) 278–292. Ferroni G., ‘Dulces lusus.’ Lirica pastorale e libri di poesia nel Cinquecento, Manierismo e barocco 16 (Alessandria: 2012). Firpo L., Scritti sulla Riforma in Italia, Biblioteca del Corpus reformatorum Italicorum (Naples: 1996). Guthmüller B., Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare. Forme e funzioni della trasposizione in volgare della poesia classica nel Rinascimento italiano, I saggi di letteratura italiana antica 13 (Fiesole: 2008). Idee in cerca di parole, parole in cerca di idee, Incontro di studio 73 (Milan: 2014). Jossa S. – Pieri G. (eds.), Chivalry, Academy, and Cultural Dialogues: The Italian Contribution to European Culture (Cambridge: 2016). Lepschy A.L. – Tosi A. (eds.), Languages of Italy: Histories and Dictionaries, Il portico 142 (Ravenna: 2007). Richardson B., Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History (Cambridge: 1994). Sanson H., Women, Language and Grammar in Italy 1500–1900, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs (Oxford: 2011). Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura. Convegno internazionale di studi (Firenze, 26–30 giugno 1980) Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (Florence: 1982). Serianni L. – Trifone P. (eds.), Storia della lingua italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: 1993–1994). Tomasi F., Studi sulla lirica rinascimentale, Miscellanea erudita. Nuova serie 80 (Rome – Padua: 2012). Trovato P., Con ogni diligenza corretto. La stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna: 1991). Trovato P., L’ordine dei tipografi. Lettori, stampatori, correttori tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Biblioteca del Cinquecento 79 (Rome: 1998). Venturi G. – Cappelletti F. (eds.), Gli dei a corte. Letteratura e immagini nella Ferrara estense, Ferrara paesaggio estense 3 (Florence: 2009). Zampese C., Tevere e Arno. Studi sulla lirica del Cinquecento, Letteratura italiana 14 (Milan: 2012).

chapter 6

‘All Outward and on Show’: Montaigne’s External Glosses John O’Brien A putative episode in Michel de Montaigne’s life (1533–1592), recorded by La Croix du Maine in his Bibliothèque (‘Library’) of 1584, recounts that king Henry III of France told the essayist that he had much enjoyed reading his book, to which Montaigne is reported to have replied, ‘il fault donq’ necessairement que ie plaise à vostre Maiesté, puisque mon liure luy est aggreable, car il ne contient autre chose qu’vn discours de ma vie, & de mes actions’ (‘I must perforce please your Majesty, since my book is agreeable to him, for it contains nothing other than a discourse of my life and my actions’).1 Assuming this is more than a polite conversational rejoinder, these words strike us as decidedly odd. The Essais are not a discourse about their author’s life and actions in any conventional sense. They do not adopt the traditional chronological framework of a biography. There is no step-by-step narrative of Montaigne’s life. Such life events as are described are few and far between and while some are openly discussed, most have to be largely deduced from the implications of the essayist’s words rather than from anything he says directly. If you are looking for action-packed adventure with Montaigne as the hero, do not read the Essais. To modern readers, indeed, the Essais are less valuable as the record of external accomplishments than as the origin of a particular brand of introspection by which the minutiae of the inner life are subject to special analysis and evaluation. Self-dissection and self-glossing have been taken historically as Montaigne’s most pressing concerns, not least because many of his own most memorable formulations give this impression. Such reflective passages have traditionally enjoyed a favoured status in modern critical evaluations of his work, most notably in the late twentieth century as instances of his reflexivity, his ultimate concern (on this view) not only with the self and

1  La Croix du Maine François Grudé de, Premier Volume de la Bibliothèque (Paris, L’Angelier: 1584) 329. My translation. I express my grateful thanks to my colleague, Kathryn Banks, who commented on an earlier draft of this essay.

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self-commentary, but with the status of writing itself.2 It would be difficult to deny that such ideas form a coherent pattern in the Essais and a distinctive part of their originality. Yet at the same time, another strain – no less distinctive and significant – can be discerned in Montaigne’s work, travelling in another direction. In his preface to the reader, he claims that he is himself the matter of his book; he does not – let us note – make distinctions between particular moments of intensity and the general run of his work: the whole book, he says, is filled with the matter of Montaigne. If we are to take this claim seriously and combine it with the implications of his reply to Henry III, we need to investigate how writing is linked not to brooding inwardness, but to the externalisation of thought, feeling and reflection. In this version of his project, Montaigne is turned just as much outward as inward; there is no real division between the one and the other. Thought as action, word as deed, self-commentary as refracted through outward projection are the primary features of this mode, following the example of Perseus, king of Macedon, cited in the chapter “De l’experience” (“Of experience”): ‘son esprit, ne s’attachant à aucune condition, alloit errant par tout genre de vie et representant des moeurs si essorées et vagabondes’ (‘his mind, settling on no condition, went roaming around among every type of existence and displaying such windborne and wandering manners’).3 The matter of Montaigne’s book cannot therefore be confined to the question of introspection, as the critical tradition has largely done; introspective vocabulary does not provide a universal metalanguage for understanding the Essais. Since Montaigne refers to himself indeed on one significant occasion as ‘tout au dehors et en evidence’ (‘all outward and on show’) (III.3: V, 823; my translation), it is worth pausing to consider in what sense or senses this self-description might be true and whether the internal and the external are as antagonistic as critical accounts of Montaigne sometime suppose. In this regard, one particular area of interest is the nature of the Montaignian ‘I’ ( je, the moi). It has long been seen as the expression of the individual, the pronoun that singularises the thoughts under discussion. The ‘I’ has been perceived not only as what reflects on the issue at hand, but as what distinguishes the consciousness of the essayist from the surrounding matter. The ‘I’ is in this respect discontinuous with the text in which it appears; it is the sign as well as 2  See e.g. Cave T., The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979). 3  Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. P. Villey – V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: 1965) 1077; The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. D. Frame (Stanford: 1958) III.13, 825 (translation modified). References will henceforth be included in the text using the letters V and F, followed by the page number.

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the instrument of differentiation. Yet in the light of outwardness, what function can be ascribed to the ‘I’? The approach developed in this chapter will be based on extended mind theory, in which, to quote Andy Clark, ‘plasticity and multiplicity are our true constants’.4 I shall argue that the limits of the essayist’s ‘I’ do not coincide with the boundaries of skin and skull, while bearing in mind that as Terence Cave has very recently emphasised, ‘there is still controversy over what exactly is meant by ascribing cognition to phenomena beyond the confines of the body (or indeed of the brain)’.5 I shall claim that, like the example of king Perseus, Montaigne’s ‘I’ can be extended into other lives; grammatically singular, it can become existentially plural, not least because this idea of permeability, plasticity and extension is complemented by another image found once again in the final chapter of the Essais, “De l’experience”, where he tells us that he has trained himself from his youth to see his own life mirrored in that of others (III, 13: V, 1076; F, 824). Concrete evidence of the essayist’s fascination with the lives of others can be gleaned not only from his reading of biographies, notably Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, but from his abiding interest in prismatic, many-sided figures such as Julius Caesar who combines the activities of the writer, the soldier and the statesman. Linking Caesar with Xenophon at various points, Montaigne observes that ‘[i]ls ont cherché à recommander non leur dire, mais leur faire’ (‘they sought to recommend not their sayings but their doings’) (V, 249; F, 183) and again: ‘Caesar et Xenophon ont eu dequoy fonder et fermir leur narration en la grandeur de leurs faicts comme en une baze juste et solide’ (‘[i]n the greatness of their deeds Caesar and Xenophon had something to found and establish their narrative upon, as on a just and solid base’) (V, 663; F, 503). While the image of the mirror is one of the most common in Renaissance literature, appearing in a wide variety of contexts, more is at stake for Montaigne in the question of mirroring than the issue of reflection alone. Indeed, Miranda Anderson comments in this way on the implications for cognition: The physical properties of a mirror relate to the figurative properties of a metaphor, which is based on notions of transfer: an image of the beholder is transferred onto a reflection, which is at once analogous to and yet different from the observing self, playing with the co-existence of similitude and dissimilitude, and the mutual formation of each other by the original and the image. The complexity of the mirror as a literary motif 4  Quoted in Anderson M., The Renaissance Extended Mind, New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (London: 2015) 67. 5  Cave T., Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: 2016) 52.

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arises from the obviously liminal space which it inhabits, being neither entirely subject nor entirely object: the mirror is potentially revelatory of the interior world of the self and yet conversely figures the objectified self within the external world, while exposing the negotiability and permeability of the boundary between them.6 The creative interdependency of the viewer and the viewed; the porosity of boundaries between the inner and the outer; questions of similarity and dissimilarity, of analogy and difference: Anderson deliberately underscores the full potential, and the consequences, of the mirror as a cognitive instrument. Concentrating on the major discussions of the figure of Julius Caesar in the Essais,7 I shall claim that by mirroring himself in such classical figures, Montaigne aims to dismantle sharp distinctions between the world of action and the universe of words, to extend cognition through depicting and indeed perhaps even inhabiting the deeds of others, and to nurture possibilities for self-commentary which favour a strong sense of externalisation rather than simply inward-looking self-analysis. Correspondingly, in this version of selfcommentary, the emphasis is on its embedding and activity within the literary text rather than on authorial pronouncements separate from the text, so that a distinction between the primary and secondary texts is not preserved in this instance. Pierre Villey first established the importance of Julius Caesar in Montaigne’s Essais.8 Recent scholars such as Carol Clark have shown how pervasive a 6  Anderson, The Renaissance Extended Mind 165. See also Anderson M. (ed.), The Book of the Mirror: An Interdisciplinary Collection exploring the Cultural History of the Mirror (Newcastle: 2007). 7  For other assessments of Caesar in Montaigne, see Chevallier R., “Montaigne lecteur et juge de César”, in idem (ed.), Présence de César. Actes du Colloque des 9–11 décembre 1983: Hommage au doyen Michel Rambaud, Caesarodunum 20, numero spécial (Paris: 1985) 91–107; McGowan M., The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: 2000) 301–306; idem, “The Diverse Faces of Caesar: Fabrication and Manipulation in the Essais”, in Cameron K. – Willett L. (eds.), Le Visage changeant de Montaigne / The Changing Face of Montaigne. Colloques. Congrès et Conférences sur la Renaissance Européenne 39 (Paris: 2003) 121–137; Séguier-Leblanc C., “‘Somme, c’est César’: Le jugement de Montaigne sur la Guerre civile”, Montaigne Studies, XVII (2005) 175–190; Mackenzie L., “Imitation Gone Wrong: The ‘Pestillentially Ambitious’ Figure of Julius Caesar in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais”, in Wyke M. (ed.), Julius Caesar in Western Culture (Oxford: 2006) 131–147; Clark C., “Some Renaissance Caesars”, in Griffin M. (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Oxford: 2009) 356–370. 8  Villey P., Les Sources et évolution des “Essais” de Montaigne, 2 vols. (Paris: 1908), I: Les Sources et la chronologie des “Essais” 90–92. A wide-ranging collection of articles on the importance of Caesar in France is Méniel B. – Ribémont B. (eds.), La Figure de Jules César au Moyen

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presence this Roman figure is, mentioned over 100 times by name and occurring not only in extensive reflections but also in indirect allusions and characterisations.9 We are also fortunate in possessing Montaigne’s reading notes on Caesar, containing seven hundred entries in a 1570 Plantin edition now preserved at Chantilly;10 upwards of five hundred of these notes are autograph. The essayist records that he completed reading the Civil Wars in February 1578 and the Gallic War in July of the same year.11 Not only that, but the endpaper on which he sets down the date of finishing the Civil Wars also contains a lengthy and instructive evaluation of the Roman general. In view of its importance for our purposes, it is worth transcribing the whole piece [Fig. 6.1]: Somme c’est cæsar Vn des plus grans miracles de Nature Si elle eut volu menager ses faueurs ell’en eut bien faict deus pieces admirables Le plus disert le plus net et le plus sincere historien qui fut iamais car en cete partie il n’en est nul romein qui lui soit comparable et sui tresaise que cicero le iuge de mesme Et le chef de guerre en toutes considerations des plus grans qu’ele fit iamais Quand ie considere la grandur incomparable de cete ame i’excuse la uictoire de ne s’estre peu desfaire de lui uoire en cete tresiniuste & tresinique cause Il me samble qu’il ne iuge de pompeius que deus fois / 208 / 324 / Ses autres exploits & ses conseils il les narre naïfuemant ne leu[r] desrobant rien de leur merite Voire par fois il lui preste des recomandations de quoi il se fut bien passe Come lors qu’il dict que ses conseils tardifs & consideres estoint tires en mauuese part par ceus de son armee Car par la il samble le vouloir descharger d’auoir done cete miserable bataille tenant cesar combatu & assiegè de la fein / 319 / Il me samble bien qu’il passe vn peu legieremant ce grand accidant Âge et à la Renaissance, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 13 spécial (2006) and 14 spécial (2007); it includes Boudou B. – Charpentier F., “La Figure de Jules César dans le Discours de la servitude volontaire de La Boétie et dans les Essais de Montaigne”, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 13 spécial (2006) 183–203. 9  Clark C., “Some Renaissance Caesars” 367–368. 10  Caesar Gaius Julius, Commentarii (Antwerp, Plantin: 1570); Chantilly, Musée Condé, shelfmark XII D 58. This work was reproduced in facsimile in “Somme, c’est César [...]”: Première reproduction en fac-similé, de l’exemplaire des ‘Commentaires de César’ annoté par Montaigne, ed. A. Gallet (Chantilly and Bordeaux: 2002), with a review and corrections by Legros A. – Tournon A., “Compte rendu du fac-similé publié par André Gallet, avec retouches et ajouts de plusieurs transcriptions faites en marge du fac-similé”, Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, VIIe série, 35–36 (juillet–décembre 2004) 116–127. 11  See Legros A., Montaigne manuscrit, Études montaignistes 55 (Paris: 2010), “Annotations de Montaigne lecteur, César”, 489–620 (617, 620 for the dating of Montaigne’s reading of Caesar).

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Figure 6.1 Montaigne, characterisation of Caesar, in Caesar, Commentarii (Antwerp, Christopher Plantin: 1570), shelfmark: XII D 58. By kind permission of BVH (Tours) and the Musée Condé, Chantilly

de la mort de pompeius De tous les autres du parti contrere il en parle si indifferammant louant tantost nous proposant fidelemant leurs actions vertueuses tantost uitieuses qu’il n’est pas possible d’y marcher plus consciantieusemant S’il desrobe rien a la verite i’estime que ce soit parlant de soi car si grandes choses ne peuuent pas estre faictes par lui qu’il n’y aie plus du sien qu’il n’y en met C’est ce liure qu’un general darmee deuroit continuellemant auoir dauant les yeus pour patron come faisoit

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le marechal Strozzi qui le sçauoit quasi par ceur & l’a traduit non pas ie ne sçai quel philippe de comines que charles cinquiesme auoit en pareille recomandation que le grand Alexandre auoit les les euures de Homere Marcus Brutus Polybius l’historie[n].12 (In sum, this is caesar One of the greatest wonders of Nature If she had wished to be sparing with her favours, she could easily have made two admirable specimens out of him The most eloquent the clearest and the most honest historian that ever was for in this area there is no Roman comparable to him and I am very pleased that cicero judges him similarly And as a commander in all respects one of the greatest Nature ever made When I consider the incomparable greatness of this soul I excuse victory for being unable to shake free of him, even in that very unjust and very iniquitous cause It seems to me that he evaluates pompey only twice /208/324/ His [i.e. Pompey’s] other exploits and deliberations he recounts straightforwardly subtracting nothing from their merit Indeed sometimes he lends him credit which he could have easily omitted As when he says his tardy and carefully weighed deliberations were taken in the wrong direction by those in his army For in that way he seems to wish to discharge him for having fought that wretched battle [Pharsalus, 48 BC] while keeping caesar holed up and besieged by famine /319/ It seems to me that he passes over the great calamity of pompey’s death rather lightly Of all those others of the opposite party, he speaks so dispassionately praising now faithfully suggesting to us their virtuous deeds now their wicked deeds that it is not possible to tread more conscientiously If he secretly subtracts anything from the truth I consider that it is speaking of himself for such great things cannot be done without his investing more of himself in them than he sets down It is this book that a military commander ought to have continually to hand as a model as was the case with Field Marshal Strozzi who knew it almost by heart and translated it not some philippe de comines or other that charles V had in comparable regard to Alexander’s liking for the the works of Homer Marcus Brutus the historian Polybius.)13 This document puts forward three major points: Caesar’s status as a phenomenon of Nature; his qualities as an historian and to a lesser degree as a general; and his value as a model for contemporary military commanders. Within this sequence, most of the assessment is devoted to the comparison between 12  Ibidem 617–618. 13  My translation.

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Caesar and Pompey and more particularly to Caesar’s evaluation of Pompey. We should note three features about this last point. First, Caesar’s judgment and Montaigne’s stand in parallel; they share the vocabulary of adjudication, so that Caesar the writer reflects in miniature Montaigne the writer (and vice versa). Secondly, bringing Pompey into the orbit of Caesar suggests affinities between the two after the manner of Plutarch, although without taking the formal comparison further at this stage; and in Plutarch, of course, Pompey was compared to Agesilaus, not to Caesar. Thirdly, there is a close connection between Caesar the general and Caesar the author, the miracle of nature and the wonder among historians; in both spheres, the Roman is an instance of excellence. The spotlight, in this manuscript account, is indeed firmly on that notion of the supreme, the exceptional, the outstanding, whereas, like the figure of the French reader-writer himself, the other aspects of the portrait remain a virtual presence, suggested rather than developed at greater length. Nonetheless, this passage will constitute the nucleus which Montaigne will subsequently potentiate more fully in the Essais themselves. In that sense, it constitutes an instance of the way in which, as André Tournon has shown,14 something that starts as a gloss can be expanded into an essai – or in this case, several. It so happens, indeed, that a fair amount of this assessment of Caesar is refracted across a spectrum of chronologically early chapters in Montaigne, sometimes verbatim, and it is very likely, though not absolutely certain, that the manuscript passage preceded these chapters, which would all have been written a little later in the same period, 1578–1580. Elements of the portrait are, for instance, repeated in chapter 34 of book 2, “Observations sur les moyens de faire la guerre de Julius Caesar” (“Observations on Julius Caesar’s methods of making war”). In the print version, though, the sequence is re-organised and re-weighted to give a different slant on the issues it raises. From the very start (rather than at the end as in the manuscript), the connection is now set up between military leaders and their favourite books: Alexander read Homer, Scipio Africanus Xenophon, Brutus Polybius, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V Philippe de Comines. But the greatest praise, as in the hand-written account, is reserved for the French field marshal Pietro Strozzi (c. 1510–1558) whose preference was for Julius Caesar. Montaigne then comments on this choice: car, à la verité, ce devroit estre le breviaire de tout homme de guerre, comme estant le vray et souverain patron de l’art militaire. Et Dieu sçait encore de quelle grace et de quelle beauté il a fardé cette riche matiere, 14  See his classic work Tournon A., Montaigne, la glose et l’essai. Édition revue et corrigée, précédée d’un Réexamen, Études montaignistes 37 (Paris: 2001; 1st ed.: Lyon: 1983).

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d’une façon de dire si pure, si delicate et si parfaicte, que, à mon goust, il n’y a aucuns escrits au monde qui puissent estre comparables aux siens en cette partie. Je veux icy enregistrer certains traicts particuliers et rares, sur le faict de ses guerres, qui me sont demeurez en memoire. Son armée estant en quelque effroy pour le bruit qui couroit des grandes forces que menoit contre lui le Roy Juba, [...] les ayant faict assembler [...] V, 736

(for in truth he should be the breviary of every warrior, as being the true and sovereign model of the military art. And God knows, moreover with what grace and beauty he has embellished that rich matter, with a manner of speaking, so pure, so delicate, and so perfect, that to my taste there are no writings in the world comparable to his in this respect. I want to record here certain individual and unusual features, on the subject of his wars, that have remained in my memory. When his army was in some fright at the rumor that was current of the great forces that King Juba was leading against him, [...] he assembled them to reassure them [...]) F, 556

The movement of this passage is carefully modulated: from the soldier’s vademecum and a fulsome description of Caesar’s style to a direct account of specific episodes in Caesar’s career, by way of Montaigne’s own pivotal intervention in the flow (‘Je veux icy enregistrer’, ‘I want to record here [...]’). That sequence – book : I ( je) : action – is a characteristic feature of the phenomenon I am describing: taking on a more active role, the ‘I’ now unites and also activates the two components, making of Julius’s Commentaries Montaigne’s own book and turning the Roman general into an extension of the je through his absorption into memory. Caesar moves from existence as a military manual to a centre-stage agent; he is quickened into life by the essayist’s pen and mind. Thereafter, the rest of the chapter is fully devoted to Caesar’s exploits, recounted in the third person (like Caesar’s own narrative style), with only two minor additional comments from the je. Yet this is far from being a motley list of military exploits. Caesar was of course the teller of his own deeds and, in telling of the teller, Montaigne underscores particular facets: almost every sentence relates ‘traicts particuliers et rares’ (‘individual and unusual features’) of the Roman general’s strategic genius. The extraordinary is suggested by the counter-intuitive nature of his style as a commander. He trains his men to obey

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without understanding their leader’s thinking and changes orders at the last minute; he establishes a place for encampment, but then pushes his soldiers further on, especially in wet weather. Yet at the same time, he calls his soldiers ‘comrades’ (socii in Latin) and knows how to relax as well as tighten military discipline, allowing them to loot on occasion and asking nothing of them but valour. ‘Il les rapaisoit plus par authorité et par audace, que par douceur’ (‘He appeased them more by authority and audacity than by gentleness’) (V, 737; F, 557), Montaigne says when recounting an episode of mutiny and indeed audacity and authority are the keynotes in his portrait of Caesar. All the incidents he selects are kairetic, in other words Caesar knows how to make use of the opportunity, how to seize the moment,15 as Montaigne stresses: ‘car il redit maintes-fois que c’est la plus souveraine partie d’un capitaine que la science de prendre au point les occasions, et la diligence, qui est en ses exploits à la verité inouye et incroyable’ (‘for many a time he repeats that the most sovereign quality of a commander is the knowledge of how to seize occasions at the right point, and speed in execution, which in his exploits is truly unheard-of and incredible’) (V, 737; F, 557). When, for example, the Helvetic tribes make overtures to him, he delays his reply two days under the cover of a truce in order to assemble his army. Caesar shows himself to be fortune’s master, not her slave, knowing when to refuse her gifts as well as when to accept what she offers; and he demonstrates his command of his troops through personal attachment as well as through his natural authority and military discipline. While Caesar is not perceived here as a fully independent consciousness, he nevertheless embodies characteristics such as boldness, mastery and command, none of which can be directly predicated of the writer sitting in his study. Yet through extended cognition of Caesar’s talents, he arguably comes to know and share these features he so values. And such cognition is extended by presenting Caesar not as the object of reported narrative, but as the subject of action, so that these are words mobilised into deeds and not words as mere descriptors of deeds. Through the degree of mirror-like reflection between the writer and his topic, Montaigne and Caesar, the distance between subject and object is reduced, at the same time that the reader enabled to see what words look like in action as attached to a specific agent and how writing can be a form of enactment. Moreover, this notion of flexible self-projection through extension is further nuanced and refined by Montaigne in “Observations”. The key element here is Caesar’s relationship to speaking and writing:

15  See further Paul J., “The Use of Kairos in Renaissance Political Philosophy”, Renaissance Quarterly, 67, 1 (2014) 43–78.

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De vray, sa langue luy a fait en plusieurs lieux de bien notables services; et estoit, de son temps mesme, son eloquence militaire en telle recommendation que plusieurs en son armée recueilloyent ses harangues; et par ce moyen il en fut assemblé des volumes qui ont duré long temps apres luy. Son parler avoit des graces particulieres, si que ses familiers, et, entre autres, Auguste, oyant reciter ce qui en avoit esté recueilli, reconnoissoit jusques aux phrases et aux mots ce qui n’estoit pas du sien. La premiere fois qu’il sortit de Rome avec charge publique, il arriva en huit jours à la riviere du Rhone, ayant dans sa coche devant luy un secretaire ou deux qui escrivoyent sans cesse, et derriere luy celuy qui portoit son espée. V, 738

(In truth, his tongue did him very notable services in many places; and even in his own time, his military eloquence was in such high esteem that many in his army took down his harangues; and by that means there were volumes of them collected that lasted a long time after him. His speech had particular graces, so that his intimates, and among them Augustus, hearing anyone recite what had been collected of them, could recognize what was not his, even to phrases and words. The first time he left Rome with a public command, he reached the river Rhone in a week, having in his coach in front of him one or two secretaries who were continually writing, and behind him the man who carried his sword.) F, 558

This small mise en abyme of the general who is also an author and an eloquent orator not only captures the multi-dimensional picture of Caesar portrayed by this chapter, but equally creates a suggestive linkage between him and Montaigne: Caesar stands in the same relation to his writings and deeds as the essayist stands in relation to writing and representation; they can mirror each other’s identity, if not character. It is not difficult in this light to see how thought can be quickened into action; how such action needs writing; and how both imply a human agent. And all three elements are set on the same level, their equal significance stressed, in this vignette of the man in his carriage dictating to his secretaries while his swordbearer sits behind. This is not the only time Montaigne discusses the intermixing of style and man in Caesar and in no less arresting terms. In “Des livres” (“Of books”), he analyses a range of historians, culminating in one particular one, and in words which are close to and in some cases almost exactly the same as the manuscript

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character sketch in his copy of the 1570 Caesar (the quotations or echoes are emphasised in blue typeface): Mais Caesar singulierement me semble meriter qu’on l’estudie, non pour la science de l’Histoire seulement, mais pour luy mesme, tant il a de perfection et d’excellence par dessus tous les autres, quoy que Saluste soit du nombre. Certes, je lis cet autheur avec un peu plus de reverence et de respect qu’on ne list les humains ouvrages: tantost le considerant luy mesme par ses actions et le miracle de sa grandeur, tantost la pureté et inimitable polissure de son langage qui a surpassé non seulement tous les Historiens, comme dit Cicero, mais à l’adventure Cicero mesme. Avec tant de syncerité en ses jugemens, parlant de ses ennemis, que, sauf les fauces couleurs dequoy il veut couvrir sa mauvaise cause et l’ordure de sa pestilente ambition, je pense qu’en cela seul on y puisse trouver à redire qu’il a esté trop espargnant à parler de soy. Car tant de grandes choses ne peuvent avoir esté executées par luy, qu’il n’y soit alé beaucoup plus du sien qu’il n’y en met. V, 416–17

(But it seems to me that Caesar singularly deserves to be studied, not only for the knowledge of history, but for himself, so much perfection and excellence he has above all the others, although Sallust is one of their number. Indeed I read this author with a little more reverence and respect than one reads human works: now considering him in himself by his actions and the miracle of his greatness, now the purity and inimitable polish of his language, which surpassed not only all the historians, as Cicero says, but perhaps Cicero himself. With so much sincerity in his judgments when speaking of his enemies, that except for the false colors with which he tries to cover his evil cause and the filthiness of his pestilential ambition, I think the only fault that can be found in him is that he has been too sparing in speaking of himself. For so many great things cannot have been performed by him without so much more of himself having gone into them than he sets down.) F, 303

‘[N]on pour la science de l’Histoire seulement, mais pour luy mesme’ (‘Not only for the knowledge of history, but for himself’): Montaigne’s initial phrase anticipates his more expansive reflection in the lines that follow, which in turn incorporate, often directly, the terms of the manuscript account we saw earlier. Caesar is, once again, the very personification not only of the historian,

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but also of the writer in general, thereby bringing “Des livres” into the orbit of the later “Observations” and conjoining the two chapters by seeing Caesar the writer, the man and the agent as a single continuous entity. Thus “Observations” offers a dynamic, three-dimensional model for approaching the relationship between thought and action, the transformation of the human subject into an agent, and the performative rather than constative nature of literary representation. Although they have been separated here for the purposes of our analysis, these three aspects are considered all together in chapter II.34; they are interwoven and interdependent, not sequential or hierarchical, and this is how Montaigne commonly depicts their activity. If chapter II.34 gives the content of his consciousness and transforms what would otherwise be bookish memory into movement and activity, there is nonetheless a constant interplay between books, deeds, and the writer’s consciousness; the repetition of ‘memoire’ in the closing sentence emphasises this dimension, referring as it does both to human memory and to editions of Caesar’s works which act as Montaigne’s aide-mémoire. In one sense, his book of Essais is the affordance which facilitates the cognitive extension of self into other, thought into action, writing into performance. Yet the relationships that he sets up make the book less obviously instrumental or functional. What he builds for us are not just textual layers of meaning, but more ambitiously a spatial model of triangulation creating a sense of volume and perspective which enables his topic, Julius Caesar, to be viewed from different, but complementary, angles. When the essayist engages in speculative self-projection, he does so in ways that require his reader to follow him in breeching the gap between the internal sphere of reflection and writing, and the external world of military service and exploits, and to suggest their mutual interdependency in the process. In addition, to re-apply a quotation from Miranda Anderson, ‘That the mind or subject may be encapsulated by a textual distillation and further that this distillation of the mind will in turn teach the mind that created it, creates a circularity of created and creation between the object and the subject which places their duality in question, as it is suggested that objects create subjects as much as they are created’.16 As Anderson underlines here, the relationship between the mind and its creations need not be hierarchical. In placing himself on the same level as this classical figure some of whose primary qualities he admires, Montaigne insinuates that commentary on Caesar can equally well be commentary on himself, at least to an extent, and so he reinvents the notion of a congress of minds and souls by according a person on paper the same status as an entity in the phenomenal life of the external world. 16  Anderson, The Renaissance Extended Mind 142.

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This last point feeds into a further important element which “Observations” also instances. This is the comparison Montaigne makes in this chapter between Caesar and other military leaders. In other words, the essayist also sets up a series of parallels for the Roman general; he creates his own parallel lives in configurations reminiscent of Plutarch who includes Caesar and Alexander in his writings, although without overtly comparing them, as he does in other Lives. Montaigne’s comparison runs as follows: Je le [=Caesar] trouve un peu plus retenu et consideré en ses entreprinses qu’Alexandre: car cettuy-cy semble rechercher et courir à force les dangiers, comme un impetueux torrent qui choque et attaque sans discretion et sans chois tout ce qu’il rencontre: Sic tauri-formis volvitur Aufidus, Qui Regna Dauni perfluit Appuli, Dum saevit, horrendamque cultis Diluviem meditatur agris. Aussi estoit-il embesoigné en la fleur et premiere chaleur de son aage, là où Caesar s’y print estant des-jà meur et bien avancé. Outre ce qu’Alexandre estoit d’une temperature plus sanguine, colere et ardente, et si esmouvoit encore cette humeur par le vin, duquel Caesar estoit tresabstinent: mais où les occasions de la necessité se presentoyent et où la chose le requeroit, il ne fut jamais homme faisant meilleur marché de sa personne. […] Ces gens là ont eu je ne sçay quelle plus qu’humaine confiance de leur fortune. Et disoit-il qu’il failloit executer, non pas consulter, les hautes entreprises. V, 739–40

(I find him [Caesar] a little more restrained and deliberate in his enterprises than Alexander; for the latter seems to seek out dangers and run headlong to meet them, like an impetuous torrent that runs into and attacks everything it encounters, without discrimination or choice: Thus surges bull-like Aufidus, Which flows through the Apulian Daunus’ realm, When in a rage, with horrid flood, He aims the fruitful fields to overwhelm. Also he was occupied in war in the flower and first ardor of his youth, whereas Caesar took to it when he was already mature and well advanced in years. Besides, Alexander was of a more sanguine, choleric, and ardent temperament, and moreover he stimulated this humor further with wine,

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of which Caesar partook very sparingly. But where necessary occasions presented themselves and the matter required it, there was never a man who held his life more cheaply. […] People like him have had a mysterious and superhuman confidence in their own fortune. And he used to say that a man must carry out, not deliberate about, high enterprises.) F, 559–560

Two chapters later, in “Des plus excellens hommes” (“Of the most outstanding men”), Montaigne returns to this comparison: il confessera, tout cela mis ensemble, que j’ay eu raison de le preferer à Caesar mesme, qui seul m’a peu mettre en doubte du chois. Et il ne se peut nier qu’il n’y aye plus du sien en ses exploits, plus de la fortune en ceux d’Alexandre. Ils ont eu plusieurs choses esgales, et Caesar à l’adventure aucunes plus grandes. Ce furent deux feux ou deux torrens à ravager le monde par divers endroits, Et velut immissi diversis partibus ignes Arentem in silvam et virgulta sonantia lauro; Aut ubi decursu rapido de montibus altis Dant sonitum spumosi amnes et in aequora currunt, Quisque suum populatus iter. Mais quand l’ambition de Caesar auroit de soy plus de moderation, elle a tant de mal’heur, ayant rencontré ce vilain subject de la ruyne de son pays et de l’empirement universel du monde, que toutes pieces ramassées et mises en la balance, je ne puis que je ne panche du costé d’Alexandre. V, 755

(If anyone puts all this together, he will confess that I have been right to prefer him [Alexander] even to Caesar, who alone was able to make me doubtful of my choice. And it cannot be denied that there is more of his own in Caesar’s exploits, and more of fortune in Alexander’s. They had many equal qualities, and Caesar perhaps some greater ones. They were two fires or two torrents to ravage the world in divers places, As, spreading devastation in their flight, Torrents roar seaward from a mountain height, Or fires from opposing quarters rush Upon a forest thick with laurel bush.

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But even if Caesar’s ambition had more moderation in itself, it is so unfortunate in having for its abominable object the ruin of his country and the general detriment of the world, that all things being put together and placed in the balance, I cannot help inclining to the side of Alexander.) F, 572

One of the most striking features of this comparison is the quality of Caesar and Alexander as phenomena of nature – both are compared to elemental forces. That same idea informs “Observations” where Caesar, a torrent and a fire here, is in addition likened there to the swiftness of lightening and to a boulder rushing down a mountain side and carrying all before it. The activity of judging between the relative merits of Caesar and Alexander integrates the poetic comparison into the work of evaluation. For the essayist’s verdict pivots on the question of Caesar’s ambition, a problem mentioned elsewhere,17 so that the more-thanhuman energies of the Roman general now seem to be simply an image of his very human lust for power. Moreover, in a work such as the Essais which so continuously enquires about the status of the human and the natural, the superhuman and the supernatural, the parallel lives of Caesar and Alexander create interconnections with other thematic strands in this and other chapters, ranging from the supernatural heroism of Cato to the human heroism of Socrates, from the acknowledgement of Caesar, along with Alexander and Cyrus, as one of the ‘maistres du monde’ (‘masters of the world’) (III.12: V, 1058; F, 810) to the celebration of Philopoemen, the pre-eminent general of the Achaean League who, says Montaigne following Plutarch, knows not only how to command according to the law, but to command the law itself when the need arises. Montaigne pursues that ‘parallel lives’ theme elsewhere, for example in chapter III.10 which adds another comparison, this time between Caesar and Pompey: Le ciel n’a point veu un si poisant desaccord que celuy de Cesar et de Pompeius, ny ne verra pour l’advenir. Toutesfois il me semble reconnoistre en ces belles ames une grande moderation de l’un envers l’autre. C’estoit une jalousie d’honneur et de commandement, qui ne les emporta pas à haine furieuse et indiscrete, sans malignité et sans detraction. En leurs plus aigres exploits je descouvre quelque demeurant de respect et de bien-veuillance, et juge ainsi que, s’il leur eust esté possible, chacun d’eux eust desiré de faire son affaire sans la ruyne de son compaignon plustost qu’avec sa ruyne. Combien autrement il en va de Marius et de Sylla: prenez y garde. 17  Mackenzie, “Imitation Gone Wrong”, particularly emphasises this aspect.

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Il ne faut pas se precipiter si esperduement apres nos affections et interests. Comme, estant jeune, je m’opposois au progrez de l’amour que je sentoy trop avancer sur moy, et estudiois qu’il ne me fut si aggreable qu’il vint à me forcer en fin et captiver du tout à sa mercy, j’en use de mesme à toutes autres occasions où ma volonté se prend avec trop d’appetit. V, 1014

(Heaven has not seen, and will never see again, so grave a discord as that between Caesar and Pompey. However, I seem to recognize in these noble souls a great moderation toward one another. It was a rivalry in honor and authority, which did not carry them away into furious and undiscerning hatred, a rivalry without malignity and without detraction. In their bitterest exploits I discover some remnant of respect and good will, and thus I judge that if it had been possible, each of them would have wished to do his business without the ruin of his fellow rather than with his ruin. How differently it goes with Marius and Sulla. Make a note of it. We must not rush so frantically after our passions and interests. Just as when as I was young I opposed the progress of love, which I felt advancing too far upon me, and took care that it should not be so pleasing to me as in the end to overpower me and hold me completely at its mercy, so I do the same on all other occasions where my will is seized with too strong an appetite.) F, 775–776

The passage moves rapidly and suddenly between statements about the two Roman generals and the essayist’s evaluation of their character and activity contrasted with those of Marius and Sulla. It then modulates into a generalisation about passion with the essayist as its prime instance, the vocabulary of love replacing but nonetheless recalling the lexicon of war and military campaigns. In one of the clearest occurrences of the mirror theme, the parallel is now no longer just between Caesar and Pompey but between both of these and the essayist himself. The movement between modes – plural and singular, ‘they’ / ‘I’ / ‘we’ – and between the outer world of the Roman Civil wars and the inner sphere of reflection and judgment suggests, most importantly of all, how a classical general such as Caesar is integrated into the project of a life as well as of life-writing, that is, how the use of such figures represents not only intertextuality, but also distributed cognition of a very Montaignian kind. Chapter 33 of book 2 of the Essais, “L’histoire de Spurina” (“The Story of Spurina”), offers a more detailed example still of this parallelism between the essayist and his chosen classical figure of Caesar. It is the chapter which immediately precedes “Observations” and is in some sense paired with it, sharing

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with its successor, as we shall see, a number of crucial traits. “L’histoire de Spurina” opens with an abstract philosophical precept: La philosophie ne pense pas avoir mal employé ses moyens quand elle a rendu à la raison la souveraine maistrise de nostre ame et l’authorité de tenir en bride nos appetits. V, 728

(Philosophy does not think it has used its resources badly when it has given to reason the sovereign mastery of our soul and the authority to hold our appetites in check.) F, 550

Expanding on this core idea, the topic of discussion in this chapter will accordingly be our control (or more frequently lack of control) of our passions or appetites. Caesar illustrates three such passions: his amorous pursuits, his ambition, and his mildness or clemency. Of Caesar’s ambition, an object of strong criticism in other chapters, Montaigne here observes: Cette passion regenta en luy si souverainement toutes les autres, et posseda son ame d’une authorité si pleine, qu’elle l’emporta où elle voulut. Certes j’en suis despit quand je considere au demeurant la grandeur de ce personnage et les merveilleuses parties qui estoient en luy […] V, 731

(This passion of ambition ruled all the others so sovereignly in him and possessed his soul with such full authority that it carried him away where it willed. Indeed it vexes me when I consider the greatness of this person in all other respects and the marvelous qualities that were in him […]) F, 552;

and that greatness mitigated by ambition, a feature of his depiction of Caesar, is picked up later in a coda that is directly lifted from the 1578 manuscript account (blue typeface here): Quand je considere la grandeur incomparable de cette ame, j’excuse la victoire de ne s’estre peu depestrer de luy, voire en cette tres-injuste et tres-inique cause. V, 732

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(When I consider the incomparable greatness of that soul, I excuse victory for being unable to shake free of him, even in that very unjust and very iniquitous cause.) F, 553

As in other chapters, this one also creates, as it proceeds, embedded parallels (which are in fact contrasts), in this case first with Cato and then with Pompey. A shorter but important and specific comparison with Cicero on the question of eloquence concludes by awarding the palm to Caesar – and in terms which themselves pick up the very similar formulation in “Des livres” (“Of books”) which we have already seen. The question of greatness and its attendant vices and virtues; parallels with other contemporary Romans; praise of Caesar’s eloquent speech and later his writings; references back to the manuscript assessment: these are by now familiar techniques in Montaigne’s dealings with his illustrious subject. Yet now he emphasises a further dimension: his own proximity or distance from the topic under consideration. The insistent vocabulary of analytical evaluation – ‘je considere’, ‘à mon advis’, ‘selon mon jugement’ (‘I consider’, ‘to my mind’, ‘in my judgment’) – is complemented by a more discreet and personal note. When discussing Caesar’s weakness for love affairs, he added a comment after 1580 but before 1588: ‘Mais, chez moy, Venus est bien plus allegre, accompaignée de la sobrieté’ (‘But with me Venus is much more sprightly when accompanied by sobriety’) (V, 731; F, 553). Brief though it is, this small revelation relies on an understanding of Montaigne and Caesar as independent but seemingly equal subjects. It regards Caesar’s human flaws as shaping the contrasting response of the author, Montaigne. The created in some sort models the creator; and the vocabulary of analysis gives way to the vocabulary of propinquity, even if, as here, it is in the register of antithesis. And so, finally, in this section of my essay, to chapter I.53, “D’un mot de Caesar” (“Of a saying of Caesar’s”), which presents one of the most deeply rooted and indeed paradoxical instances of Julius Caesar’s integration into the fabric of the Essais. This short chapter seems at first sight to have little in common with the motifs we have been discussing so far. It turns away from the external theatre to the inner ‘fabric’ of ‘feeble and failing pieces’ where our perpetual dissatisfaction makes us unable to choose what we need; even the sovereign good is debated and in doubt. The focus of the argument then tightens, at the next stage, to concentrate on a related point: since what we know gives us no satisfaction, we go seeking after the unknown and fix our appetites and our hopes on what we neither know nor understand. The chapter then culminates in a line from Caesar:

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communi fit vitio naturae ut invisis, latitantibus atque incognitis rebus magis confidamus, vehementiúsque exterreamur. V, 310

(it happens by a common vice of nature that we trust more, and fear more violently, things to us unseen, hidden, and unknown.) F, 225

This quotation from Caesar is entirely consistent with the thinking Montaigne has been setting out. Its original context is in his work the Civil Wars, where he pauses briefly during his description of siege preparations at Marseilles to offer this reflection on human nature. An unusual formulation in Caesar, the quotation selected by Montaigne echoes ideas from elsewhere in his work; it presents a perfect conceptual fit. Initially, in the Essais of 1580, the quotation stood alone at the close of the chapter, but accompanied by a French translation. Montaigne then re-worked the chapter by 1588, adding two further Latin quotations, from Lucretius, which encapsulate the argument he is presenting in prose. In the manuscript copy, after 1588, he next crossed out his French version of the quotation from Caesar. No longer a borrowing identified as such by the presence of its vernacular equivalent, it is now identical to the two other Latin quotations in this chapter, neither of which has a translation. Yet these closing words remain resolutely a saying of Caesar, attributed expressly to him both in the title of the chapter and immediately before the quotation itself. Montaigne allows Caesar to speak as Caesar and in Caesar’s own Latin tongue. He respects his independence, while nonetheless underscoring the congruence between them at the level of language as well as idea and attuning the Latin writer to his own way of thinking. Thus the cluster of the motifs contained in the manuscript account of Caesar written in 1578 is progressively unfolded and systematically developed across a series of thematically linked chapters, which integrate its themes into the texture of the Essais as a whole and set up further resonances of meaning. One way of articulating the relationship between the manuscript version and the corresponding chapters of the Essais is to view those chapters as an extended commentary on the themes of the manuscript, whether explicitly or implicitly, so that the chapters complement the self-commentary which Montaigne establishes in the person of Caesar. In both the manuscript and print versions, certain motifs assume particular prominence. Judgment and decision-making in action, the handling of chance and fortune, the ability to command and exercise power, the showing-forth of character and personal ‘vertu’, the importance of writing and speaking: all these are at stake in Montaigne’s depiction of Caesar and the range of conceptual and literary

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devices he puts in place enables him to set up analogies with a historical agent whose activities reflect those in which he himself engages or which he admires and discusses at length in his work. The mirror, with its connotations of reflection and self-reflection, is one such device and the most widespread, but the associated idea of reflexivity now no longer pertains to writing alone, but to an amalgam of features focused on a classical figure with whom the essayist establishes affinities. Connected with this is the sequence of parallel lives, by which Montaigne inventively re-shapes Plutarch by combining and re-combining the lives under comparison – Caesar and Alexander, Caesar and Pompey, Caesar and Xenophon – characteristically thinking of such figures not singly, but by pairs, ‘tant elles sont doubles et bigarrées à divers lustres’ (‘so two-sided and motley do they seem in different lights’) (V, 1077; F, 825); hence he develops a prismatic, multi-facetted sense of his topic. Another device again is Montaigne’s book, which offers a substantial expansion and refinement of what a cognitive affordance might mean. In chapter II.18, “Du dementir” (“Of giving the lie”), he writes, ‘Je n’ay pas plus faict mon livre que mon livre m’a faict, livre consubstantiel à son autheur, d’une occupation propre, membre de ma vie’ (‘I have no more made my book than my book has made me – a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, a member of my life’) (V, 665; F, 504, translation modified). Montaigne also claims that what affects one, affects the other, and such unequivocal statements ought to counter a common objection against extended mind theory, namely that contiguity does not mean causality; in other words, that the presence of a technological innovation such as the printed book does not imply that it brought about a change in human behaviour or attitude. Montaigne clearly states the opposite. The book is seen as a living entity, part and parcel of his life, and the sentence from II.18 just quoted is one of many pivotal statements about the book which see it as an active creator of meanings rather than a passive record of thoughts. Thus the essayist not only expands the range of devices which enable self-commentary via distributed embodiment, but also highlights literature as the way in which such distribution, for him, occurs. In this way, he connects two distinct features of extension which Miranda Anderson perceives in sixteenth-century literature. She writes: In the Renaissance the body, objects, language, other people, and the environmental and sociocultural context are described as extensions of the subject and its cognitive processes. However, in the Renaissance, types of cognition relating to internal reflection, and mental travel through time and space, are also thought of in terms of extension.18 18  Anderson, The Renaissance Extended Mind 245.

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Montaigne’s initiative ambitiously bridges these spheres and does so, to adapt Anderson’s formulation, by ‘dynamic and transformative relations with [his] environmental, sociocultural and technological contexts’.19 In conclusion, we may briefly underline some consequences of this transformative relation in the Essais, starting with the famous ontology of flux with which the essayist is traditionally credited. From the perspective of this chapter, his emphasis on flux is not an end in itself, however anti-essentialist in objective it may appear to be, but rather a way of enabling that liquid flow into others, that permeability and extensibility via the book of Essais into the lives, the actions and even the emotions of figures such as Caesar. In the process, Montaigne pushes to the limit ‘the Renaissance notion of ideal models as cognitive supplements’.20 He lives in multiplicity, and that multiplicity in turn shifts our attention away from what the philosopher Barry Dainton calls consciousness ‘at a time’ to consciousness over time;21 in other words, if the Essais can be said to constitute Montaigne’s consciousness seen as a totality as if at a single point and a single moment, they no less represent a span of consciousness stretched over time, which he further deepens by the opening up of historical dimensions as is the case with Caesar. I have been suggesting that it would be profitable for us to move from consciousness at a time to consciousness over time in the Essais, that is, from moments of introspective self-glossing to instances of selfprojection through the development of historical figures and the expansion of their dynamic role. Re-conceived in this light, flux in Montaigne facilitates what we might term being-with-others, most audaciously so when those others are mental constructs and literary creations. Interestingly – to return full circle to our point of departure – La Croix du Maine glimpses this point when he defines the term ‘essay’ as a ‘discours pour se façonner sur autruy’ (‘discourse to fashion oneself upon others’),22 a perception which is strikingly close to the idea of dialoguing with others so as to form the self, and confirms the statement in chapter I.26, “De l’institution des enfans” (“Of the education of children”): ‘[j]e ne dis les autres, sinon plus d’autant plus me dire’ (‘I do not speak of others except to speak of myself the better’) (V, 148; my translation). The Essais themselves are all at the same time the place and the instrument and the outcome of this activity. Through the fusion of the spatial dimensions of the book with the temporal aspects of the mind, Montaigne demonstrates how commentary on others can be a commentary on oneself, and how the self 19  Ibidem 245. 20  Ibidem 208. 21  Dainton B., The Phenomenal Self (Oxford: 2008) xix, 53, 73. 22  La Croix du Maine, La Bibliothèque 328.

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in question, ‘tout au dehors et en evidence’ (‘all outward and on show’), does not live in opposition to such others but in them and by them. Selective Bibliography Anderson M. (ed.), The Book of the Mirror: An Interdisciplinary Collection exploring the Cultural History of the Mirror (Newcastle: 2007). Anderson M., The Renaissance Extended Mind, New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (London: 2015). Boudou B. – Charpentier F., “La Figure de Jules César dans le Discours de la servitude volontaire de La Boétie et dans les Essais de Montaigne”, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 13 spécial (2006) 183–203. Caesar Gaius Julius, Commentarii (Antwerp, Plantin: 1570). Caesar Gaius Julius, “Somme, c’est César [...]”: Première reproduction en fac-similé, de l’exemplaire des ‘Commentaires de César’ annoté par Montaigne, ed. A. Gallet (Chantilly and Bordeaux: 2002). Cave T., The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979). Cave T., Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: 2016). Chevallier R., “Montaigne lecteur et juge de César”, in idem (ed.), Présence de César. Actes du Colloque des 9–11 décembre 1983: Hommage au doyen Michel Rambaud, Caesarodunum 20, numero spécial (Paris: 1985) 91–107. Clark C., “Some Renaissance Caesars”, in Griffin M. (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Oxford: 2009) 356–370. Dainton B., The Phenomenal Self (Oxford: 2008). La Croix du Maine, François Grudé de, Premier Volume de la Bibliothèque (Paris, L’Angelier: 1584). Legros A., Montaigne manuscrit, Études montaignistes 55 (Paris: 2010). Legros A. – Tournon A., “Compte rendu du fac-similé publié par André Gallet, avec retouches et ajouts de plusieurs transcriptions faites en marge du fac-similé”, Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, VIIe série, 35–36 (juillet–décembre 2004) 116–127. Mackenzie L., “Imitation Gone Wrong: The ‘Pestillentially Ambitious’ Figure of Julius Caesar in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais”, in Wyke M. (ed.), Julius Caesar in Western Culture (Oxford: 2006) 131–147. McGowan M., The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: 2000) 301–306. McGowan M., “The Diverse Faces of Caesar: Fabrication and Manipulation in the Essais”, in Cameron K. – Willett L. (eds.), Le Visage changeant de Montaigne / The

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Changing Face of Montaigne. Colloques. Congrès et Conférences sur la Renaissance Européenne 39 (Paris: 2003) 121–137. Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. P. Villey – V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: 1965). The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans D. Frame (Stanford: 1958). Paul J., “The Use of Kairos in Renaissance Political Philosophy”, Renaissance Quarterly 67, 1 (2014) 43–78. Séguier-Leblanc C., “‘Somme, c’est César’: Le jugement de Montaigne sur la Guerre civile”, Montaigne Studies, XVII (2005) 175–190. Tournon A., Montaigne, la glose et l’essai. Édition revue et corrigée, précédée d’un Réexamen, Études montaignistes 37 (Paris: 2001; 1st ed.: Lyon: 1983). Villey P., Les Sources et évolution des ‘Essais’ de Montaigne, 2 vols. (Paris: 1908), I: Les Sources et la chronologie des ‘Essais’.

chapter 7

Companions in Folly: Genre and Poetic Practice in Five Elizabethan Anthologies Harriet Archer 1 Introduction Much work has been done to chart the central yet shadowy place occupied in the Elizabethan literary landscape by Edmund Spenser’s era-defining compendium of prose and verse, The Shepheardes Calender (1579).* The Calender’s sequence of pastoral eclogues, each dedicated to a month of the year, is framed by an incongruous critical apparatus. Its preface and glosses scaffold the text with a roster of canonical antecedents, in which the poems’ fictional editor, E.K., sketches the processes of thought and intention behind the lexical decisions of the work’s author, named only as ‘Immeritô’, or ‘the New Poet’. Of course, this appellation has an ironic dimension, as E.K.’s extensive explication of the poems’ classical allusions and imitations makes clear. The work’s debt to continental models of authorial self-commentary is also well known.1 E.K.’s commentary draws on the self-aware poetics of Dante and Petrarch, and Jacopo Sannazaro’s prosimetric Arcadia (composed 1480s). It extends the metatextual interests of the pastoral to fulfil the mode’s interest in poetic generation, while critiquing the assumptions and excesses of humanist commentary, also sent up in Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae (1515) and its concomitant annotation.2

* I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust and Newcastle University, where a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship allowed me to pursue this research, and to Francesco Venturi and the two anonymous readers for their very helpful suggestions for revision. 1  See Harrison T.P. Jr, “Spenser and the Earlier Pastoral Elegy”, Studies in English 13 (1933) 36–53 (53); Heninger S.K. Jr, “Spenser, Sidney, and Poetic Form”, Studies in Philology 88, 2 (1991) 140–152 (150); Staton W.F. Jr, “Spenser’s ‘April’ Lay as a Dramatic Chorus”, Studies in Philology 59, 2 (1962) 111–118 (112–113). 2  For the work’s debt to models of classical commentary, see Pugh S., Spenser and Virgil: The Pastoral Poems, The Manchester Spenser (Manchester: 2016) 82–83 and passim; McCanles M., “The Shepheardes Calender as Document and Monument”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22, 1 (1982) 5–19. On the relationship between pastoral and literary invention, see Kalstone D., “The Transformation of Arcadia: Sannazaro and Sir Philip Sidney”, Comparative Literature 15 (1963) 234–249 (243–244).

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Criticism has followed E.K.’s lead in focusing on this literary genealogy, framed as a linear narrative of generation and inheritance in the work’s dedication, and complicated by “Immeritô’s” valedictory poem which sends the book out into the world like a child, ‘base begot’, ‘whose parent is vnkent’.3 Yet to track the heredity of the Shepheardes Calender backwards in this fashion is to deny the possibility of multiple determination, neglecting Spenser’s near contemporaries and the series of metatextual, hybrid anthologies printed in the years immediately preceding his debut. Without losing sight of Spenser’s reading in important longer traditions, this chapter attends in addition to The Shepheardes Calender’s evocation of them in amongst a neglected contemporary upsurge in similar poetic projects. It contextualises Spenser’s divided authorial self within more recent literary history, and approaches the Calender as an iteration, at the decade’s end, of a mode of writing found in some of the most popular and influential works of the 1570s: metatextual prose narratives of poetic composition. In particular, the Calender’s multi-faceted reflexivity is considered with reference to the broad tradition of Menippean satire, which Spenser would have encountered in the works of Lucian and Erasmus. However, where Spenser and the commentator-persona E.K. seek to distance the Calender from works by contemporary poets, dismissing them with the words, ‘let them a Gods name feede on theyr owne folly’, I will suggest that the Erasmian noun draws some of his Elizabethan precursors into the text’s orbit, and highlights their common Menippean ground.4 Like Spenser’s Calender, but in contrast to their early Tudor analogues, these texts specifically advance accounts of poetic practice, which extend out of paratextual forms like titles and prefaces, to make up the prose frame around a series of inset poems. Their diverse generic affiliations mask these shared characteristics. Critics are accustomed to calling William Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates (1559–1578) a historical complaint collection, since it comprises a sequence of medieval verse tragedies modelled on Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–1374). George Gascoigne’s “Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F.I.” (1573) usually gets categorised as prose fiction – as early as 1930, Leicester Bradner dubbed it ‘the first English novel’, an honour also afforded to Baldwin’s earlier prose satire Beware the Cat (MS, c. 1552) by his twentieth-century editors.5 George Whetstone’s Rocke of Regard 3  Spenser Edmund, The Shepheardes Calender (London, Hugh Singleton: 1579) “To His Booke”, fol. ⁋ iv. 4  Ibidem, fol. ⁋ ii v–iij r. 5  Bradner L., “The First English Novel: A Study of George Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J.”, Publications of the Modern Language Association 45 (1930) 543–552; Baldwin William, Beware

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(1576), and Nicholas Breton’s Workes of a Young Wit (1577), frame themselves variously as posies and gardens, etymologically in keeping with the 1570s vogue for anthologies, or miscellanies, with which they are associated. Finally, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender is, well, what? A calendar? A “shorter poem”? The ‘loadstarre of the English language’?6 These works, consequently, are rarely grouped, although their authors often knew one another in person as well as in print, giving rise to resonances with one another which are beginning to be acknowledged and usefully unpacked.7 If we read these prose-verse hybrid works, all printed or reprinted within a single decade, as generically analogous pieces, light may be shed on their common struggle to isolate and represent the mercurial origins of literary invention. These innovative and pseudo-autobiographical texts break down the firm division between text and paratext by inserting what are ostensibly stand-alone poems into prose accounts of their composition. At the same time, they shore up a factitious division between author and commentator, while blending the strategies of commercial print publication with an aesthetic of informal collation to evoke the intimacy of manuscript circulation and coterie networks.8 In doing so, they open a space for self-commentary in prefaces and glosses which become the text itself, prompting metatextual meditations on the hot poetic topics of their time: vernacular metre and form, decorum, and, however haphazardly, the mechanisms of cultural production. Other models of self-reflexive literary framing might also be brought to bear on the texts in question. Judith M. Davidoff’s taxonomic study of framing fictions in Middle English poetry identified how potentially productive the interplay between expository frame and embedded lyric could be.9 The tension between what Davidoff calls the ‘core’ and the frame subsumes non-narrative poems of diverse kinds to enact a transformative power on the poem’s generic status.10 The early Tudor poetry of the Scottish Chaucerian William Dunbar stands out in Davidoff’s analysis, exploiting the pressure exerted by framing fictions on their core content to produce parody, ‘in a special and almost parasitic the Cat: The First English Novel, ed. W.A. Ringler – M. Flachmann (San Marino, California: 1988). 6  See Kuskin W., ‘“The Loadstarre of the English Language’: Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and the Construction of Modernity”, Textual Cultures 2, 2 (2007) 9–33. 7  See Harrison M., “The Rude Poet Presents Himself: Breton, Spenser, and Bad Poetry”, Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 29 (2014) 239–262. 8  See Crane M.T., Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England Princeton Legacy Library (Princeton: 1993) 138. 9  Davidoff J.M., Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry (London – Toronto: 1988). 10  Ibidem 18.

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relationship to the traditional genres’.11 The works discussed below compound this pressure, by externalising commentary and rendering it formally distinct by virtue of their hybrid prose-verse arrangement; their literary heredity combines poetic framing fictions of vernacular antecedents like Dunbar and, of course, Geoffrey Chaucer, with the prosimetric form transposed from earlier continental European sources such as Boethius’s late antique Consolation of Philosophy (523), Dante’s Vita Nova (c. 1295), or indeed Sannazaro’s Arcadia.12 Yet these antecedents do not fully account for the ironic vein in which the texts discussed here approach their delineation of poetic praxis. This chapter considers a sequence of texts printed between 1571 and 1579, and composed by Spenser; the printer, satirist and clergyman William Baldwin (d.  1563); the shrewd yet luckless prodigal poet George Gascoigne (born 1534/35?, d. 1577); and his versifying acolytes George Whetstone (bap. 1550, d. 1587) and Nicholas Breton (1554/5–c. 1626). Each text posits its narrative of composition as a form of anti-commentary, which deliberately obscures the inset poems’ intellectual and social origins. Theirs is a discourse of nonchalance, dissipation and accident, cut through with high-critical seriousness. They cast their series of popular genres in a sceptical light through tongue-in-cheek metatextual reflection, where traditional commentary might be expected to clarify and elucidate. The fictional commentator E.K.’s famous introduction of Spenser as ‘the New Poet’ in the preface to the Shepheardes Calender at once invokes and distances a literary canon which is not quite representative of Spenser’s work, while his glosses notoriously misdirect and misinform the reader. Throughout the Calender, and Baldwin, Gascoigne, Whetstone and Breton’s hybrid works which precede it, there is a tension in play between being and not being a particular kind of text. Jane Griffiths identifies a type of early modern gloss which works as something like ‘“parody” – but parody not so much of the content of the text as of reader expectations about how a gloss is likely to behave’.13 This idea resonates with the writing discussed below, whose framing fictions at once leverage and undercut the genres to which they purport to belong. Griffiths groups Baldwin, Gascoigne and Spenser as writers whose marginal and main-text glosses ‘pull the reader up short’, and adds: ‘Despite appearing in printed texts intended for wide dissemination, they are frequently obscure, 11  Fox D., “The Scottish Chaucerians”, in Brewer D.S. (ed.), Chaucer and the Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature (London: 1966) 164–200 (187), cited in Davidoff, Beginning Well 166. 12  See Johnson E., “Chaucer and the Consolation of Prosimetrum”, Chaucer Review 43, 4 (2009) 455–472. 13  Griffiths J., Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: 2014) 3–4.

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self-referential, and elusive, seeming to assume that writer and readers share a set of reference points, or even a private language […]. They are like blank signposts: a contradiction in terms’.14 I want to extend Griffiths’s reading beyond the gloss to the larger formal operation of these poets’ works. Also combined are the popular poetic stances of dissolute tear-away and moralising educator. The phenomenon of the “prodigal” poet, brought to critical attention by Richard Helgerson, saw the splitting of the authorial self along temporal lines; poetic careers hinged on a moment of repentance and reform, which divided the youthful reprobate from the mature, ethical citizen.15 Selfcommentary, or metatextual reflexivity, in the prose fiction and hybrid narratives of the 1570s and 1580s allowed authors to accommodate both sides of the prodigal coin simultaneously (as well as the twin poetic motives of profit and delight), condemning the licentious doings of one persona in the voice of another.16 For George Gascoigne, assembling his prodigal career in real time by simultaneously courting and deflecting controversy, or William Baldwin, propounding and critiquing political history by turns, the distancing function of a prose frame also blunted potential censure. Yet, the metatextual focus with which self-commentary inevitably imbues these works centres the act of composition, all but displacing their moral import. Further, the sprezzatura with which these accounts of textual production are delivered, following Castiglione’s recently translated edict ‘to vse in euery thyng a certain Reckelesness, to couer art withall, & seeme whatsoeuer he doth & sayeth to do it wythout pain, & (as it were) not myndyng it’, casts doubt, in keeping with Griffiths’ observation, on the mechanisms of reader expectation, and paratextual direction and response.17 Self-commentary demands that the author is split into the personae of writer and reader, where the reader-persona performs in the written commentary the secondary role of editor or compiler.18 In almost every case it is this secondary figure whose narrative authority we are encouraged to privilege, over the inset poetry. The mise en page of the texts, too, makes this hierarchy clear: the 14  Ibidem 3. 15  Helgerson R., The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: 1976). 16  See Wilson K., Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: 2006) 13 and passim. 17  Castiglione Baldassarre, The Courtyer, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: William Seres, 1561), fol. Eii r. See Berger H. Jr, The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: 2000). 18  See Archer H., “Studied for Redaction? Reading and Writing in the Works of John Higgins”, in Acheson K. (ed.), Early Modern English Marginalia, Material Readings in Early Modern Culture (London: 2019).

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Mirror for Magistrates’s prose frame is printed in larger type than the verse tragedies, and Whetstone’s headings indicate the commentary sections in larger type than the verse titles, while Breton’s prose links are given in clear Roman type rather than the close blackletter of the verse, and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender follows suit, providing glosses in Roman type, arguments in italic type, and eclogues in blackletter. Only Gascoigne’s “Adventures of Master F.I.” deviates from this typographical pattern, instead giving the prose narration in blackletter in contrast to its protagonists’ Roman epistles, and poems in italic type. The material form of the text itself, then, in addition to genre, persona and narrative, adduces a fictive composition history. Meanwhile, the writer of the inset poems, in the majority of cases examined here, is also framed explicitly as a reader, of literary antecedents and, more abstractly, of circumstances. Topical and occasional verse, as these examples all purport to be, demands not only adaptability on the part of the author, but also their skill as a reader of events: the relevance of history to contemporary politics; the preferences of patrons; the predilections of lovers; the literary zeitgeist itself. The making of poetry, in terms of origin, inspiration, and procedure, is interrogated in the prose accounts which frame these inset verses, while the making of meaning inheres in both creative origin and lectoral reception. The interface across which writing and reading interact is genre: the form or shape which governs both authorial choice and reader expectation, and which, according to Rosalie L. Colie, pertains in the Renaissance to ‘how literary works were thought to come into being’.19 What these five authors suggest, though, is that genre itself is a false friend, an inauthentic pose. The relationship between the prose and verse portions of each text included here hangs on the pseudo-commentator’s lack of faith that their poetic personae may be trusted to make themselves understood, and readers trusted to understand them; in turn, the extrinsic prose commentary is shown time and again to be untrustworthy in itself.20 The generic expectations prompted by the texts’ assumed forms are also, therefore, exposed as misleading. As a result, attempts to isolate and depict the originary creative act continue to slip back over a narrative horizon.

19  Colie R.L., The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. B.K. Lewalski, Una’s Lectures 1 (Berkeley – London: 1973) 2. 20  See Colie, Resources of Kind 26.

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Self-Commentary in Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579)

As noted above, the Shepheardes Calender was first printed under the anonymous authorship of the ‘New Poet’, or ‘Immeritô’, in 1579. The work comprised twelve eclogues pertaining to each month of the year, in a variety of verse forms, and attributed to a series of allegorical shepherd-poets including Spenser’s persona Colin Clout, framed by an explicating gloss by the work’s – possibly fictional – editor, E.K. This framing prose on one level aped the heavy explicatory apparatus of humanist scholarship, including Gerardus Listrius’s annotations to Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae, which had ‘proclaim[ed] the genre to which the Moria belongs’ such that ‘the connotations of the form themselves authorise Erasmus’ work’.21 However, E.K.’s prose alternates with the poems instead of commenting on them from the margins.22 In addition to the poems and their glosses, each eclogue is accompanied by a short “emblem” or motto, and an illustrative woodcut, after the practice of another of Spenser’s analogues, Joachim du Bellay; these, in turn, provide ‘a sort of pictorial gloss upon the eclogue’, yet generate irresolvable tensions between the work’s ‘two incompatible aesthetics’, that of the homespun bucolic almanac, and the formal textual criticism of a humanist elite.23 The Calender is riven with internal divisions, by means of which the formally distinct parts of the work reflect on and mediate one another. The first section of this chapter will consider the dynamics of this internal commentary, as regards its meditations on poetic practice and authority. We cannot be certain who E.K. was or is supposed to be; the paratext attributed to him may have been compiled by Spenser’s friend and alleged dedicatee, Gabriel Harvey, or by Spenser himself, perhaps aping Harvey’s style. Set against the poets and commentators identified only by their initials in 21  Griffiths, Diverting Authorities 108. 22  Slights W.E., Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books, Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism (Ann Arbor: 2001) 57. 23  Mohsen E., Time and the Calendar in Edmund Spenser’s Poetical Works, Éditions Publibook Université (Paris: 2005) 140; Staley Johnson L., The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction (Philadelphia: 1990) 2; Halpern R., The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca – London: 1991) 195. See also Luborsky R.S., “The Illustrations to The Shepheardes Calender”, Spenser Studies 2 (1981) 3–53; Slights, Managing Readers 52. For a detailed interpretation of the May eclogue’s woodcut, see Borris K., Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (Oxford: 2017) 83–121. For more on the April eclogue’s woodcut see Davis H., “Allusive Resonance in the Woodcut to Spenser’s ‘April’”, in Howard-Hill T.H. – Rollinson Ph. (eds.) Renaissance Papers 2000 (Rochester, N.Y.: 2001) 25–40.

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recent compilations by Baldwin and Gascoigne, or John Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis (1577), though, E.K. takes on a markedly more spurious cast than attempts to identify him as Edward Kirke, Edward Knight, Edward de Vere or similar have admitted.24 The dedication of the text to Harvey by ‘his verie special and singular good frend E.K.’ alludes at the very least to their social if not ontological intimacy, doubling the sense of indivisibility by the association between ‘special’ and ‘singular’.25 To cement this point, E.K. also signs off, ‘thus recommending the Author vnto you, as vnto his most special good frend, and my selfe vnto you both, as one making singuler account of two so very good and so choise frends, I bid you both most hartely farwel’.26 (The name of the Calender’s printer, Hugh Singleton, could also be in play here.) E.K. emphasises the division within language itself by foregrounding the ‘strangeness’ of the Calender’s English; here, his ludic engagement with the flipside of singularity advances a vision of the text’s social and sociable origins. From the first, the work is grounded in the thematic splitting of the ostensibly indivisible. In common with the other subjects of this volume, the Calender explicitly peels its author’s authority and authorness apart: Spenser remains anonymous under the pseudonym ‘Immeritô’, unworthy of the proper names afforded to his literary antecedents, but is also labelled ‘the New Poet’, a tag which divides and contains his youthful inferiority from and beside his classically neoteric credentials. The pastoral persona, Colin, further distances Spenser from his poetic output within the text’s inner-most fiction, where poems-within-poems are attributed to the lovelorn shepherd. The mechanics of allegory, too, necessarily divide Spenser’s inscribed characters from their referents, while imitation, on which this paradoxically innovative anthology is explicitly predicated, requires that the author approach oneness with his models.27 These included the French Calendrier des bergers tradition, and its English language iteration, Richard Copland’s Kalender of Shephardes (1570), from which Spenser is thought in part to have drawn inspiration for his woodcut illustrations.28 Kenneth Borris is confident that Spenser, who probably trained in draughtsmanship under Richard Mulcaster at the Merchant Taylors’ School, 24  See Steinberg T.L., “E.K.’s Shepheardes Calender and Spenser’s”, Modern Language Studies 3, 2 (1973) 46–58; Shore D.R., “E.K.”, in Hamilton A.C. (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopaedia (Toronto: 1990) 231. 25  Spenser, Calender, “Epistle”, fol. ⁋ ij r. 26  Ibidem, fol. ⁋ iij v. 27  See Archer H., “‘New Matter Framed Upon the Old’: Chaucer, Spenser, and Luke Shepherd’s ‘New Poet’”, in Badcoe T. – Griffith G. – Stenner R. (eds.), Chaucer and Spenser, The Manchester Spenser (Manchester: forthcoming). 28  See Borris, Visionary Spenser 88.

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directed the production of the woodcuts, since ‘the illustrations display a constellation of interests and expertise unique to the Calender’, and reads the pictures and poems for each month as ‘planned as an interactive unit’.29 Borris argues that ‘Spenser’s eclogues are so interactively verbal-visual that the term “eclogue” in Spenserian applications should imply pictorial as much as poetic development’.30 While Borris’s identification of this interactivity does acknowledge the units’ ‘combinative experimentation’ in ‘mixing formerly heterogeneous verbal and visual materials’, though, Richard Halpern’s analysis dwells in greater detail on the tensions produced by the text and woodcuts’ heterogeneity.31 For Halpern, this disjunction reflects the antagonisms within the work between margin and centre which E.K.’s commentary invokes, where ‘the figure of landscape and portrait may be read as a metaphor for the relation between commentary and text’.32 Lynn Staley Johnson interprets the contrast between the April eclogue’s woodcut and the content of the poem as an assertion of Elizabeth I’s status as an emblem of potential harmony [Fig. 7.1].33 In the text, the shepherds Hobbinoll and Thenot discuss Colin Clout’s unrequited love for Rosalind, before rehearsing his lay written for Elisa, ‘Queene of shepheardes all’.34 The woodcut, though, seems to show Elizabeth I attended by some ten or eleven female figures (possibly the poem’s muses and nymphs), who play a variety of musical instruments, while two labourers tend to their sheep in the background. Hobbinoll explicitly notes in the poem that Colin ‘Hys pleasaunt Pipe, whych made vs meriment, / He wylfully hath broke’, but in the woodcut, a shepherd-like character plays a pipe to the left of the royal entourage.35 Johnson argues that the illustration’s content is in some ways ‘unrelated’ to the text, but that ‘it establishes Elizabeth [I] as the focal point of the pastoral world’, and foregrounds her role in bringing about a solution to the problems – including the contested question of her marriage – to which the verbal eclogue alludes.36 However, Johnson’s definitive identification of the woodcut’s personnel occludes the allegorical slippage between April’s women. We have already been made aware that Rosalind, the object of Colin’s love, is a fictive ‘shadow’ for a real-world love interest; Elisa is the subject of his song; while Elizabeth is the referent, according to E.K.’s ‘Argument’, of the eclogue as 29  Ibidem 88–89. 30  Ibidem 85. 31  Ibidem 88. See Halpern, Primitive Accumulation 193. 32  Halpern, Primitive Accumulation 179–182. 33  Johnson, Introduction 170. 34  Spenser, Calender, fol. 12r. 35  Ibidem. 36  Johnson, Introduction 167.

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Figure 7.1 Edmund Spenser, woodcut illustration to the April eclogue, The Shepheardes Calender (London, Hugh Singleton: 1579), fol. 11 v

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a whole.37 Meanwhile, the song compares Elisa to a checklist of nymphs and goddesses, partly parallel to and partly including ‘this beuie of Ladies bright, / raunged in a rowe’ in Elizabeth’s image who proliferate across the woodcut’s pastoral landscape.38 The interpretative challenges set for the reader by the woodcuts’ awkward conjunction with their verse echo the mismatch of symbol and referent on which Spenser’s eclogues also play. The work’s self-commentary does not, however, only inhere in the dialogue between frame and poem, or text, illustration and gloss. E.K.’s gloss aligns the Calender with a continental tradition of commentary ‘which maner […] wil seeme straunge and rare in our tongue’, yet here E.K.’s justification splinters into three distinct claims: firstly that he has provided ‘a certain Glosse or scholion for thexposition of old wordes and harder phrases’; then that ‘I knew many excellent and proper deuises both in wordes and matter would passe in the speedy course of reading, either as vnknowen, or as not marked’; and finally that, ‘by meanes of some familiar acquaintance I was made priuie to his counsell and secret meaning in them’.39 The preface simultaneously posits scenarios in which the text is difficult to understand firstly because of its archaism, secondly because of the reader’s inattention, and thirdly because it contains significances which no one but a personal acquaintance of the author might penetrate. E.K.’s prose glosses appear to ground the poetry of the Shepheardes Calender in precedent and procedure, in a masterful bid for a place in a canonical hierarchy that Spenser deftly deconstructs even as he defers to it. But as Helen Barr argues in a forthcoming essay collection, the text follows Chaucer as much in its reflection of the puffed up hollowness of literary fame, as in its pre-epic champing.40 Meanwhile, Hannah Crawforth’s study of Spenser’s etymological play demonstrates how his meticulous deployment of cuttingedge Anglo Saxon linguistic scholarship effects not an academic solidity but an ironic estrangement of language.41 So the very weight of Spenser’s learning is calculated to collapse, and in this way, too, his self-commentary takes the idea of commentary apart. The prose glosses and emblems which follow each eclogue create a maze of tangled paths which weave backwards in time to a series of dead ends. The gloss which explains the poet’s use of ‘Helicon’ in the April eclogue, for 37  See Hadfield A., “Spenser’s Rosalind”, The Modern Language Review 104, 4 (2009) 935–946. 38  Spenser, Calender, fol. 13v. 39  Spenser, Calender, fol. ⁋ iij r. 40  See Barr H., “‘Litle herd gromes piping in the wind’: The Shepheardes Calender, The House of Fame, and ‘La Compleynt’”, in Stenner – Badcoe – Griffith (eds.), Chaucer and Spenser (forthcoming). 41  Crawforth H., Etymology and the Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: 2013) 23–27.

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example, states that the fabled Muses’ spring arose when the winged horse Pegasus struck the ground with his hoof; the gloss adds that Pegasus stands for ‘fame and flying renowne’.42 This seems fairly straightforwardly to reveal fame as the motivator, rather than the product, of poetic inspiration, as Pegasus, or fame, gives rise to the emergence of the Muses’s spring from the earth, and not the other way around. The subsequent gloss claims, wrongly, that the ‘silver song’ in praise of Elisa, a shadow for Elizabeth I, imitates Hesiod – a misattribution which has the potential to question the foundations of royal authority as much as Baldwin’s historiographical cruxes had, by situating an erroneous textual history at the heart of an allegorical panegyric to the queen. Most pointedly, of course, the final gloss on the conspicuously absent emblem after the December eclogue, perhaps a joke about commentaries seeking to read phantom interpretations into texts reluctant to yield them up, misquotes both Horace and Ovid, even as it asserts that the Calender ‘shall endure as long as time etc. folowing the ensample of Horace and Ouid in the like’.43 E.K.’s framing prose contradicts itself, too, as the unfolding textual apparatus complicates the prefatory epistle’s picture of Spenser’s frame of reference. It questions the authority of those models it had cited – the January gloss refers to ‘the French Poete Marot (if he be worthy of the name of a Poete)’ – while bringing additional voices into play, including Skelton, Sir Thomas Smith, and Plato, and putting forward then dismissing others, such as Erasmus and Lucian, as we will see below. The October eclogue’s gloss also cites Lucian, though, to explain ‘strange Bellona; the goddesse of battaile, that is Pallas, which may therefore wel be called queint for that (as Lucian saith) when Iupiter hir father was in traueile of her, he caused his sonne Vulcane with his axe to hew his head’.44 Like April’s allusion to Pegasus, this gloss attempts to elucidate, but ultimately obfuscates, the strangeness of mythological generation. In the context of the October eclogue’s interrogation of poetic inspiration and origins, it seems that its narrative of violent birth additionally pertains to artistic making – shading into the making-up for which Lucian himself was notorious.45 The gloss which follows the November eclogue refers explicitly to Gascoigne, with whom Spenser may have been personally acquainted, bringing the recently

42  Spenser, Calender, fol. 14v. 43  Ibidem, fol. 52r. 44  Ibidem, fol. 43v. 45  See Duncan D.J.M., Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: 1979) 84–85. On Spenser’s consideration of poetic inspiration in the Shepheardes Calender, see also Tylus J., “Spenser, Vergil, and the Politics of Poetic Labor”, English Literary History 55, 1 (1988) 53–77.

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deceased poet into the picture unnecessarily and at a tangent.46 Rather than explaining a reference to Philomele, in a note where readers might expect to find a discussion of her treatment by Ovid, E.K. recommends Gascoigne’s account of the myth, but then fumbles his encomium. Philomele’s complaint, E.K. notes, be very well set forth of Ma. George Gaskin a wittie gentleman, and the very chefe of our late rymers, who if some partes of learning wanted not (albee it is well knowen he altogether wanted not learning) no doubt would have attayned to the excellencye of those famous Poets.47 Worthy of Gascoigne’s own prodigal riddling, this gloss, with its double negatives, contradictory parenthetical statement, and the multiple passes it demands of the reader, appears to bend over backwards to praise, and simultaneously to avoid offending, the “late” poet. Attention to the layered connotations of ‘attayned to’ works subtly to nudge the pedestal on which ‘those famous Poets stand’: would Gascoigne have ‘approached’ or ‘achieved’ their excellence had he been more learned, or would he have ‘befallen’ it, ‘concerned’ it, or ‘troubled’ it perhaps?48 The ambiguity built into E.K.’s choice of word allows learned authority to be at once the agent and the victim of a destabilising assault; Gascoigne himself is shown to be as vulnerable to this quibbling as those predecessors he threatened to topple. In common with Baldwin, Gascoigne and their acolytes, the Calender’s subversive paratextual apparatus works to prove that a poet’s reputation is made and remade only by the writing of his successors, and their commentary, however unreliable. In addition, Spenser’s approbative gesture towards Gascoigne acknowledges a poetic community otherwise absent from The Shepheardes Calender and its web of literary referents. This chapter proposes that Spenser’s anonymous debut, in some ways strenuously defined against that community, is also a product of this moment’s mediation of Erasmian humanism, and through Erasmus, Menippean irony, within narratives of poetic composition. Spenser and E.K. together encourage the reader to situate the New Poet in amongst the leading lights of continental vernacular verse, and unassailable classical names. Yet, the burial of not only Erasmus but also Gascoigne in the substrata of E.K.’s gloss hints that Spenser did not leapfrog backwards over the preceding 46  See Austen G., George Gascoigne, Studies in Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: 2008) 10–11. 47  Spenser, Calender, fol. 48r. 48  See “attain, v.” Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/ (accessed 1 March 2017).

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decade, but approached his overt sources through contemporary poetic preoccupations and developments, and in dialogue with a longer unfolding negotiation of humanist thought and practice. 3

The Shepheardes Calender and the Spectre of Menippus

This chapter considers the common ground of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, William Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates, George Gascoigne’s “Adventures of Master F.I.”, George Whetstone’s Rocke of Regard, and Nicholas Breton’s Workes of a Young Wit, as analogous to the so-called ‘mixed form’, or prosimetrum.49 Might they usefully be drawn into dialogue with Menippean satire, one particular exponent of that form? Prosimetrum, and its Menippean associations, are not explicit points of reference for the authors whose works are discussed here. However, the framework offered by generic definitions of “menippea” sets out a series of points of contact between these works, and serves to point towards some rarely considered strands of influence, which include but are not limited to the relevance of Erasmus in these writers’ negotiations of high humanism. Menippus was a Greek satirist writing in the third century BC; none of his writings are extant, but he lived on as a character and generic metonym in the work of Lucian – including the Necromantia, a dialogue with Menippus himself in hell, printed in English in 1530 – as well as Varro, and Petronius. As Mike Pincombe explains, ‘[i]n its simplest form, Menippean satire is a mixture (satura) of prose and verse […]. In Lucian, the incorporation of lines of epic and tragedy into colloquial prose is used to make sport of the pompousness of the former […]. But Menippean satire is also genuinely satirical, in that it mocks at pretensions to grandeur of all kinds’.50 This emphasis on generic range is important. As part of his now standard definition, Mikhail Bakhtin notes that ‘[a]ny form that pretended to be a vehicle for learned discourse – the treatise, the cosmography, the epistle, symposium, or dialogue – was fair

49  See Dronke P., Verse with Prose From Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form, Carl Newell Jackson Lectures [1992] (Cambridge, MA – London: 1994) 1. 50  Pincombe M., “Tragic and Untragic Bodies in the Mirror for Magistrates”, in Archer H. – Hadfield H. (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 2016) 53–70 (67). See also Blanchard W.S., Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg: 1995); Frye N. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, ed. R.D. Denham, Frye, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye 22 (Toronto: 2006) 289–291.

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game for his ridicule’.51 The mode was to undergo a substantial revival in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the publication two years after The Shepheardes Calender of Justus Lipsius’s neo-Latin dream vision Somnium (1581), based on Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, in which a Senate meeting attended by figures including Cicero and Varro debates ‘the problem of overzealous editors and philologists who corrupt Classical texts with unfortunate or unnecessary emendations and alterations’.52 However, as Joel Relihan notes, ‘[t]he Renaissance typically suppresses the name of Menippus: the great early imitators of Lucian, such as Erasmus, Alberti, and Rabelais, feel no need to resuscitate Menippus himself and hardly speak of him’.53 His example necessarily manifests as ‘criticism and ironic distance’.54 Bakhtin, too, describes the infiltration of the model ‘[i]n diverse variants and under diverse generic labels’ into the medieval and early modern epochs, ‘both with and without a clear-cut awareness of itself as a genre’.55 However nebulous as a genre, though, menippea is germane to an investigation of the splitting of the authorial self. In addition to its acting as a vector for the carnivalesque, menippea is of interest to Bakhtin because in it ‘there appears for the first time what might be called moral-psychological experimentation’ of ‘formal generic significance’, in which the hero ‘loses his finalized quality and ceases to mean only one thing; he ceases to coincide with himself’.56 Bakhtin observes that ‘[t]his destruction of the wholeness and finalized quality of a man is facilitated by the appearance, in the menippea, of a dialogic relationship to one’s own self’, epitomised by Varro’s Bimarcus, in which the first Marcus, late with a promised writing assignment, is plagued by the second Marcus, his conscience.57 Relihan suggests that ‘[a]cademic selfparody is Varro’s most important contribution’ to the genre, manifested during 51  Bakhtin M.M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson, Theory and History of Literature 8 (Minneapolis: 1984) 316. 52  Smet I.A.R., Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581–1655, Travaux du Grand Siècle 2 (Geneva: 1996) 88. Lipsius’s Somnium was printed the same year that he published his own work of commentary, Commentarius ad Annales (1581), on the Annales of Tacitus. See de Landtsheer J., “Annotating Tacitus: The Case of Justus Lipsius”, in Enenkel K.A.E. (ed.), Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 29 (Leiden – Boston: 2014) 280–326. 53  Relihan J.C., “Mennipus in Antiquity and the Renaissance”, in Branham R.B. – GouletCazé M. (eds.), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy, Hellenistic Culture and Society 23 (Berkeley: 1996) 265–293 (267). 54  Ibidem 275. 55  Bakhtin, Problems 113. 56  Ibidem 116–117. 57  Ibidem 117.

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the Reformation in, for example, the authorial self-parody of Erasmus’s Moria.58 Bakhtin concludes his discussion by making the argument that menippea was characteristic of the epoch in which it developed, which saw ‘a devaluation of all external positions that a person might hold in life, their transformation into roles played out on the stageboards of the theater of the world’.59 This hybrid mode, which dramatises the division of the self into parts while sending up performativity and posturing, feels pertinent, then, to the poetics of midElizabethan self-fashioning.60 By 1570, Lucian “the scoffer” was being deployed as an example of how not to edit and prepare epitomes, in Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster (1570), and had become a byword for disreputable fictionality; the parodic editorial commentary which accompanies The Shepheardes Calender therefore reads as knowingly hypocritical when it explicitly rejects the writing of Lucian, and ‘hys deuilish disciple […] Aretino’.61 The annotations to Spenser’s work also take issue with ‘Erasmius’, ‘a great clerke and good old father’, whose ‘great learning notwithstanding’, E.K. notes in the explication of February’s second emblem, ‘it is to plaine, to be gainsayd, that olde men are muche more enclined to such fond fooleries, th[a]n younger heades’.62 As William W. Barker observes, E.K. refutes the author of The Praise of Folly ‘on the grounds of his old age and foolishness’, a joke which Barker suggests extends to The Shepheardes Calender at large, ‘a work that favors wise youth over foolish old age’, and ‘the overthrow of authority by the young’.63 This chapter seeks to set the games Spenser’s E.K. plays with Lucianic-Erasmian irony in The Shepheardes Calender’s framing commentary in dialogue with those of his poetic contemporaries. Perhaps Gascoigne, Breton, and Whetstone are precisely ‘the rakehellye route of our ragged rymers […] which without learning boste, without iudgement iangle, [and] without reason rage and fome’, knocked down as a counterpoint to Spenser’s ‘well grounded, finely framed, and strongly trussed up’ anthology in the Calender’s prefatory epistle.64 Yet E.K.’s parting shot, ‘let them a Gods name feede on theyr owne folly’, yokes the unskilled jangling of these rhymers to his own justification of Spenser’s choice of poetic form when he relays the poet’s claim that ‘the young shepheards’ of pastoral had become 58  Relihan, “Menippus in Antiquity and the Renaissance” 282. 59  Bakhtin, Problems 119. 60  See Kinney A.F., Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst, MA: 1986) 79. 61  Spenser, Calender, fol. 2v. 62  Ibidem, fol. 8r. 63  Barker W.B., “Erasmus, Desiderius”, in Hamilton A.C., The Spenser Encyclopedia 251–252. 64  Spenser, Calender, fol. ⁋ ii v–iij r.

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Spenser’s ‘equalls and companions of his vnfortunate folly’.65 The metaphor of auto-consumption, and the repetition of ‘folly’ with its evocative Erasmian overtones, see Spenser and his contemporaries alike engaged in the parodic interrogation of the forms their works embody. 4

William Baldwin as a Vector for Erasmian Irony: Beware the Cat (c. 1552) and A Mirror for Magistrates (1559–1578)

It has been widely recognised that the Gulielmus Baldwin, who pens and narrates the internal story of Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, is an authorial persona. Sherri Geller coined the term ‘pseudo-nonfictional’ to describe Baldwin’s prose narrative which frames the verse complaints in the Mirror for Magistrates.66 The compound adjective conveys an accurate sense of how all of the prose accounts discussed here operate, covering the use of personae, pseudonyms, and the more slippery misrepresentation of an author’s persona as himself.67 In his theory of paratexts, Gérard Genette breaks claims to authorial identity down into the categories of anonymity, pseudonymity, and the more ‘ordinary state’, which he calls ‘onymity’, in order, he says, ‘to rescue it from this deceptive ordinariness’.68 The claim to authorship, then, is itself a paratext, and may be read as a form of self-commentary, like the tongue-in-cheek anonymity of the ‘New Poet’, the semi-onymity or pseudonymity of Spenser’s E.K., Gascoigne’s F.I., and Whetstone’s P. Plasmos, and, first, the ‘onymity’ of William Baldwin. Beware the Cat is a multi-layered sequence of narratives, described aptly by its 1988 editor William A. Ringler as resembling a series of inter-nesting boxes.69 The central narrative, written down by the inscribed character Baldwin following the orations of an Inns of Court buffoon called Streamer, is compiled and conveyed via multiple, dubious oral accounts. In formal contrast to 65  Ibidem. See Maslen R.W., Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: 1997) 202. 66  Geller S., “Editing under the Influence of the Standard Textual Hierarchy: Misrepresenting A Mirror for Magistrates in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Editions”, Textual Cultures 2, 1 (2007) 43–77; eadem, “What History Really Teaches: Historical Pyrrhonism in William Baldwin’s A Mirror for Magistrates”, in Herman P.C. (ed.), Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies: Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo (Newark – London: 1999) 150–184. 67  Related to, but not quite embodied by, Michel Foucault’s theory of the ‘author function’. 68  Genette G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: 1997) 39. 69  Baldwin, Beware the Cat, “Introduction”, xxiii.

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this layered narrative of unreliable oral transmission, the text is annotated in the margins – just like the textbooks of natural phenomena which Streamer tries to look like he reads – with a series of notes which variously summarise, satirise, and digress from, the main treatise’s content. All of this is framed by an introductory note signed ‘Gulielmus Baldwin’, a figure undoubtedly separate from the man we would call the author of the work. It is his very ‘onymity’, therefore, which calls the William Baldwin inscribed within the Mirror for Magistrates into question, when its own compilation, via a series of dubious, and explicitly contested first person historical accounts, is narrated by ‘Baldwin’ in a prose frame. Like Beware the Cat, and like Baldwin’s earlier Treatise of Moral Philosophy (1547), a collection of misquoted and misattributed commonplaces, the Mirror is better understood, like Griffiths’s parodic gloss, as a meta-literary commentary on the way the kind of text it seems to be is expected to behave.70 Beware the Cat, then, shared attributes with the Menippean stance, perhaps prompted by Baldwin’s likely familiarity with his associate Thomas Chaloner’s recent translation of Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae as The Praise of Folie (1549), or Ralph Robinson’s English Utopia (1551).71 While Chaloner’s translation had glossed Erasmus’s encomium to different ends than its original glossator Listrius, ‘it too invites thought about the exact nature of the relationship between text and gloss’, ‘counteracting the implicit finality of the printed text’, and as such convincingly mediates between Baldwin’s self-commentary and the 1515 apparatus to Erasmus’s Moria.72 Like those of established adherents to the Lucianic-Erasmian ironic mode, Beware the Cat’s main objects of satire are the sort of text it purports to be, and the sort of pretentious scholar who might fall for the superficial trappings of academicism in which parts of it are dressed. The text can be framed as a magic realist or science fiction prose narrative whose satirical treatment of Roman Catholicism led to its probably voluntary suppression under Mary I, an abortive publication attempt in the early 1560s, and its eventual appearance as late as 1570. It cuts to the heart of textual certainty by calling all utterances, spoken and written, into question.73 Pincombe 70  See Richards J., “Commonplacing and Prose Writing: William Baldwin and Robert Burton”, in Hadfield A. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose: 1500–1640 (Oxford: 2013) 43–58; Archer H., Unperfect Histories: the ‘Mirror for Magistrates’, 1559–1610, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: 2017). 71  See Griffiths, Diverting Authorities 103–122. 72  Ibidem 122. 73  See Ringler W.A., “Beware the Cat and the Beginnings of English Fiction”, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 12, 2 (1979) 113–126; Maslen R.W., “Cat Got Your Tongue’: Pseudo-Translation, Conversion and Control in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat”, Translation and Literature 8, 1 (1999) 3–27.

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reads Baldwin’s later Mirror for Magistrates as formally and technically, as well as temperamentally, Menippean, too: he suggests that ‘[t]he abrupt transitions from tragic verse to colloquial prose in the Mirror also provide occasions for this kind of stylistic irony […]. It is but a step from Menippus’s philosophically supercilious attitude towards the great and powerful to the less emphatic mischief of Baldwin’s attitude to some of the imaginary speakers of the 1559 Mirror’.74 The sequence of texts explored here benefits from being situated in relation to this thread, to show how their aggregation of original verse with pseudo-allographic prose commentary shades into a satirical treatment of their own, and their contemporaries’, poetic practice. The Mirror for Magistrates (1559–1563) comprises a sequence of verse complaints or tragedies in the voices of late medieval English rulers and rebels, who were active across the reigns of Richard II to Richard III, framed by Baldwin’s prose account of the complaints’ composition and compilation. As verse history, we would expect the Mirror to recount the nation’s past, perhaps reliably, but primarily in a way that educates, edifies and entertains. It should uphold the political and ethical status quo, by bolstering the incumbent monarch’s authority and discouraging dissent. In addition to moments where they do just that, however, the Mirror’s verse complaints also often perform the opposite of these functions, shedding light instead on the value of opposition to tyranny, and the unjust condemnation of dissenting courtiers and political figureheads by kings and queens. Based on John Lydgate’s verse collection The Fall of Princes (1431–1438), itself a translation and adaptation of Boccaccio’s prose De casibus virorum illustrium, the Mirror inherited the dialectic between the historical verse tragedies which comprise its ostensible raison d’être and a framing authorial commentary, from Lydgate’s Fall, whose envoys dramatise its commission and patronage by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and Lydgate’s process of adaptation; the prosimetric arrangement was, however, Baldwin’s innovation, at least in this strand of the speculum principis tradition.75 Prose commentary used to frame verse complaint pits not only different kinds of form and voice but also clashing tempos and narrative arcs against one another. The Mirror comments obliquely on the fraught coexistence of story and axiom it embodies by holding two kinds of narrative in tension: the repetitive de casibus account of history’s perpetual rise and fall, and the prose account of its production, which, in direct opposition to the structural principles of de casibus, has no defined shape or trajectory: it begins in medias res,

74  Pincombe, “Tragic and Untragic Bodies” 67–68. 75  See Dronke, Verse with Prose 2 and 85.

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and fails to end with the compilation’s completion.76 Just as the Mirror’s verse complaints do not fulfil the professed role of verse history, so the prose narrative does not narrate the work’s real composition history. We are told that the gathered authors tooke vpon themselues euery man for his parte to be sundrye personages, and in theyr behalfes to bewayle vnto me, [Baldwin], theyr […] wofull misfortunes. This doen, we opened suche bookes of Cronicles as we had there present, and maister Ferrers […] founde where Bochas left [Boccaccio in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes], whiche was about the ende of king Edwarde the thirdes raigne, to begin the matter.77 Baldwin, whose assigned role within the narrative is ‘to note and pen orderly the whole processe’, also steps in to read certain complaints aloud, but only to ensure ‘you shal not say my masters but that I wyll somewhat do my parte’.78 Baldwin the author clashes with Baldwin the secretary-compiler, whose function is specifically non-generative, to the extent that he accidentally produces the tragedy of Richard Plantagenet, duke of York, by dreaming it; instead, the process mimics the compilation of manuscript miscellanies. Additionally, the work as described within the text is not the text we read, which has two parts instead of the stated three, for example, and is presented in a different order.79 Baldwin’s prose frame in the Mirror opened up a space to discuss the right retelling of conflicted chronicle accounts, the philosophical role of equivalence in retrospective moral judgements, and the decorum of poetic register when dealing with the contrasting speech of kings and the lower orders. The prose passage which follows the complaint of Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk – attributed in the 1571 edition to a ‘T. Ch.’, most likely Erasmus’s translator Chaloner – comments on the discrepancy between Robert Fabyan and Edward Hall’s chronicle accounts of his dealings with Henry Bolingbroke, and refers readers to ‘ye records of ye acts of the parliamente’ for further clarification.80 Subsequently, the prose following Richard II’s and Thomas Montague’s complaints meditates on the affective impact of tragic narrative,

76  See Crane, Framing Authority 164. 77  Baldwin, William, A Mirror for Magistrates (London, Thomas Marshe: 1571), “Baldwin to the Reader”, fol. Aiv. 78  Baldwin, Mirror, fols. Aii r, 11 v. 79  See Archer, Unperfect Histories 14–38. 80  Baldwin, Mirror, fol. 16r.

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which has rendered the roomful of would-be poets and historians ‘sylent’.81 Baldwin’s poets, though, also run riot through their literary-critical assignment. They joke, for example, that ‘this Richard [Plantagenet, earl of Cambridge] was but a litle man, or else litle fauoured of writers for our chronicles speake very litle of him’, and undermine the whole project by allowing the high register of Michael an Gof the Blacksmith to elevate his moral standing, despite his being a traitor.82 The compilation of historical tragedies had got off to a bad start, as one of the contributing poets observes, tentatively, in the prose narrative following the first complaint, evidently unsure of the work’s precise role.83 He ventures, ‘[a]lthough it be not greatly appertinent to our purpose, yet in my iudgement I think it would do wel to obserue the times of men, & as they be more auncient, so to place them’, advocating for a chronological arrangement which he goes on to violate by relating the prior story of Roger Mortimer.84 Instead of rearranging the tragedies, Baldwin narrates the discussion, foregrounding the historiographical logic at work behind the collection’s compilation. By not rearranging the tragedies, his narrative undercuts that logic, and establishes tension between the projected and real forms of the text. Meanwhile, the commentary emphasises the role of contingency in the assemblage of historical narrative: George Ferrers, introducing his complaint of Thomas Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, tells the assembled listeners simply, ‘ye shall heare what I thinke mete to be saied’.85 The inscribed Baldwin’s reluctance to participate in the Mirror’s composition – he admits in his initial preface ‘To the Reader’ that he had tried to get out of it – extends to the slapdash fashion in which we are told he assembles the complaints, and orchestrates the work’s completion, while additional tales, like that of the grisly death of the ‘fat Pryor of Tiptre’, are invoked then passed over arbitrarily.86 Far from being the worthy, educative historical compendium it sets out to imitate, then, the Mirror uses its prose frame to disrupt its generic affiliations, and question the viability of the humanist exemplary model.87 .

81  Ibidem, fol. 19r. See Budra P., “A miserable time full of piteous tragedyes”, in Archer – Hadfield (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context 35–52. 82  Baldwin, Mirror, fol. 29v; see Pincombe, “Tragic and Untragic Bodies” 57 and passim. 83  This anonymous contributor has been identified by Scott Lucas as Henry Lord Stafford; see Lucas S., “Henry Lord Stafford, ‘The Two Rogers’, and the Creation of A Mirror for Magistrates, 1554–1563”, Review of English Studies 66, 277 (2015) 843–858. 84  Baldwin, Mirror, fol. 4r. 85  Ibidem, fol. 7v. 86  Ibidem. 87  See Hampton T., Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca – London: 1990) 7; Jellerson D., “The Spectral Historiopoetics of the Mirror for

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Baldwin’s Mirror was hugely successful and much emulated, and spawned a series of revised and extended editions still going strong throughout the 1570s. While its influence is widely acknowledged in terms of its subject matter – it is regularly name-checked as a source for Shakespeare’s medieval history plays, and noted as the inspiration behind Spenser’s inset verse chronicle, ‘Briton Moniments’, in Book II of the Faerie Queene (1590) – this more slippery mode of narrative sleight of hand, involving the recession of textual origins from view, the misattribution of agency, and the fictionalisation of poetic composition, seems to inform the 1570s miscellanies of Gascoigne, Whetstone, Breton, and even Spenser. Its 1571 edition, printed for the first time with its complaints’ diverse authors identified by initials included after their poems, also tapped into the contemporary popularity of, for example, Richard Tottel’s and George Turberville’s respective anthologies of Songs and Sonnets by foregrounding the collection’s affiliation to the miscellany genre. Further, the compromised ontological status of the titular book it describes offers a convincing antecedent for George Gascoigne’s fictional Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, a miscellany which is the eponymous subject, as it were, of Gascoigne’s 1573 work of the same name. That text’s compilation is described in the fictive exchange between F.I., G.T., and H.W., in the inset prose-verse hybrid narrative, the “Adventures Passed by Master F.I.”. 5

George Gascoigne’s “Adventures Passed by Master F.I.” (1573)

Gascoigne is known to have engaged elsewhere with Baldwin’s work, and the Mirror tradition. His Senecan tragedy Jocasta, with its roots in the politically exercised Inns of Court milieu, was likened, in Gabriel Harvey’s marginal scrawl on his copy of Gascoigne’s Posies (1575), to the Mirror itself, while his ‘tragicall comedy’ The Glasse of Gouernement (1575) and satirical poem The Steele Glas (1576) borrow the ‘mirror’ metaphor, and “Dan Bartholmew of Bathe” shares, to a degree, the Mirror’s posthumous complaint premise and rhyme royal scheme.88 But it is the “Adventures of Master F.I.”, dominated by ‘two bookish fools, one a poet engaged in salacious games of textual exchange, Magistrates”, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2, 1 (2010) 54–71; Vine A., “Bibliophily in Baldwin’s Mirror” 89–106; Shrank C., “‘Hoisted high upon the rolling wheele’: Elinor Cobham’s Lament”, in Archer – Hadfield (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context 109–125. 88  See Winston J., Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581 (Oxford: 2016); eadem, “Rethinking Absolutism: English de casibus Tragedy in the 1560s”, in Archer – Hadfield (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context

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and one a pseudo-academic interpreting them’, which most closely resembles the arrangement of Baldwin’s spurious poetic miscellany within a fictive prose account, and which, moreover, situates the work as we read it in the uncertain space between the process of compilation and its appearance in print that Baldwin’s works so frequently occupy.89 Gascoigne’s critical persona, too, unpicks the stylistic workings of the poems he proffers, at once to inhabit and problematise his chosen genre. Like the ascendant Mirror’s ironic narrative of poetic production, Gascoigne may have found inspiration for the formal parody and authorial prismatics of the “Adventures” in Erasmus. Arthur F. Kinney sees the Moria as Gascoigne’s ‘original’, via Chaloner’s translation.90 In addition, Bradner cites as a potential source the relatively recent English translation of The Goodli History of the Moste Noble and Beautyfull Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane, and of her Louer Eurialus (1553), by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, or Pope Pius II, an epistolary ‘novel’ made up of letters between the lovers after a brief introduction, along with the prosimetric romances of Jorge de Montemayor and Pietro Bembo.91 In terms of prosodic experimentation, Gascoigne was certainly significantly indebted to Italian poetry collections. The difference between the hybrid texts addressed in this chapter and Montemayor’s Diana (first printed in English in 1598), or Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (composed 1580s, first printed 1590) as modelled on the Arcadia of Sannazaro, though, is that Montemayor and Sidney’s works are first and foremost stories in prose, with inset poems which emulate the pastoral exchange of songs. By contrast, Gascoigne, as well as Baldwin, Whetstone, Breton and Spenser, in the texts examined here, purport to present their readers with poetry collections, whose narratives of composition ought to be incidental to the verse, but whose main concern becomes the prose account of their production.92 Rather than setting the lyric in opposition to narrative genres, the hybridity of the “Adventures” foregrounds the complex tensions between occasion, spontaneity, and narrative time within the transition from 199–215 (211); Kalas R., Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca – London: 2007) 107–126. 89  Wilson, Fictions 16. See also Archer, Unperfect Histories 14–38; Stenner R., “The Act of Penning in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat”, Renaissance Studies 30, 3 (2016) 334–349. 90  See Kinney, Humanist Poetics 41, 54–56. 91  Bradner, “The First English Novel” 547. 92  Bradner makes a convincing case for the similarity of Gascoigne’s “Adventures” to Piccolomini’s History of Lucres, based on their common preoccupation with the materiality of the textual exchange which governs the narrative. See Bradner, “The First English Novel” 548–549. See also Philmus M.R., “Gascoigne’s Fable of the Artist as a Young Man”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73, 1 (1974) 13–31 (14).

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manuscript to print publication which Gascoigne’s pseudo-miscellany tries to recount.93 The work’s apparent form and attribution are both misleading. Gascoigne’s “Adventures of Master F.I.” is presented within his Hundreth Sundrie Flowres as a collection of poems and letters by the young writer, F.I., and others, which the editor-figure G.T. believes might interest his friend H.W., who has recently compiled for the printer A.B. a miscellany by the name A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres.94 This playful metatextual circularity sets the tone for G.T.’s account of the composition of the poems he has collected for H.W.’s attention, an account which becomes an erotic tale of romantic rivalry, betrayal and euphemistic textual exchange. Gascoigne’s inscribed correspondents suffer from a similar debasement of their high literary ambitions. G.T. had pre-empted by some seven years Spenser’s suggestion in the Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters (1580) he exchanged with Harvey that the English might one day possess ‘the kingdome of oure owne Language’, when he states his hope that ‘both our countreymen & countrie language might be entronised amonge the olde foreleaders vnto the mount Helicon’.95 This poetic apotheosis may happen, G.T. says, ‘If quicknes of inuencion, proper vocables, apt Epythetes, and store of monasillables may help a pleasant brayne to be crowned with Lawrell’, a qualification weighed down with equal measures of scepticism and self-reflexive smirking on Gascoigne’s part.96 From the outset, Gascoigne’s “Adventures” is framed not only by a fictive narrative of its composition, but also by a fictive paratext which seems to express doubt about its own aims. However, G.T.’s intention to inaugurate a new phase of English poetry suggests a deeper or at 93  Dubrow H., The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: 2008) 189. See Colie, Resources of Kind 104, on the workings of narrative time in relation to Dante’s prosimetric Vita Nova. 94  Gascoigne, George, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres Bounde Up in One Small Poesie (London: Henry Bynneman and Henry Middleton for Richard Smith, 1573). The constraints of space do not permit a discussion of the ways in which the story is complicated by the 1575 publication of Gascoigne’s Posies, an allegedly reformed reworking of the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres; see Hughes F.A., “Gascoigne’s Poses”, Studies in English Literature: 1500– 1900 37, 1 (1997) 1–19 (1); Austen G., “The Adventures Passed by Master George Gascoigne: Experiments in Prose”, in Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 156–171 (163); Scambly Schott P., “The Narrator Stance in ‘The Adventures of Master F.J.’: Gascoigne as Critic of His Own Poems”, Renaissance Quarterly 29, 3 (1976) 369–377 (370); Wilson, Fictions 31. 95  Spenser Edmund, “To my long approoued and singular good frende, Master G.H.”, in Harvey, Gabriel – Spenser Edmund, Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters: Lately Passed Betweene Two Universitie Men (London: Henry Bynneman, 1580) 6; Gascoigne, Flowres 204. 96  Ibidem.

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least broader engagement with origins and creation, invention and originality, than is regularly acknowledged, beyond the context of Gascoigne’s fabrication of alternative selves.97 Notorious for his use of multiple personae, to engage his readers and the censor in convoluted games of hide and seek, ‘Gascoigne’s most enduring character’, says Roger Pooley, ‘is “Gascoigne,” not to be confused with the historical figure who may often be observed sending him up from an ironic distance’.98 By contrast to the critical treatment of his acolytes, Breton and Whetstone, a great deal has been written about the interplay of narrative and literary critical voices in Gascoigne’s “Adventures”, in which his editor-persona, G.T., offers ‘perfunctory criticism’, and ‘[o]ccasionally […] outright mock-criticism’, of F.I.’s poetic efforts.99 While Gascoigne’s disposal of author, reader, editor, compiler and printer roles across a series of characters distinguished by their initials lends his story a comic officiousness, though, within the narrative the boundaries between reader, writer, compiler and critic functions elude the characters themselves. Early on, F.I., believing that the object of his affection, Elinor, has returned his letters and poems having been unable to understand them, ‘in great rage began to wreake his mallice on this poore paper, and the same did rend and teare in peeces. When sodenly at a glaunce he perceaued it was not of his owne hande writing’, he attempts to restore ‘all the peeces therof, as orderly as he could’.100 By failing in his interpretation, F.I. imagines himself to be the author, but on reading more closely, attempts to recompose another’s writing from its disparate fragments. This incident within the “Adventures” parallels the compilation of the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres itself, whose own narrative of composition in the “Adventures”’s opening letters worries over the multiplicity of forms, authors, and occasions which crowd the anthology. It is a plethora ‘of Sonets layes, letters, Ballades, Rondlets, verlayes and verses, the workes of your friend and myne Master F.I. and diuers others’, which, G.T. grumbles, he has ‘with long trauayle confusedly gathered together’.101 G.T.’s role as commentator, meanwhile, pits his myopic literalness against Elinor’s coy, affected misunderstanding of F.I.’s ‘darke letters’, and F.I.’s own frustrated ‘dull vnderstanding, which so rashly presumed to wander in this endles Laberinthe’ of textual

97  See, for example, Austen G., “Self-Portraits and Self-Presentation in the Work of George Gascoigne”, Early Modern Literary Studies 14, 1 (2008) 1–34. 98  Gascoigne, George, The Green Knight: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. R. Pooley, Fyfield Books (Manchester: 1982) 22. 99  Philmus, “Fable of the Artist” 13–31 (25). 100  Gascoigne, Flowres 207–208. 101  Ibidem 204.

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exchange.102 The hybrid prose-verse organisation of the “Adventures” functions, then, less like a mirror, and more as a prism, refracting interpretation and authority among Gascoigne’s multiple selves. The relationship between poetic origin and occasion preoccupies Gascoigne’s characters, to the extent that the prose narrative of the “Adventures” grows out of the editors’ paratextual attempt to reconstruct the correct order of F.I.’s poems for the speculative anthology.103 G.T. foregrounds the importance to his critical project that the circumstances of a piece’s composition are recorded; he notes that his young gentlemen authors ‘did alwayes, with the verse, reherse vnto me the cause th[at] moued them to write’, so that their poems may be properly contextualised and arranged.104 The significance of occasion or cause to the proper arrangement of ‘Master F.I. and sundry other toward young gentlemen’s […] sundry copies of these sundry matters’ reiterates a commonplace that would be spelled out most clearly the following decade in George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), in which Puttenham’s delineation of contemporary poetic forms presents genre as dependent on purpose and subject.105 The putative centrality of occasion to poetic composition, and thus to G.T.’s commentary, though, gives him license to stray from literary criticism into a prurient narrative of F.I.’s affair, while the real imaginative and practical origins of these poems recede from the reader’s sightline. Moreover, G.T.’s critical commentary fails to reconnect the reconstructed sequence of events to the poems’ formal properties, in which he often has little confidence: F.I.’s ‘moonshine banquet’ poem is a ‘Ballade, or howsoeuer I shall terme it’.106 In this way, G.T.’s failure to execute appropriately the role he has taken on confuses the generic identity of the “Adventures” as well as the poems within it, and calls the clear-cut formal distinctions implied between the prose frame and inset poems into question. Critics have variously considered Gascoigne’s “Adventures” as a satire of courtly love or, more specifically, Petrarchan lyric – a framework and a form which Gascoigne hypothesises and then rescinds over the course of the narrative.107 In common with the eponymous “hero” of 102  Ibidem 209; see Wilson, Fictions 26. 103  Michael Hetherington productively explores the etymological relationship between ‘occasion’ and ‘accident’ across the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. See Hetherington M., “Gascoigne’s Accidents: Contingency, Skill, and the Logic of Writing”, English Literary Renaissance 46 (2016) 29–59. 104  Gascoigne, Flowres 205. 105  Ibidem. See also Colie, Resources of Kind 23–24. 106  Gascoigne, Flowres 238. 107  See Philmus, “Fable of the Artist” 15 and passim; Waters G., “G.T.’s ‘Worthles Enterprise’: A Study of the Narrator in Gascoigne’s ‘The Adventure of Master F.J.”, The Journal of Narrative Technique 7, 2 (1977) 116–127 (116); Wilson, Fictions 19, 23.

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Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), F.I. and G.T. also bring tropes familiar from the romance tradition to bear on their accounts of his decidedly ignoble escapades.108 G.T.’s abortive anthology allows Gascoigne to unpick the workings of the miscellany, ‘to explore the kinds of corpus that might emerge when works of varied occasion and genre were bundled together’.109 Commending a particular sonnet, G.T. comments metaleptically, ‘I haue heard F.I. saye, that he borowed th’inuentiun of an Italian: but were it a translation or inuention (if I be Iudge) it is both prety and pithy’; Gascoigne parodies both the sketchy attribution attendant on print and manuscript miscellanies of the period, as well as the recursive quest for a definitive site of poetic making, playing on the emerging modern meaning of ‘invention’ and its earlier sense of ‘treatment’ or ‘method’ to create a nonsensical opposition between the two.110 This uncertainty, half-baked and unresolved, emerges as a digression, but underlines the embedded critique of the miscellany form, which occludes the interplay of influence and authority in the smoothed out compilation format.111 Gascoigne’s work went on to exert significant influence on later Elizabethan writing, too. Katharine Wilson has traced the development of Elizabethan ‘fictions of authorship’ from Gascoigne’s “Adventures of Master F.I.” into the efflorescence of prose romance in the 1580s and 1590s, Sidney’s Arcadia among them. She notes that ‘what unites these books are the multitude of readers and writers within the texts, who are often mischievously and self-consciously conflating echoes of earlier literature for new purposes’.112 Yet the works of two of Gascoigne’s earliest imitators already exhibit the mischievous self-reflexivity common to his and Baldwin’s writing, and make the case that their parodic, bifurcated representations of authorship and self-commentary were entrenched even by the later 1570s. 6

George Whetstone and Nicholas Breton’s Pseudo-Anthologies (1576–1577)

George Whetstone was a personal acquaintance of Gascoigne, and his first poetic outing in print may have been a commendatory verse for Gascoigne’s revised Posies (1575), the reworked edition of the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres 108  See Philmus, “Fable of the Artist” 27. 109  Hetherington, “Gascoigne’s Accidents” 30, 53. 110  Gascoigne, Flowres 218. See “invention, n.”, in Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed .com/. (accessed 1 March 2017). 111  See Waters, “Worthles Enterprise” 118. 112  Wilson, Fictions 9.

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which purported to clean up the earlier anthology’s smuttier material. The Posies’ front matter, comprising an absurdly expansive, multilingual series by Gascoigne’s apologists, includes a poem attributed to a G.W., which praises both Gascoigne’s ‘loftie vaine in verse, [and] his stately stile in prose’.113 Shortly after the publication of the Posies, Whetstone’s Rocke of Regard (1576) followed Gascoigne’s lead, as another single-authored iteration of the fashionable miscellany genre.114 Whetstone’s Rocke claims to shoot for a Horatian blend of profit and delight in the moral education of its readers. The work is divided into four allegorical zones: the Castle of Delight; the Garden of Unthriftinesse; the Arbour of Vertue; and the Ortchard of Repentance, which echo Gascoigne’s latter-day division of his own poems by way of horticultural metaphors of worth. Like Gascoigne, too, Whetstone constructs a pseudo-miscellany, characterised by his pseudo-prodigality, layered with pseudo-commentary. He also raises doubts regarding the ostensible occasionality of the miscellany form. And, by framing its teaching as primarily financial in his initial preface, punning on ‘profit’, ‘worth’, and ‘commoditie’ to elide moral and monetary value, Whetstone reveals the form’s nested contradictions; a frivolous commodity bought, paradoxically, as an incitement to thrift. Much of Whetstone’s original verse is framed by expository prose, including the short Arguments which introduce the Henrysonian “Cressids Complaint”, and “Dom Diego his Dolorous Discourse”, and the longer framing narrative of “Rinaldo and Gilleta” which, like Gascoigne’s “Adventures of Master F.I.”, shades between narrative, exegesis, and literary criticism.115 The headings of Whetstone’s verses are sometimes so lengthy as to become prose introductions, while the fiction of a series of collated volumes necessitates a new set of prose dedications at the opening of “The Arbour of Vertue” and “The Ortchard of Repentance”, providing further opportunities for the proliferation of personae. The poems of the “Ortchard”, in particular, are also subject to substantial marginal annotation. Most pertinent here, however, is the collection’s final major piece, the prose-verse hybrid tale, “Inuentions of P. Plasmos Touching his Hap and Hard Fortune”, in which ‘the reporter’ introduces and comments in prose on a series of complaints presented in a range of verse forms. Whetstone’s character echoes the reporter persona common to Baldwin’s Beware the Cat and Gascoigne’s “Dan Bartholmew of Bathe”, in combination with “Dan 113  Gascoigne, George, The Poesies of George Gascoigne Esquire (London, Henry Bynneman for Richard Smith: 1575) fol. ⁋⁋⁋⁋r. 114  See Crane, Framing Authority 179; Wilson, Fictions 33. 115  Wilson discusses the relationship between Gascoigne’s ‘Adventures’ and ‘Rinaldo and Giletta’ in Fictions 19–51.

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Bartholmew”’s formal experimentation, and the prose frame with inset verse of the “Adventures of Master F.I.”. The Rocke of Regard opened with the Latin epigraph, formae nulla fides.116 Whetstone seems subsequently to have adopted the phrase as a motto, akin to Baldwin’s ‘Love and Live’, or Gascoigne’s Tam Marti, quam Mercurio, including it on the title pages of later works. It apes the phrasing of a classical saw, cited in James Sandford’s translation of Lodovico Guicciardini’s The Garden of Pleasure (1573), ‘[t]he very which Iuuenal in his seconde Satyre sayeth: Fronti nulla fides, that is, Trust not the face’.117 Whetstone himself employs Juvenal’s axiom in his Honorable Reputation of a Souldier (1585): ‘[f]or Contenaunce is so great a deceiuer, as it brought foorth this Adage, Fronti nulla fides: but as the slender Grayhound, byteth as sore as the strong Mastife, and ouertaketh sooner’.118 Given the parallels between Guicciardini’s Garden and Whetstone’s Rocke, though, it is possible that Whetstone was thinking of Sandford, in addition to Juvenal himself, when he adjusted ‘trust not the face’ to ‘trust not the appearance’, to preface his pseudo-anthology. So, the tag raises the spectre of distrust in the apparent formal properties of a given genre to govern meaning. It is difficult to be certain about exactly what ‘formae’ Whetstone’s motto urges readers to distrust, but its message is emphatic, as the tag recurs on every sub-section’s title page, as well as following the epilogue to the “Castle of Delight”. Dictionary definitions of ‘form’ as it was understood in the early modern period demonstrate a tension between its signification of the outward appearance as well as in the inward essence of an object or being. Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotheca (1542), for example, gives ‘fourme or shape sometyme beaulty, fascion, maner’.119 While there is less strong a connotation of a literary style of expression than modern usage carries, it is also plausible that Whetstone’s appropriated slogan alluded to the unreliability of formal denotation, in addition to broader shape. Whetstone’s hapless poet Plasmos seems to owe his name to Whetstone’s interest in the semantic cluster around forming and making: plasma, in post-classical Latin, following its ancient Greek 116  Whetstone George, The Rocke of Regard (London, H. Middleton for Robert Waley: 1576). 117  Guicciardini Lodovico, The Garden of Pleasure, contayninge most pleasante tales, worthy deeds and witty sayings of noble princes [et] learned philosophers, moralized, trans. J. Sandforde (London, Henry Bynneman: 1573) fol. 98v [Translation of Guicciardini Lodovico, L’hore di ricreatione di M. Lodovico Guicciardini Patritio Fiorentino (Antwerp, Willem Silvius: 1568)]. 118  Whetstone, George, The Honorable Reputation of a Souldier with a morall report, of the vertues, offices, and (by abuse) the disgrace of his profession (London: Richard Jones, 1585) fol. Fiii r. 119  Elyot Thomas, Bibliotheca Eliotae Eliotis Librarie (London: 1542) fol. Pvii r.

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etymology, is a creature, a poetic fiction, or anything formed or moulded; later a form, mould or shape.120 Whetstone’s preoccupation with poetic form and fiction, then, runs deep, whether ‘Plasmos’ is a convenient pseudonym for a fictive persona, or of greater significance. The ‘inventions’ of the title, as we saw above, refers to the mustering of poetic skill to particular ends, or to physical collation (central to G.T.’s marshalling of F.I.’s diverse poems), while introducing ‘the possibility of imaginative creation, still, however, controlled and framed by its roots in gathering’.121 Within the “Inventions”, Whetstone engages at length with questions of trust in form and appearance. The collection comprises the complaints of Plasmos and a number of his fictive or pseudonymous acquaintances – Lyros, Frenos, Caphos, and the lawyer Pimos – ‘intermixte’ amongst the Reporter’s prose commentary. The Reporter notes that Plasmos’s misfortunes ‘might haue forewarned other younge Gentlemen to haue shunde the like follies’; in common with the Rocke at large, the aim is to advise its readers in prudent behaviour. More specifically, the collection works up a low-level satire on the exploitative dealings of early modern litigation, drawing on Whetstone’s experience as a student at the Inns of Chancery.122 The prose mediates between commentary on the poems’ invention and the extraction of morals. Plasmos’s occasional verses are arranged not according to chronology, but to construct the most effective educative narrative, we are told. The Reporter’s exegesis, though, adopts a sarcastic tone from the start: Plasmos’s love interest, Lady Laymos, seems, for example, ‘as meeke as Medea, as honest as Hellen, as constant as Cressed, and as modest as Maria Bianca, and therefore worthie of estimation’ – Medea, Helen, and Cressida being, of course, well-known models of these virtues’ opposites.123 Despite still being somewhat taken in by them, Thomas C. Izard noted early on the layers of deception at play in Whetstone’s “Inventions”, in which ‘autobiography quite possibly is liberally intermixed with fiction’, and where ‘Whetstone is ostensibly editing fragmentary work of another, but the mythical Plasmos bears suspicious resemblances to the editor’.124 The book’s general schema, too, is misleading: ‘The names of the four parts’, for example, ‘do not always accurately describe their contents’.125 120  “plasma, n.” Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/ (accessed 1 March 2017). 121  Crane, Framing Authority 175. 122  See Eccles M. “George Whetstone in Star Chamber”, Review of English Studies, 33 (1982) 385–395. 123  Whetstone, Rocke 81. 124  Izard T.C., George Whetstone: Mid-Elizabethan Gentleman of Letters, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature 158 (New York: 1942) 11, 47. 125  Izard, Whetstone 35.

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The role of ‘reporter’ in itself writes the concept of mediation and transmission into Whetstone’s narrative, distancing narrative authority yet further from the text at hand, as well as introducing the potential for deliberate or accidental corruption of the original information. The Reporter also presents the reader with a paradox, refusing to report, in particular, on the iniquities of Plasmos’s friends, ‘sith the circumstances be longe, and in reporting them I should passe my purpose, I leaue their lewdnes vnto their owne reporting’.126 What is the purpose of the reporter if not to report? Like Erasmus’s knowing Folly, and Thomas Blenerhasset’s forgetful personification Memory in the Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1578), Whetstone’s Reporter embodies the deferral of his signifier. It is therefore ironic that he adopts the interest of Baldwin’s Mirror’s prose frame in decorum and equivalence, noting that ‘[t]his disordered complaint of Frenos, is answerable vnto his disordered dealing’, while his prose muddles the discourse of narrative with its particulars, using terms like ‘sequel’ and ‘digression’ to refer to events in Plasmos’s story, rather than the telling of it.127 Like the Mirror’s narrative of composition, too, Whetstone’s Reporter allows the subpar verse to stand, since ‘howsoeuer it hange together, it conteyneth matter of note, which I leaue to the censure of the discrete reader’.128 The Reporter acknowledges the tangle of literary influence, including ‘Wanton Comedies, Tragedies, and discourses’, afflicting Plasmos’s composition, and, juxtaposing – or confusing – secular and devotional habits of reading, depicts Plasmos inspired by scripture to employ his ‘Muse vnto a more better vse then of yore’, and effect a prodigal reformation.129 The Reporter leaves off Plasmos’s history at the moment of his recantation and valediction to love poetry, to focus on the misfortunes of his enemies. Here, the “Inventions” change gear, and appropriate the language and form of the Mirror for Magistrates’ de casibus complaints. Lyros, ‘supposed at the houre of his death’, explicitly asks in rhyme royal that ‘[a]monge their falles, by filthie fraude which fell, / Let my mishappe, registred be I pray’, aping the diction and style, as well as the metatextual consciousness, of Baldwin’s Mirror poems and their many contemporary imitators. In particular, Lyros’s crimes themselves are textual: he ‘forged deedes’, ‘rased roules’, and ‘put in vre, what coemates mine inuent’.130 The tension between positive and negative senses of ‘craft’ overshadows Plasmos’s verse, and the Reporter’s exposition of it. So interested 126  Whetstone, Rocke 86. 127  Ibidem 114. 128  Ibidem. 129  Ibidem 96. 130  Ibidem 108.

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in making, and ‘invention’, Whetstone’s warnings about conniving, parasitical acquaintances blur into his discussion of poetics. “P. Plasmos Description of Couseners”, for example, condemns a sequence of charlatans according to their underhand making: the lawyer who ‘drawe[s] a craftie deede’; the merchant who forges truth out of falsehood; the scrivener who ‘counterfet[s] a name’.131 In his debt to Gascoigne, Whetstone was not merely imitating the techniques of a more successful antecedent, but building on the scepticism with which Gascoigne had also approached form and poetic invention.132 By participating in the language of prodigal reform which Gascoigne’s Posies had affected, Whetstone himself, around twenty-three years old at the time of the Rocke’s publication, was sailing under false colours, adopting a pose of mature retrospection on a misspent youth. The reflexivity of the prodigal stance is revealed as germane to literary production and self-commentary, though.133 For Plasmos, we are told, writing poetry ‘ease[s] his mynde of griefe’, and even constitutes an expression of l’esprit de l’escalier: ‘(prouoked to impatience) whereas he came to complaine of one of the two, he departed exclayming on them all, and at leasure, inuented as followeth’.134 In “P. Plasmos to his Mishap”, the poet himself engages in an introspective moment of creative deliberation: ‘How should I frame my plaint, how shall I tell my tale?’135 By contrast, Whetstone’s Frenos ‘hauing his conscience vnprepared, tormented with the multitude of his sinnes’, is shocked into inarticulacy, and stands exposed within the “Inventions”, ‘amazed what to say’.136 The narrative confronts the difficulty of conveying verbally the inability to speak, as Breton’s inscribed persona would go on to do the following year, grappling with the failure of invention, imagination and rhetoric, by spinning out an unedifying bout of writers’ block into a lyric sequence, whose subject is poetic inspiration. Nicholas Breton had become Gascoigne’s step-son when Breton’s mother remarried, following an unseemly dispute between Gascoigne and another suitor. Greatly in Gascoigne’s debt, poetically, it has been suggested that Breton lost out on what would have been a considerable inheritance when Gascoigne diverted the late William Breton’s fortune to replenish his own notoriously empty coffers.137 In 1577, the young Nicholas produced two autographic anthologies 131  Ibidem 93. 132  See Wilson, Fictions 36. 133  See Crane, Framing Authority 181. 134  Whetstone, Rocke 90–91. 135  Ibidem 87. 136  Ibidem 114. 137  Flournoy F., “William Breton, Nicholas Breton, and George Gascoigne”, The Review of English Studies 16, 63 (1940) 262–273 (273).

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of varied occasional verse, The Workes of a Young Wit, and “The Toyes of an Idle Heade”, part of A Floorish Upon Fancie, whose framing prose probed the cause and origin of poetic creativity.138 Both allow the lengthy titles of their occasional verse to stand in for a narrative of composition; while presented as lyric poetry collections, both in fact become hybrid prose-verse fiction, as the stories of their creation unfold. “The Toyes of an Idle Head” introduces its lyrics as written by an unnamed ‘young man’ following various prompts, effectively disowning the poems which follow, while The Workes of a Young Wit’s prose frame uses the first person and the conceit of a muse to interrogate the illogical coexistence of the notion of divine inspiration with material circumstance in the poetic invention of the contemporary rhymester. Between “Fly fansy fonde, and trouble me no more”, and “My Lord commaundes, that I in hast doo write”, Breton’s prose link in the Workes of a Young Wit describes how: Now gan my Muse sodeinly to leaue me […] being not gon far from my lodging, I mette with a noble man, my right good Lord, who would (no nay) haue me with him to his lodging, where I had not been long, but he commaunded me to wryte him some Verses. I craued of his Lordship a Theame to wryte vppon· none would he graunt, but wild me to write what I would. I not knowing what of a sodayne myght best fit his fansy, and yet desyrous to pen that myght like his Lordshyppe, standyng a while in a studye, at last at all aduentures I wrote that which I dyd assure my selfe myght no way much mislyke hym, which with the helpe of my Muse who mette me there of a sodayne, and vnseene or heard, would whisper me in the eare with what inuention shee thought best.139 This commentary on the circumstances, conditions and mechanisms of poetic invention alludes to the pragmatism of the jobbing Elizabethan hack writer, responding to the need to please a capricious patron, while insisting on the unknowability of a poem’s origins. The sudden visitation of the muse, ‘vnseene or heard’, supplies invention and removes any agency the poet had left over from his paymaster. The resulting poem, though, also claims to be bereft of inspiration: its author’s brain is ‘barren’, again, and it is all he can 138  See Tappan E.M., “Nicholas Breton and George Gascoigne”, Modern Language Notes 11, 4 (1896) 113–114 (113). 139  Breton Nicholas, The Workes of a Young Wit, Trust vp with a Fardell of Pretie Fancies Profitable to Young Poetes, Preiudicial to no Man, and Pleasaunt to Euery Man, to Passe Away Idle Tyme Withall (London: 1577), fol. 15r.

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do to write ‘these ragged rimes, at randon’.140 Recalling the affective mirroring provided by Baldwin’s collaborators, Breton’s muse reflects the modulation of occasion and form as the miscellany progresses: she becomes ‘somewhat melancholy with the reading of this pitifull parting of this poore Gentleman, standing a while in a great dumpe’, before ‘suddaynly call[ing] to mynde a dolefull discourse’.141 A later poem, on the subject of ‘nothing’, takes the futility, emptiness, and paradoxically generative essence of this process to its logical, and, to be honest, aesthetic limits.142 In many ways ridiculous, when read through the testosterone-laden innuendo of these real and imagined textual communities, the simultaneously corrosive, hollow and generative potential of ‘nothing’ makes sense. The acknowledged imitation of literary models is absent from this rootless mode of generation, although Gascoigne’s presence is clear enough. Indeed, in one extraordinary fiction, Breton obliquely addresses questions of textual transmission, influence and imitation by eliding writing and reading, or the compulsion of his muse with what amounts to the theft of a poem, founde lynge in his window, which hauing read ouer, I bare in mynde as I coulde, yet hauyng almoste forgotten it, my Muse brought it agayne to my remembraunce, and made me wryte as foloweth.143 In Gascoigne’s “Adventures”, the generative dissipation of spiritually and professionally idle, yet physically active, young men had found twin expression in sex and writing. Having laboured the significance of occasion to the generation of text, G.T. imbues the sexually frustrated F.I.’s recourse to solitary poetic composition with substantial innuendo; for instance, ‘in the morning rysing very earely (although it were farre before his mistres hower)’, F.I. ‘cooled his choller by walking in the Gallery neare to hir lodging, and there in this passion compyled these verses following’.144 The widely noted punning on ‘pen’ and ‘penis’ throughout G.T.’s narration shapes the poetics of sexual and textual exchange in the “Adventures”, whose discourse of reading and writing does not so much stand metaphorically for erotic interaction as it presents both signified and signifier as simultaneous, parallel realities. The discourse of sexual dissipation is absolutely pervasive in Breton’s early works, too, where the scattered seeds of 140  Breton, Workes, fol. 15r. 141  Ibidem, fol. 12v. 142  Ibidem fol. 16v–17v. 143  Ibidem fol. 28r–v. 144  Gascoigne, Flowres 225.

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their textual gardens and orchards capture poetry’s paradoxical status as something wasteful and barren, empty and inconsequential, but also something which bears fruit.145 The Workes opens with a “Primordium” which discusses the sowing of wild oats ‘within my barren brayne’.146 These statements move beyond the conventional stance of the modesty topos, as they probe fundamental theoretical ideas, and plumb the depths of banality.147 Michael Hetherington suggests that in the “Adventures”, Gascoigne had ‘creatively explore[d] aspects of his own poetic persona, which relied extensively on the performance of spontaneous composition in response to sudden circumstance’.148 The fiction of spontaneous composition reaches new extremes in Breton’s Workes of a Young Wit, in which Breton’s pseudo-autobiographical descriptions of his own poetic inventions stress that they are explicitly the product of youthful masculine dissipation. Akin to the metatextual awareness of Baldwin’s historical villains, F.I.’s quasi-metaphorical literary intercourse, and Plasmos’s moments of writerly introspection, Breton’s poems themselves, in conjunction with his prose narrative, discuss the interplay of inspiration, occasion and labour in their composition. Far more overtly than his predecessors, the inscribed Breton interrogates the machinery of poetic practice, doubling his commentary across both prose and verse, framework and core, to echo the implied internal division between muse and writer, as well as unconscious dreamer and writer, in addition to the external drivers of patronage and occasion. Despite (and, of course, because of) his adherence to the post-Petrarchan plain style where M.R. Rohr Philmus argues Gascoigne’s “Adventures” led, Breton’s poems adumbrate a network of influences which speaks to his investment in contemporary considerations of the relationship between poetic form and origin.149 Matthew Harrison frames Breton’s persona as that of the ‘unfledged youth’ as opposed to Gascoigne’s prodigal, although, in common with the divided authorial selves of the prodigal poet, Conny Loder suggests that Breton draws a distinction between ‘a desired and an undesired identity’ throughout his works.150 In this respect, Harrison argues, Breton anticipates Edmund Spenser’s pose in The Shepheardes Calender: both immature poetic practitioners are like ‘young birdes, that be newly crept

145  See Harrison, “Rude Poet” 250. 146  Breton, Workes, fol. 3r. 147  See Harrison, “Rude Poet” 247. 148  Hetherington, “Gascoigne’s Accidents” 45. 149  See Philmus, “Fable of the Artist” 21. 150  Harrison, “Rude Poet” 249; Loder C., Nicholas Breton and the English Self, Britannia 17 (Frankfurt am Main: 2014) 14.

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out of the nest’.151 Like Spenser’s inscribed persona Colin Clout, too, Breton’s young male poets (including his own authorial persona) struggle with inspiration, imperfection, and the dealings of their muses, in amongst other, more worldly, concerns. 7 Conclusion While scholarly investigations of the Shepheardes Calender’s points of reference have tended to look backwards over the heads of the ‘minor Elizabethans’ to more illustrious antecedents, from Marot, Chaucer and Petrarch to Vergil and Theocritus, this chapter has aimed to show that it may also be fruitful to resituate Spenser, and his poetic persona Colin Clout, amongst their contemporary late sixteenth-century rhymesters. Philmus calls the “Adventures Passed by Master F.I.” a Künstlerroman, a novel about the development of the novelist, which also speaks usefully to Whetstone, Breton, and Spenser’s works.152 Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, too, printed in 1570 amid his Mirror’s burgeoning popularity, occupies similar territory. The ‘New Poet’ himself was just twenty-seven years old when the Calender appeared in print. E.K.’s professions of his youth and greenness have largely been read as a foil for the glittering canon Spenser aims to equal, as listed in E.K.’s preface. Yet Spenser himself, and the persona Colin, face up to precisely the issues raised by Baldwin, Gascoigne, Breton and Whetstone. Using a formal apparatus of self-commentary, whose inaccurate glosses and blind alleys recall the hermetic warren of Baldwin’s marginal annotations in Beware the Cat, Spenser interrogates the questions with which all of the writers discussed here wrestle: where does poetry come from, and how is it authorised? The Calender’s account of its own composition differs from those of the texts described above, in that it is embedded within E.K.’s scholarly apparatus rather than plainly set out as part of a narrative. However, Spenser’s poems and framing prose engage as rigorously with the vagaries of form and the process of poetic creation as the earlier hybrid collections. These poets’ interrogative humanisms differ substantially from the models of Erasmus and More, and from each other. Where the Moria and Utopia had sought to satirise scholasticism, Baldwin and Spenser’s narratives of composition rounded on the educative practices of historiography and commentary, while Gascoigne, Whetstone and Breton, feeding, as E.K. claimed, on their own

151  Spenser, Calender, fol. ⁋ iij r. 152  Philmus, “Fable of the Artist” 14.

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literary ‘folly’, sent up poetic composition itself.153 However, all of the texts discussed above generate scepticism with regards to the relationship between form and meaning. For Halpern, ‘Spenserian pastoral [is locked] into a tightly dialectical relationship with humanist scholarship’, as it enacts ‘the interplay of certainty and uncertainty’ which ‘was at least latent in humanism from its beginnings’.154 But reading across these works makes clear their common articulation of ‘that humanist dilemma we have seen inherent in Erasmus and More and central to their fictions: the trust or distrust of language’; while, supplementarily, making a case for a more sustained consideration of Spenser’s place within his immediate context.155 We should take care before labelling this shared interest ‘Menippean’: when we refer to Menippean satire, as Bakhtin wryly notes, we must trust Lucian’s evocation of a literature that is fundamentally slippery, if not fully untrustworthy, by nature.156 Yet to deploy Bakhtin’s framework of the menippea in relation to these poets’ prose-verse hybrid anthologies points up a productive set of correspondences between them, which are informed by but also sometimes transcend the model of Erasmus, and with which we may consider anew the operations of literary production and influence in the messy vernacular anticanon of mid-Elizabethan England. These works see writers interrogating the written text, and the relationship between form, decorum and invention, by commenting self-reflexively on their poetic practice, and in the process tearing their models apart. These works’ divided authorial stances reflect starkly on their decade’s engagement with textual legitimation and origins. Their narratives of poetic composition satirise not just the writing of poetry but also its interpretation, anticipating a metacritical analysis of interpretative discourse, and reveal the reciprocity of creative and critical acts by embedding commentary within literary texts. By ventriloquising the unfledged poet and the misguided Menippean commentator, both of whose voices reverberate within the additional, unseen framework of the generic contract between writer and reader, these poets explore the contingency of textual authority.

153  See Wooden W.W., “Anti-Scholastic Satire in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 8, 2 (1997) 29–45. 154  Halpern, Primitive Accumulation 182. See also Slights, Managing Readers 52; Wooden W.W., “Utopia and Arcadia: An Approach to More’s Utopia”, College Literature 6, 1 (1979) 30–40. 155  Kinney, Humanist Poetics 91. 156  Bakhtin, Problems 316.

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Selective Bibliography Texts

Baldwin William, Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, ed. by William A. Ringler and Michael Flachmann (San Marino, Huntington Library: 1988). Baldwin William, A Mirror for Magistrates (London, Thomas Marshe: 1571). Breton Nicholas, The Workes of a Young Wit, Trust vp with a Fardell of Pretie Fancies Profitable to Young Poetes, Preiudicial to no Man, and Pleasaunt to Euery Man, to Passe Away Idle Tyme Withall (London, Thomas Dawson and Thomas Gardiner: 1577). Castiglione Baldassarre, The Courtyer, trans. Thomas Hoby (London, William Seres: 1561). Elyot Thomas, Bibliotheca Eliotae Eliotis Librarie (London: 1542). Gascoigne George, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres Bounde Up in One Small Poesie (London, Henry Bynneman and Henry Middleton for Richard Smith: 1573). Gascoigne George, The Poesies of George Gascoigne Esquire (London, Henry Bynneman for Richard Smith: 1575). Gascoigne George, The Green Knight: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. R. Pooley, Fyfield Books (Manchester: 1982). Guicciardini Lodovico, The Garden of Pleasure, contayninge most pleasante tales, worthy deeds and witty sayings of noble princes [et] learned philosophers, moralized, trans. James Sandforde (London, Henry Bynneman: 1573). Harvey Gabriel – Spenser, Edmund, Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters: Lately Passed Betweene Two Universitie Men (London, Henry Bynneman: 1580). Spenser Edmund, The Shepheardes Calender (London, Hugh Singleton: 1579). Whetstone George, The Rocke of Regard (London, H. Middleton for Robert Waley: 1576). Whetstone George, The Honorable Reputation of a Souldier with a morall report, of the vertues, offices, and (by abuse) the disgrace of his profession (London, Richard Jones: 1585).

Studies

Archer H., “‘New Matter Framed Upon the Old’: Chaucer, Spenser, and Luke Shepherd’s ‘New Poet’”, in Badcoe T. – Griffith G. – Stenner R. (eds.), Chaucer and Spenser, The Manchester Spenser (Manchester: forthcoming). Archer H., “Studied for Redaction? Reading and Writing in the Works of John Higgins”, in Acheson K. (ed.), Early Modern Marginalia, Material Readings in Early Modern Culture (London: 2019). Archer H., Unperfect Histories: the ‘Mirror for Magistrates’, 1559–1610, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: 2017).

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Archer H. – Hadfield A. (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 2016). Austen G., George Gascoigne, Studies in Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: 2008). Austen G., “Self-Portraits and Self-Presentation in the Work of George Gascoigne”, Early Modern Literary Studies 14, 1 (2008) 1–34. Bakhtin M.M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson, Theory and History of Literature 8 (Minneapolis: 1984). Barker W.B., “Erasmus, Desiderius”, in Hamilton A.C., The Spenser Encyclopedia (London and Toronto: 1990) 251–252. Barr H., “‘Litle herd gromes piping in the wind’: The Shepheardes Calender, The House of Fame, and ‘La Compleynt’”, in Badcoe T. – Griffith G. – Stenner R. (eds.), Chaucer and Spenser, The Manchester Spenser (Manchester: forthcoming). Berger H. Jr, The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: 2000). Blanchard W.S., Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg: 1995). Borris K., Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (Oxford: 2017). Bradner L., “The First English Novel: A Study of George Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J.”, Publications of the Modern Language Association 45 (1930) 543–552. Branham R.B. – Goulet-Cazé M. (eds.), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy, Hellenistic Culture and Society 23 (Berkeley: 1996). Brewer D.S. (ed.), Chaucer and the Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature (London: 1966). Budra P., “A miserable time full of piteous tragedyes”, in Archer – Hadfield (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context 35–52. Colie R.L., The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Lewalski B.K., Una’s Lectures 1 (Berkeley – London: 1973). Crane M.T., Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: 1993). Crawforth H., Etymology and the Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: 2013). Davidoff J.M., Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry (London and Toronto: 1988). Davis H., “Allusive Resonance in the Woodcut to Spenser’s ‘April’”, in Howard-Hill T.H. – Rollinson P. (eds.) Renaissance Papers 2000 (Rochester: 2000) 25–40. Dronke P., Verse with Prose From Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form, Carl Newell Jackson Lectures [1992] (Cambridge and London: 1994). Dubrow H., The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: 2008). Duncan D.J.M., Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: 1979).

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Eccles M. “George Whetstone in Star Chamber”, Review of English Studies, 33 (1982) 385–395. Enenkel K.A.E. (ed.), Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 29 (Leiden – Boston: 2014). Flournoy F., “William Breton, Nicholas Breton, and George Gascoigne”, The Review of English Studies 16, 63 (1940) 262–273. Fox D., “The Scottish Chaucerians”, in Brewer D.S. (ed.), Chaucer and the Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature (London: 1966) 164–200. Frye N. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, ed. R.D. Denham, Frye, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye 22 (Toronto: 2006). Geller S., “Editing under the Influence of the Standard Textual Hierarchy: Misrepresenting A Mirror for Magistrates in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Editions”, Textual Cultures 2, 1 (2007) 43–77. Geller S., “What History Really Teaches: Historical Pyrrhonism in William Baldwin’s A Mirror for Magistrates”, in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies: Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo (Newark – London: 1999) 150–184. Genette G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: 1997). Griffiths J., Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: 2014). Hadfield A. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose: 1500–1640 (Oxford: 2013). Hadfield A., “Spenser’s Rosalind”, The Modern Language Review 104, 4 (2009) 935–946. Halpern R., The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca and London: 1991). Hamilton A.C. (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopaedia (Toronto: 1990). Hampton T., Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: 1990). Harrison M., “The Rude Poet Presents Himself: Breton, Spenser, and Bad Poetry”, Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 29 (2014) 239–262. Harrison T.P. Jr, “Spenser and the Earlier Pastoral Elegy”, Studies in English 13 (1933) 36–53. Helgerson R., The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: 1976). Heninger S.K. Jr, “Spenser, Sidney, and Poetic Form”, Studies in Philology 88, 2 (1991) 140–152. Hetherington M., “Gascoigne’s Accidents: Contingency, Skill, and the Logic of Writing”, English Literary Renaissance 46 (2016) 29–59. Howard-Hill T.H. – Rollinson P. (eds.) Renaissance Papers 2000 (Rochester: 2000).

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Hughes F.A., “Gascoigne’s Poses”, Studies in English Literature: 1500–1900 37, 1 (1997) 1–19. Izard T.C., George Whetstone: Mid-Elizabethan Gentleman of Letters, Columbia Studies in English and Comparative Literature 158 (New York: 1942). Jellerson D., “The Spectral Historiopoetics of the Mirror for Magistrates”, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2, 1 (2010) 54–71. Johnson E., “Chaucer and the Consolation of Prosimetrum”, Chaucer Review 43, 4 (2009) 455–472. Johnson L.S., The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction (London: 1990). Kalas R., Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: 2007). Kalstone D., “The Transformation of Arcadia: Sannazaro and Sir Philip Sidney”, Comparative Literature 15 (1963) 234–249. Kinney A.F., Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: 1986). Kuskin W., “‘The Loadstarre of the English Language’: Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and the Construction of Modernity”, Textual Cultures 2, 2 (2007) 9–33. de Landtsheer J., “Annotating Tacitus: The Case of Justus Lipsius”, in Enenkel K.A.E. (ed.), Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 29 (Leiden – Boston: 2014) 280–326. Loder C., Nicholas Breton and the English Self, Britannia 17 (Frankfurt am Main: 2014). Luborsky R.S., “The Illustrations to The Shepheardes Calender”, Spenser Studies 2 (1981) 3–53. Lucas S., “Henry Lord Stafford, ‘The Two Rogers’, and the Creation of A Mirror for Magistrates, 1554–1563”, Review of English Studies 66, 277 (2015) 843–858. Maslen R.W., “‘Cat Got Your Tongue’: Pseudo-Translation, Conversion and Control in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat”, Translation and Literature 8, 1 (1999) 3–27. Maslen R.W., Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: 1997). McCanles M., “The Shepheardes Calender as Document and Monument”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22, 1 (1982) 5–19. Mohsen E., Time and the Calendar in Edmund Spenser’s Poetical Works, Éditions Publibook Université (Paris: 2005). Philmus M.R., “Gascoigne’s Fable of the Artist as a Young Man”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73, 1 (1974) 13–31. Pincombe M., “Tragic and Untragic Bodies in the Mirror for Magistrates”, in Archer – Hadfield (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context 53–70.

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Pugh S., Spenser and Virgil: The Pastoral Poems, The Manchester Spenser (Manchester: 2016). Relihan J.C., “Mennipus in Antiquity and the Renaissance”, in Branham R.B. – GouletCazé M. (eds.), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy, Hellenistic Culture and Society 23 (Berkeley: 1996) 265–293. Ringler W.A., “Beware the Cat and the Beginnings of English Fiction”, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 12, 2 (1979) 113–126. Scambly Schott P., “The Narrator Stance in ‘The Adventures of Master F.J.’: Gascoigne as Critic of His Own Poems”, Renaissance Quarterly 29, 3 (1976) 369–377. Shore D.R., “E.K.”, in Hamilton A.C. (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopaedia (Toronto: 1990) 231. Shrank C., “‘Hoisted high upon the rolling wheele’: Elinor Cobham’s Lament”, in Archer – Hadfield (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context 109–125. Slights W.E., Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books, Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism (Ann Arbor: 2001). Smet I.A.R., Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581–1655, Travaux du Grand Siècle 2 (Geneva: 1996). Staton W.F. Jr, “Spenser’s ‘April’ Lay as a Dramatic Chorus”, Studies in Philology 59, 2 (1962) 111–118. Steinberg Th. L., “E.K.’s Shepheardes Calender and Spenser’s”, Modern Language Studies 3, 2 (1973) 46–58. Stenner R., “The Act of Penning in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat”, Renaissance Studies 30, 3 (2016) 334–349. Tappan E.M., “Nicholas Breton and George Gascoigne”, Modern Language Notes 11, 4 (1896) 113–114. Tylus J., “Spenser, Virgil, and the Politics of Poetic Labor”, English Literary History 55, 1 (1988) 53–77. Vine A., “Bibliophily in Baldwin’s Mirror”, in Archer – Hadfield (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context 89–106. Waters G., “G.T.’s ‘Worthles Enterprise’: A Study of the Narrator in Gascoigne’s ‘The Adventure of Master F.J.’”, The Journal of Narrative Technique 7, 2 (1977) 116–127. Wilson K., Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: 2006). Winston J., Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581 (Oxford: 2016). Winston J., “Rethinking Absolutism: English de casibus Tragedy in the 1560s”, in Archer – Hadfield (eds.), ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ in Context 199–215. Wooden W.W., “Anti-Scholastic Satire in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 8, 2 (1997) 29–45. Wooden W.W., “Utopia and Arcadia: An Approach to More’s Utopia”, College Literature 6, 1 (1979) 30–40.

chapter 8

The Journey of the Soul: The Prose Commentaries on His Own Poems by St John of the Cross Colin P. Thompson The poetic corpus of St John of the Cross (1527–1591) is relatively slender. But three of his poems, written in the lira form, are regarded as among the finest creations of the literature of early modern Spain: his ‘Noche oscura’ (‘Dark Night’), ‘Cántico espiritual’ (‘Spiritual Canticle’) and ‘Llama de amor viva’ (‘Living Flame of Love’).1 The ‘Cántico’, with two hundred lines, is the longest; the ‘Noche’ has forty and the ‘Llama’, a mere twenty-four. They adopt a firstperson feminine voice and their imagery is rich and sensuous. St John wrote other verse, but it is only on these three poems that he subsequently produced extensive commentaries, each of which interprets them in terms of the soul’s quest for union with God. These commentaries, the Subida del monte Carmelo and Noche oscura del alma (two parts of one work), the Cántico espiritual and the Llama de amor viva run to several hundred pages in modern editions. They use an impersonal, third-person voice and appear to inhabit a very different world from that of the poems. In each, after a brief prologue, St John provides verse-by-verse explanations, though most of the Subida-Noche expounds the image of the dark night from the first line of the poem and it peters out at the beginning of the third verse. We shall look more closely in due course at how both poems and commentaries came to be written, but for the moment the different worlds they appear to inhabit may best be illustrated by citing the beginning of each work in turn. 1

The Poet and the Commentator En una noche oscura, con ansias, en amores inflamada, ¡oh dichosa ventura!;

1  The lira was introduced into Spanish by Spain’s first great Renaissance poet, Garcilaso de la Vega (1501–1536). It usually consists of five heptasyllabic and hendecasyllabic lines rhyming ababb, though the ‘Llama’ poem uses a six-line verse.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_010

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salí sin ser notada, estando ya mi casa sosegada. (On a dark night, anxiously, inflamed by love, oh blessed fortune! I left without being noticed, my house already being at rest.) This is the first verse of the poem which introduces St John’s most famous symbol, the dark night of the soul. Here is the beginning of the extensive commentary he wrote on these words: En esta primera canción canta el alma la dichosa suerte y ventura que tuvo en salir de todas las cosas de afuera, y de los apetitos e imperfecciones que hay en la parte sensitiva del hombre por el desorden que tiene de la razón. Para cuya inteligencia es de saber que, para que el alma llegue a estado de perfección, ordinariamente ha de pasar por dos maneras principales de noches, que los espirituales llaman purgaciones o purificaciones del alma. Y aquí las llamamos noches, porque el alma, así en la una como en la otra, camina como de noche, a oscuras.2 S1.1.1

(In this first song the soul sings of her happy lot and fortune in leaving all outward things behind, the appetites and imperfections which belong to the sensory part of the soul because of the disorder of human reason. To understand this one should know that for a soul to reach the state of perfection it must normally pass through two main kinds of night, which spiritual people call purgations or purifications of the soul. And here we call them nights, because in both of them the soul travels as by night, in the dark.) At first sight poem and commentary belong to two radically different worlds. The eight liras of the poem tell of how a first-person female speaker sets out from her house one dark night to be united with her lover. Neither protagonist 2  My emphasis. All translations from the Spanish are mine. Quotations from the works of St John follow San Juan de la Cruz. Obras completas, ed. L. Ruano de la Iglesia, 11th ed. (Madrid: 1982). The titles of poems are given in inverted commas and those of the commentaries in italics; references to the latter are given by abbreviated title (S, N, C, L), then book or verse commentary and paragraph. I am grateful to Mr E.A. Southworth (University of Oxford) for reading my typescript and making several helpful suggestions for improvement.

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is named; both are described generically, as ‘amada’ (the female beloved) and ‘amado’ (the male beloved), and, in the latter case, also periphrastically, as ‘quien yo bien me sabía’ (‘the one whom well I knew’).3 The commentary, by contrast, identifies the female voice as that of ‘el alma’ (‘the soul’, feminine in gender in Spanish) and the male voice as that of her bridegroom, Christ. It launches straight into an interpretation of the night as a period of inner mortification. Nevertheless, as the highlighted words show, it repeats certain images from the verse, as well as anticipating a phrase from the second verse (‘a oscuras’, ‘in the dark’), and these play a significant part in its exposition of the verse. Both texts are the work of the same author, St John of the Cross, and both evidently refer to the same experience. How does he move from the lyrical delicacy of his verse, in which so much is left unsaid, to a commentary which appears, at least to modern sensibilities, to impoverish it by imposing an arbitrary meaning on it? The gulf between a poem about a human lover who makes her way through the darkness to be united with her beloved in a secret place and a treatise on the journey of the soul from enslavement to its appetites to union with God seems unbridgeable. The same problem arises from the first verse of the much longer ‘Cántico espiritual’ and his commentary on it:4 Adónde te escondiste, Amado, y me dejaste con gemido? Como el ciervo huiste, habiéndome herido; salí tras ti clamando, y eras ido.

3  Modern editions capitalise the terms ‘Amada’ and ‘Amado’, whereas in the earliest MSS (Sanlúcar, Jaén) they are in lower case. They are usually translated as ‘Lover’ and ‘Beloved’, but this introduces a distinction not supported by the Spanish, since both share the same grammatical form, the past participle, and differ only in gender; see Muñoz D., Transformed by the Beloved: A Guide to Spiritual Formation with St John of the Cross (Abingdon: 2014) 89. 4  Poem and commentary exist in two main redactions, generally referred to as CA and CB, as well as an intermediate one, CA’. CB adds a new stanza and makes significant alterations to the order of the verses as well as substantial additions and changes to the commentary. Its authenticity was first called into question by Chevallier P., “Le ‘Cantique spirituel’: a-t-il été interpolé?”, Bulletin Hispanique 23–24 (1921–1922) 307–342. Dozens of articles and books have since been devoted to this question. Most critics now accept the authenticity of both redactions, though a minority continues to express doubts about CB. For an account of the issues involved, see Pacho E., Reto a la crítica. Debate histórico sobre el ‘Cántico spiritual’ (Burgos: 1988); for the history of important MSS and early editions, see Cruz San Juan de la, Cántico espiritual. Primera redacción y texto retocado, ed. E. Pacho, Publicaciones de la Fundación Universitaria Española. Clásicos Olvidados 4 (Madrid: 1981) 91–504.

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(Where did you hide, Beloved, leaving me to grieve? Like the stag you fled when you had wounded me; I set out after you, calling, and you were gone.) En esta primera canción el alma, enamorada del Verbo Hijo de Dios, su Esposo, deseando unirse con él por clara y esencial visión, propone sus ansias de amor querellándose a él de la ausencia, mayormente que, habiéndole él herido de su amor, por el cual ha salido de todas las cosas criadas y de sí misma, todavía haya de padecer la ausencia de su Amado, no desatándola ya de la carne mortal para poderle gozar en gloria de eternidad. CB1.2

(In this first verse the soul, in love with the Word, the Son of God, her husband, and desiring to be united with him by clear and essential vision, voices her loving anxieties, complaining to him of his absence, especially because, having been wounded by him with love for him, for which she has gone forth from all created things and from herself, she should still have to suffer her Beloved’s absence, who does not yet free her from her mortal flesh so that she may enjoy him in the glory of eternity.) The explanation is here more precise: the soul desires to be united with the Word, the second Person of the divine Trinity, not only in this life, where he is now absent from her, but beyond death, where she will be with him forever. As before, certain images from the verse govern it. The verb ‘salir’ (‘to go forth’) occupies a prominent position in the verse, as it does in the ‘Subida’, while St John has also incorporated the expression ‘ansias de amor’ (‘loving anxieties’), from the second line of the ‘Noche oscura’ poem. But the gap between the cry of the abandoned lover in the poem and its explanation in the commentary remains disconcerting. The third poem on which St John wrote a commentary is the four-verse ‘Llama de amor viva’ (‘Living flame of love’), which he also calls a lira, though its stanzas have six rather than the normal five lines. In the commentary on the first verse, however, we find three clues which help to unravel the mystery of the gap between the language of the poems and the meaning the commentaries ascribe to it: ¡Oh llama de amor viva, que tiernamente hieres de mi alma en el más profundo centro!;

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pues ya no eres esquiva, acaba ya, si quieres; rompe la tela de este dulce encuentro. (Oh living flame of love! tenderly you wound my soul in its deepest centre! Since you are no longer troublesome, complete your work, if you so will; rend the veil of this sweet encounter). Sintiéndose ya el alma toda inflamada en la divina unión y ya su paladar todo bañado en gloria y amor, y que hasta lo íntimo de su sustancia está revirtiendo no menos que ríos de gloria, abundando en deleites, sintiendo correr de su vientre los ríos de agua viva, que dijo el Hijo de Dios que saldrían de semejantes almas (Io 7,38), parece que, pues con tanta fuerza está transformada en Dios y tan altamente dél poseída y con tan ricas riquezas de dones y virtudes arreada, que está tan cerca de la bienaventuranza, que no la divide sino una leve tela […] dice con gran deseo a la llama – que es el Espíritu Santo – que rompa ya la vida mortal por aquel dulce encuentro, en que de veras la acabe de comunicar lo que cada vez parece que le va a dar cuando la encuentra, que es glorificarla entera y perfectamente. L1.1

(Since the soul feels herself now to be wholly inflamed in divine union, and her palate wholly bathed in glory and love, and that she is overflowing with nothing other than rivers of glory to the very depths of her substance, abounding in delights, feeling the rivers of living water flow from her heart, which the Son of God said would come forth from such souls [John 7.38], it seems that nothing other than a thin veil divides her, since she is so powerfully transformed in God and so loftily possessed by him and adorned with such a rich wealth of gifts and virtues and so close to the blessed state […] she says with great desire to the flame, which is the Holy Spirit, that it should rend mortal life through that sweet encounter, in which truly he should finish communicating what he seems each time to communicate to her when he encounters her, which is to glorify her entirely and perfectly.)5 5  My emphasis, except for the biblical text. St John translates from the Vulgate (Vg), the official Latin Bible of the Church. English versions are cited from the King James Bible (KJV), which sometimes differs from the Vg, especially in the enumeration of the Psalms.

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The writing here is denser and not without its own lyrical touches, and expressions common to poem and commentary are more numerous. The first clue is that the word ‘alma’, which in the earlier examples was found only as a third-person subject in the commentary, now belongs to the first-person poetic voice, ‘mi alma’ (‘my soul’). The second clue, the insertion of a biblical text, exemplifies a practice St John adopts throughout his commentaries. As we shall discover, he interprets the words and images of his poems with the same tools a biblical exegete would have used to expound those of Scripture. If that seems a bold, even rash procedure in an age when the authority of the Church was paramount, it is tempered by the fact that many of his images are biblical in origin, and by his practice of grounding the interpretations of his own words in the sacred text itself, as he makes clear in the prologue to the Cántico espiritual: No pienso afirmar cosa de mío fiándome de experiencia que por mí haya pasado ni de lo que en otras personas espirituales haya conocido o de ellas oído (aunque de lo uno y de lo otro me pienso aprovechar), sin que con autoridades de la Escritura divina vaya confirmado y declarado, a lo menos en lo que pareciere más dificultoso de entender. C prol. 4

(I do not intend to affirm anything of my own by trusting to any experience which I may have had or what I may have come to know or hear from other spiritual people [though I intend to make good use of both], without its being confirmed and expounded with authorities from the divine Scriptures, at least in what may seem the hardest to understand). His reliance on biblical authority is nuanced: Scripture’s role will become more relevant when the teaching he sets out in the commentary is particularly difficult to grasp, while he will also make use of what he has learnt from his own experience and that of others with whom he has discussed such matters.6 He makes a similar point in the prologue to the Subida-Noche (S prol.2), though he adds that such experience can prove deceptive, whereas it is impossible to err if guided by Scripture, which speaks with the voice of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the most surprising note in the Cántico prologue is struck when he insists that his own explanations can only be partial: 6  In this respect he appears to be recalling St Augustine’s view that obscure passages of Scripture should be explained by clearer ones (De doctrina christiana iii.26), only applying it to his own words: where these are obscure, Scripture will clarify them.

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aunque en algunas maneras se declaran [estas canciones], no hay para qué atarse a la declaración, porque la sabiduría mística […] no ha menester distintamente entenderse para hacer efecto de amor y afición en el alma, porque es a modo de la fe, en la cual amamos a Dios sin entenderle. C prol.1

(although [these songs] are explained in some ways, it is not necessary to be tied down to the explanation, because mystical wisdom […] does not need to be clearly understood for it to produce the effects of love and attraction in the soul, because it is akin to faith, by which we love God without understanding him.) St John’s self-commentary is evidently not intended to be the definitive word, because there are other possible interpretations consistent with its general theme. In his own way, and for quite different reasons, he has anticipated those trends in literary theory which question authorial intention as a sure guide to understanding a text and give greater weight to the response of the reader (though that reader is assumed to be someone who is practised in mystical prayer). A third clue arises from the role paradox plays, as the gentle wound in the verse begets a further paradox in the commentary, in the juxtaposition of fire and water. Petrarchan love poetry of the period, with its icy fires and living deaths, is rich in paradoxical imagery. John himself has recourse to it in his poetry, as here, with the wound both painful and pleasurable, repeated in a varied form in the first line of the second stanza, ‘¡Oh cauterio suave!’ (‘Oh, gentle cautery!’). His versions of conventional paradoxes usually have an original twist, because paradox is but one of the ways in which language witnesses to the impossibility of capturing mystical experience other than indirectly.7 As he writes of his verses in the prologue to the Cántico: ‘ésta es la causa por que con figuras, comparaciones y semejanzas, antes rebosan algo de lo que sienten y de la abundancia de el espíritu vierten secretos y misterios que con razones lo declaran’ (C prol.1, ‘this is why they overflow with something of the feeling they express and pour out secrets and mysteries from the abundance of the spirit in figures, comparisons and similes rather than explain it in rational terms’). The biblical text he chooses in the opening of the Llama to illustrate the effects of the flame introduces water, its antithesis. But John has noticed a point of connection, the adjective ‘viva’ (‘living’) applied both to the flame in the poem and 7  See Thompson C., St John of the Cross. Songs in the Night (London: 2008) 59–64, 240–242, 245–246, 257–259.

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to the water of the Johannine text. Water normally quenches fire, but in this case they share a common property, of giving life.8 St John wrote other poems in a first-person voice, but as far as we know he left them as self-standing poetic texts. So it is to his three lira poems and their respective commentaries that we must turn in order to discover the principles which guide him as he seeks to relate the imagery of human love to the soul’s journey to divine union. Their profusion of imagery is such that I must limit this study to a single, though multifaceted example. I will therefore focus first on his most famous poetic symbol, the dark night and how he interprets it in the Subida, then broaden the search to look at a particular cluster of images common to the three poems, those relating to darkness, hiddenness and absence on the one hand and to their antithesis, light, heat and fire on the other, as indicative of his method of self-commentary.9 2

Composition and Publication

First, though, we need to understand how St John came to write at all, since the genesis of his poetry and prose is both unusual and relevant. In late 1568 he had founded the first male house of the Carmelite Reform, at the instance of St Teresa of Ávila, whom he had met a few months earlier and who had already begun the Reform among the sisters. The work of both of them proved controversial and aroused considerable opposition within the Order, culminating in the kidnapping of John and a fellow-friar and his imprisonment in solitary confinement in the conventual prison of the Carmelite monastery in Toledo from December 1577 until his escape on an August night in 1578.10 During these months he began to compose poems and, thereafter began to write explanations of his verses, not at first in any systematic way, but in response to questions from fellow-religious about their meaning. There are two principal sources for this information: the series of formal investigations which took place in 1614 to gather material for his possible beatification, and

8  St John may have remembered the juxtaposition of fire and water from Ecclus.15.17, ‘Apposuit tibi aquam et ignem’ (KJV 15.16, ‘He hath set fire and water before thee’). 9  St John characteristically uses the verb ‘declarar’ for his explanations of the poems. The verb has a wide range of meanings: ‘to clarify’, ‘to explain’, ‘to expound’; see Silvestre Miralles A., La traducción bíblica en san Juan de la Cruz: ‘Subida del Monte Carmelo’, Colección Humanidades 118 (Zaragoza: 2016) 160–172. 10  See, for example, Thompson, St John of the Cross 45–50.

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the material provided by St John’s contemporaries to one of his early biographers, the Discalced Carmelite Jerónimo de San José (1587–1654).11 Among these testimonies, that of Magdalena del Espíritu Santo, one of the sisters from the Discalced Carmelite monastery at Beas de Segura (Jaén) founded by St Teresa in 1575, stands out. She informed fray Jerónimo that John brought out of prison with him a notebook in which he had written a series of ballads based on the prologue to St John’s Gospel, some coplas (another popular verse form) beginning ‘Que bien sé yo la fonte que mana y corre, aunques de noche’ (‘How well I know the fountain which springs and flows, although at night’) and the first thirty-one stanzas of the original version of the ‘Cántico espiritual’ poem (CA). She had known him while he was prior of El Calvario de Beas (1578–1579), when he would regularly walk over the mountains to confess the sisters. She adds that he composed the rest of the ‘Cántico’ while rector of the Discalced college in Baeza (1579–1582); that his commentary on the poem began in Beas ‘respondiendo a preguntas que las religiosas le hacían’ (‘in response to questions the nuns asked him’); and that it was completed in Granada, after he became prior of the Discalced monastery there (1582–1588).12 The testimonies do not always agree on the details, but the broad picture is clear: some of his poems were begun in prison and completed later, while his commentaries on them began in piecemeal fashion and were later worked up into more finished pieces. St John had already followed the custom of confessors and spiritual advisers in writing short pieces for his charges on particular aspects of prayer, and may well have begun his commentaries as an extension of the practice.13 The dynamic process of composition is confirmed by the fact that he continued to revise his work. The verses of the ‘Cántico’ poem were reordered and the commentary rewritten (CA’, CB); the Subida del monte Carmelo and Noche oscura del alma were left unfinished; and the Llama de amor viva was also revised. None of these works were published during the saint’s lifetime, and it is doubtful that they were written with such an aim in mind. St John himself tells us that his intended readership was the tiny circle of Discalced friars and nuns and devout lay people whose experience of prayer had entered states which are commonly termed mystical: ‘Ni aun mi principal 11  This work eventually appeared as Historia del venerable padre Fr. Juan de la Cruz (Madrid, Diego Díaz de la Carrera: 1641). 12  Obras de san Juan de la Cruz, ed. S. de Santa Teresa, Biblioteca Mística Carmelitana 10–14 (Burgos: 1930) 13,325. For this and other testimonies, see Thompson C., The Poet and the Mystic, Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs (Oxford: 1977) 21–32. 13  The best guide to the history of his writing is Pacho E., San Juan de la Cruz. Historia de sus escritos, Estudios Monte Carmelo 21 (Burgos: 1998); on these short pieces see 201–218, 230–241, 253–261.

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intento es hablar con todos, sino con algunas personas de nuestra sagrada Religión de los primitivos del Monte Carmelo, así frailes como monjas – por habérmelo ellos pedido’ (S prol.9, ‘Nor is my principal purpose to address everyone, but a few of those who belong to our holy religion [Order] of the primitives of Mount Carmel, friars and nuns alike because they have asked me to do this’). His commentaries therefore belong to a monastic culture immersed in the Bible, which was encountered in the daily round of liturgy, reflected on in private prayer and spiritual conversation, and read in the light of centuries of interpretation. It is unfamiliarity with the nature of this culture, so important in the period, which helps to account for modern discomfort at the perceived mismatch between St John’s lyrical poetry and his didactic prose and which can lead to misinterpretation of his work. The publication history of St John’s works is almost as complex. The first edition of St John’s works appeared posthumously as Obras espirituales que encaminan a una alma a la perfecta unión con Dios (Alcalá, Viuda de Andrés Sanches Ezpeleta: 1618), but omitted the Cántico altogether. The CA version appeared in a French translation (Paris, Adrian Taupinart: 1622) before the first Spanish edition of CA’ (Brussels, Godofredo, Schoevarts: 1627). That same year the complete works appeared in Italian translation (Rome, Francesco Corbelletti: 1627). Only then did the first full Spanish edition, including the CA’ version of the Cántico see the light of day (Madrid, Viuda de Madrigal: 1630), followed by a Latin translation at the end of that decade (Cologne, Bernard Gualtheri: 1639). The complete works with the CB text did not appear until the early eighteenth century (Seville, Francisco de Leefdael: 1703).14 St John’s poems, therefore, began to be composed at a time of intense personal suffering, though they bear few traces of this. Where they articulate pain and distress they do not refer to the agonies of a dark and cramped cell but to the absence of the Beloved, as in the opening verses of the ‘Noche’ and ‘Cántico’; or to the oxymoronic sweet wound of the ‘Llama’. His commentaries evolved over the following years. The four books of the Subida-Noche peter out in the third verse of the poem, and even that receives only the slightest attention, as if the author had run out of steam. The greater part of his attention throughout is devoted to explicating the first line of the first verse, the dark night itself, which becomes an overarching symbol for the whole of the spiritual life, from the soul’s search for the Beloved to their joyful union. The image occupies S1.1–13; the rest of the first verse is given a mere two chapters (1.14–15). The whole of S2–3 ostensibly refers to the second verse, but is in 14  St Teresa’s works, by contrast, were published only six years after her death, despite the fact that treatises on prayer by a woman ought to have proved more controversial.

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fact a treatise on the dangers of various mystical phenomena, such as visions and revelations, and how the soul should disregard almost all of them. In N1.1– 7 he returns to the opening line, though this section too forms a short treatise, on the seven spiritual deadly sins, and he does not resume his commentary until N1.8–10. N1.11–14 refer to the rest of the first verse; N2.1–3 seem unrelated to the poem; by N2.4–10 he is back once more to the first line of the poem. In N2.11–13 he reaches the second line; N2.14 expounds very briefly the rest of the first verse and N2.15–16 the first line of verse 2; N2.17–21, its second line, but incorporating another short treatise on the ten degrees of love according to St Bernard and St Thomas, suggested by the poetic image of the ‘escala’, the stairway leading the soul out of the house. N2.22–24 expounds the remainder of the second verse and N2.25, introduces the third (‘en la noche dichosa’, ‘upon a blessed night’), but stops abruptly at that point.15 By contrast, both the Cántico and Llama commentaries offer an image-byimage exposition of their respective poems. For that reason, the Subida-Noche reads more like a spiritual treatise with occasional reference back to a poetic text, whereas the others are more intimately bound to the many images – more than a hundred in the case of the Cántico – out of which their respective poems are constructed.16 In each of these works the first-person voice of the poem is replaced by the objective third-person voice of the exegete, as the intense personal experience represented by the poetry becomes the object of retrospective analysis of its meaning.17 They raise many questions. Who are the first-person narrator of the poems and the third-person ‘alma’ of the commentaries, and what is the relationship between them? Why does St John replace the first-person voice in the former with the third person in the latter? Why does a male poet express himself consistently through a female voice? How similar are his explanations of his own words to traditional biblical exegesis? Does he imply that his own poetic images somehow share the same authority as the inspired words of Scripture? We should also bear in mind that all the time there is present another, deeper level of self-commentary. His ‘alma’ may 15  He is in good company. St Augustine’s commentary on the literal sense of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram) stops in chapter 3 and St Bernard’s eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs only reach the third chapter of that book. 16  ‘La materia […] exigía nuevas formas: lo que nace como comentario de un poema deriva en tratado’, ‘The subject-matter […] demanded new forms: what begins as a commentary on a poem turns into a treatise’; Silvestre Miralles, La traducción bíblica 178–179. 17  In the commentaries the use of the first-person voice is almost always limited to paraphrasing the voices of the lovers or to addressing the dedicatee or reader in the prologues. Again, the contrast with St Teresa could hardly be starker, in that much of her prose adopts a first-person feminine voice.

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appear to be an individual, but the journey of the soul traced in his commentaries is an account of the human self in relation to God, and in particular how it may leave behind its characteristic misapprehensions and realise the destiny for which it was created in the image and likeness of God. St John begins his commentary on the first line of the ‘Noche oscura’ poem by noting that there are two principal kinds of night for those who wish to reach the perfect state, generally called purgations or purifications of the soul (S1.1.1). The first affects the sensual or sensory part of the soul, the second, the spiritual, a distinction which belongs to the scholastic anthropology he learnt in his studies at Salamanca. It is important to understand that for him, therefore, the soul is not simply a pure, spiritual entity, but equates, broadly speaking, to a person’s inner life, in both its conscious and subconscious modes. As soon as one grasps this, his writing acquires much greater psychological depth, since he will often be concerned with the unconscious mechanisms which drive the self to make choices which stunt progress, and which need to be recognised, confronted and changed. The dark night of the soul is no less, therefore, than a reordering of the self by detachment from the desires and attachments which hold it back and prevent receptivity to the gifts of divine love. 3

The Dark Night of the Soul

Bearing all these things in mind, we turn now to examine in greater detail what St John understands by his poem’s ‘noche oscura’. In S1.2.1 the dark night is given a tripartite structure. It is the starting-place for the soul’s journey, because the way of detachment is a privation of all pleasures dependent on the senses; it is the journey itself, by faith, which is dark as night to the intellect; and it is the destination, nothing other than God, ‘el cual […] es noche oscura para el alma en esta vida’ (‘who […] is a dark night to the soul in this life’). This corresponds to its natural analogue: the darkness after twilight, at midnight, and just before dawn, the darkest time of all (S1.2.5). But it is also a Scriptural night. St John finds confirmation for his teaching in an unlikely place, the deuterocanonical book of Tobit. Earlier tradition had regarded such books as useful only for faith and morals, but the decree on the Scriptures of the fourth session of the Council of Trent (April 1546) had included them in the canon and extended their authority to include the confirmation of dogma.18 John’s teaching does not belong in the formal sense to doctrine, but the new status of Tobit meant that in applying texts from it to provide authority for his ac18  On the earlier tradition, see, for example, St Augustine, The City of God xv.23.

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count of the journey towards mystical union he was acting entirely within the intention of the decree. His choice is not, however, an arbitrary one. First, he has read the charming Jewish folk-tale carefully in the Vulgate text and knows that the angel who accompanies Tobit’s son Tobias on his journey to be married to his kinswoman Sarah commanded the young man to spend three nights on the road before he could be joined with her.19 That makes it appropriate for a poem which narrates a night-time journey to a union which is consummated and a commentary which has given the night a threefold structure. Second, Tobit himself is struck blind, so that the themes of not seeing and of darkness are central to the book, as they are to both poem and commentary. Third, like all expositors of his time and for centuries beforehand, St John read Scripture in ways which are very different from the historical-critical approach which has dominated exegesis since the later part of the eighteenth century. He would have assumed that any text could have several levels of meaning, conventionally four: the literal (the exact meaning of words and images in their context), the moral (as a guide to the practice of Christian virtues), the allegorical (as a veiled history of God’s purposes in calling Israel and then the Church to be his people), and the mystical or anagogical (as the soul’s journey from its origins to its heavenly destiny).20 We know from the testimony of his secretary, fray Juan Evangelista, that he was a great lover and user of Scripture and knew much of the Vulgate by heart.21 Moreover, like his contemporaries, he understood the Bible to be a single text inspired by the Holy Spirit, sometimes clear, often obscure, in which a text from one book could be set alongside others from other books which contained the same image or expression, so that each explained the other. He applied this same principle to the Subida: as the reader progresses ‘irá entendiendo mejor lo primero, porque con lo uno se va declarando lo otro’ (S prol.8, ‘he will gain a better understanding of the earlier part, because each explains the other’). It is this older exegetical tradition which St John most often follows in order to provide authoritative confirmation of the interpretations he proposes. Finally, there was already a long history of interpretation, even of as marginal a book as Tobit. We know St John attended lectures on a number of biblical books while a student at Salamanca (though Tobit was not, as far as we know, one of them). 19  St John cites the Book of Tobit on a number of other occasions to support a particular aspect of his teaching (S2.21.10; N2.9.3; CB2.3, 10.8, 36.1; L1.21, 2.28). English translations do not always correspond to the Vg: KJV Tobit 6.18–22 is a case in point, with no mention of three nights. 20  For a definitive statement of the significance of these senses see Aquinas, Summa 1ª.1.9–10. 21  Obras de san Juan de la Cruz, ed. S. de Santa Teresa, 13,386.

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His mystical reading of the text would not have surprised his contemporaries. Already in the Hebrew Scriptures (notably Hosea) marriage had been used as a symbol of the covenanted relationship between God and Israel, while the New Testament uses nuptial imagery for the relationship between the Church and Christ (Rev. 21.2, 22.17). The canonical book of the Song of Solomon had for centuries been interpreted as the marriage-song between Christ and his Church (allegory) or between God and the soul (anagogy). The female poetic voice adopted by St John requires no other explanation than this centurieslong and authoritative tradition.22 We also know that he was familiar with a wide range of devotional literature from medieval mystics to earlier sixteenthcentury writers, and that he would also have read some of the Fathers, in Latin or in translation; certainly the Confessions of St Augustine. It is this last work which helps us to understand how St John could so confidently link his own ‘noche oscura’ with the apocryphal tale. Though blind, Augustine tells us, Tobit was able to walk safely in the way of the Lord. Earlier exegesis presents him as an exemplar of faith, who alone of his family did not abandon the faith of his forebears in the reign of king Jeroboam, and who practised almsgiving and other works of corporal mercy: ‘O lux, quam videbat Tobis, cum istis oculis filium docebat vitae viam, et ei praeibat pede caritatis nusquam errans’ (Confessions x.34, ‘O Thou Light which Tobias saw, when, his eyes being closed, he taught his son the way of life; himself going before with the feet of charity, never going astray’).23 The ‘Noche oscura’ poem tells of a journey in which the protagonist is guided safely through the darkness by a light which ‘me guiaba / más cierto que la luz del mediodía’ (‘more brightly than the light of midday’). St John’s description of faith as dark to the mind but a safe path to union is very much in the spirit of Augustine. The passage to which St John alludes is Tobit 6.19–21: ‘Ipsa autem nocte, incenso iecore piscis, fugabitur daemonium. Secunda vero nocte in copulatione sanctorum patriarcharum admitteris. Tertia autem nocte, benedictionem consequeris’ (6.19–21, ‘Tonight, when you burn the fish’s liver, the demon will flee. On the second night you will be admitted into the company of the holy patriarchs; on the third night you will obtain blessing’).24 His commentary interprets the imagery in a spiritual sense. The burning of the heart (as he has it) of the fish rep22  Thompson, Songs in the Night 42–43; see also Brändle F. de, Biblia en san Juan de la Cruz, Logos 39 (Madrid: 1990) 24–32, 82–87. 23  Latin text from http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/latinconf/10.html (accessed 25 January 2017); translation from http://st-takla.org/books/en/ecf/101/1010191.html (accessed 25 January 2017). St Augustine expresses the same ideas elsewhere, e.g. Tractate xiii.3 (on John 3.22–29) and in his commentaries on Psalms xcvii.15 and lviii.15. 24  My translation, since KJV has a different version.

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resents the human heart attached to worldly things, which needs to be purified by the fire of God’s love. That is the work of the first part of the night, the way of purgation. The soul then journeys through the second night in company with those he describes as ‘padres de la fe’ (‘the fathers of faith’) before reaching the third, which leads to the union of perfect with the bride, who here is identified with divine Wisdom, which, like the Beloved a manifestation of the second Person of the Trinity. Except that it is not quite so straightforward. One might assume that St John would go on to examine the dark night of the soul in accordance with the tripartite scheme he has just announced. Instead, he elaborates a fourfold structure which governs the rest of the work. Each part of the soul, the sensory and the spiritual, must pass through two kinds of night, active and passive. The three books of the Subida deal with the active nights of the sense and the spirit and the two books of the Noche with their passive equivalents. The active element relates to what the soul herself does; for example, in the active night of the senses, practising mortification of the appetites so that the will is reordered away from purely sensory gratification of the self and towards God. The passive element, which might better be termed receptive and forms the more original part of St John’s schema, concerns the manner in which God is at the same time acting on the soul, which needs to be emptied of all creaturely thoughts and desires in order to receive his gifts. Though presented sequentially, the active and passive nights of both parts of the soul occur concurrently. The imposition of this weight of spiritual teaching on two words, ‘dark’ and ‘night’, may seem to threaten the whole enterprise of the poem. But the move from a threefold to a fourfold analysis of the night, together with the unfinished nature of the Subida-Noche, confirms what St John wrote in the Cántico prologue, that there is no single, exhaustive way of relating the poetic symbols to the meanings he attaches to them, because the mystical nature of the subject-matter can never be captured adequately in human language or concepts. Hence ‘no hay para qué atarse a la declaración’ (C prol.2, ‘You don’t have to be tied down to the explanation’). The pattern whereby St John teases out his interpretation of the governing symbol of the poem and supports it from the authority of Scripture, is fundamental to his self-commentary throughout. A single poetic image opens out on to journey through a world of textual connections which are unlikely to have been present to the saint when he was composing his verses but which undeniably add depth to the sense. If the Subida-Noche is unique in its focus on the one image of the night, St John’s commentaries on his ‘Cántico espiritual’ and ‘Llama de amor viva’ poems apply similar exegetical techniques to each of the images he has created in turn, as he explains how they relate to the

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soul’s journey towards union with the divine and to the authoritative voice of Scripture. This means that there is much less room for the kind of extended digressions or mini-treatises inserted into the Subida-Noche, and consequently much greater attention to the poetic text. 4

Darkness and Light in the Cántico

The ‘Cántico’ begins with a cry of pain in the form of a question, ‘¿Adónde te escondiste?’ (‘Where did you hide yourself?’), as the first-person voice addresses an absent Beloved in a preterite tense which implies a definitive rupture in their previous relationship. Hiddenness, like blindness, is analogous to darkness, in that it removes the familiar from sight. When St John comes to expound these words, he at once connects them to a biblical assertion of hiddenness as a defining feature of God, Isa. 45.15, which he translates as ‘Verdaderamente tú eres Dios escondido’ (CB1.3, ‘Truly thou art a hidden God’). He then takes the reader on a journey through fifteen other texts, including Song 1.6, ‘Muéstrame dónde apacientas y dónde te recuestas al mediodía’ (CB1.5, ‘Show me where you feed and where you take your midday rest’), which recasts the poem’s interrogative into an imperative and suggests that the Beloved’s hiding-place is to be found where he feeds and rests from the heat of the day. The answer is surprising: the Beloved is not absent but present, hidden deep within the soul (CB1.7), which is unaware of this because it does not also hide in order to find him (CB1.9); hide, that is, by forgetting all its other concerns and detaching itself from all dependence on the creaturely. The two guides which will lead to this secret place are faith and love, ‘los mozos de ciego que te guiarán por donde no sabes allá a lo escondido de Dios’ (CB1.11, ‘the blind man’s boys who will guide you on a way you do not know to the hiddenness of God’). The same fundamental images of the journey in darkness and blindness which the Subida related to the book of Tobit also dominate the beginning of the Cántico. At the same time paradox and antithesis are at work: the Beloved’s hiddenness is in fact a presence; the divine night is experienced as darkness because the intensity of God’s light is blinding. Imagery of light returns in CB10, in which the soul pleads with the still absent Beloved: ‘y véante mis ojos / pues eres lumbre dellos’, ‘let my eyes see you, for you are their light’ (‘lumbre’ means both light and heat, as from a fire). The commentary on the first of these lines is restricted to a brief paraphrase: ‘Esto es, véate yo cara a cara con los ojos del alma’ (CB10.7, ‘that is, let me see you face to face with the eyes of the soul’). St John borrows one of the characteristic formulae used by exegetes for introducing a paraphrase of a biblical text

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to clarify its meaning, ‘Esto es’, in order to paraphrase his own words.25 The commentary on the second line uses another, ‘Como si dijera’ (‘As if to say’), ‘pues los ojos de mi alma no tienen otra lumbre ni por naturaleza ni por amor sino a ti, véante mis ojos, pues de todas maneras eres lumbre dellos’ (CB11.8, ‘since the eyes of my soul have no other light, by nature or by love, than you, let my eyes see you, since in in every way you are their light’). There follow three biblical texts, the first two of which concern lack of vision: David’s complaint in Psalm 37.11 (KJV 38.10) and Tobit’s in Vg 5.12 (KJV 5.10), where he laments his blindness. The third provides their counterpart, the true desire and destination of the soul, in the vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, lit not by the sun but by the Son of God (Rev. 21.23). The exposition remains consistent with that of the ‘noche oscura’ at the start of the Subida, in that the texts and their expositions refer to the second and third parts of the journey of the soul: as St John explains, the soul has to be deprived of all creaturely light and familiar experience before it can receive the light of God (CB11.9). Three stanzas later, the speaker’s plea is answered: the Beloved’s eyes are revealed, and her ecstatic response hymns his beauty in a series of nine images in CB14–15, the sixth and longest of which evokes him as ‘la noche sosegada / en par de los levantes de la aurora’ (CB15 lines 1–2, ‘the calm night / before the rising of the dawn’). This corresponds to the third part of the natural night as given in S1.2.5, ‘ya inmediata a la luz del día’ (‘just before daylight’), as St John makes clear in the commentary (CB14–15.23). Here, the soul, having gained the desired vision, now rests on the Beloved’s breast in what he calls a ‘sueño espiritual’ (‘spiritual sleep’), and receives ‘una abisal y oscura inteligencia divina’, (CB14–15.22, ‘a fathomless and dark divine understanding’). The soul is now being raised above the darkness of natural knowledge towards a knowledge of God described as ‘matutinal’ (‘of morning’), and finds herself in an intermediate state between them. The distinction between evening or indirect knowledge of God (as, for example, in reading the book of creation) and morning knowledge of the divine Word, which St John makes at greater length in CB36.6, can be also traced back to St Augustine and provides a further example of the complexity and length of the authoritative tradition lying behind at least some of St John’s exegeses.26 We do not know if he was familiar with these passages through his own studies or mediated through devotional works or sermons, but he would have encountered the distinction in the Summa of Aquinas (la.58.6–7). In all these cases morning knowledge is attributed to the angels, whereas St John ap25  The use of these formulae is studied by Silvestre Miralles, La traducción bíblica 260–261, 285–297, 301–322. 26  See, for example, De Genesi ad litteram ii.8, iv.23; De civitate Dei xi.7,29.

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plies it to the soul’s being awakened to the supernatural knowledge imparted in divine contemplation, which indicates a degree of creative freedom in the way in which he treats the traditions he has received. When the image of night returns six stanzas late, however, it is with a quite different sense. In CB20–21 the Beloved calls on various elements of creation, animate and inanimate, not to disturb the rest of the soul now that its sensory part has been subjugated by the spiritual. Among them are ‘aguas, aires, ardores / y miedos de las noches veladores’ (‘waters, breezes, fires / and watchful fears of nights’). St John applies the four images to the four passions of the soul, pain, hope, joy and fear, just as he has applied the previous three (‘montes, valles, riberas’, ‘hills, valleys, river-banks’) to the faculties of the soul, memory, understanding and will. Here it appears to be the number of images in the poem which controls the explanation, as they are slotted into pre-existing schemes. The nocturnal ‘miedos’ refer to the emotions associated with fear, ‘que en los espirituales que aún no han llegado a este estado de matrimonio espiritual […] suelen ser muy grandes’ (CB20–21.9, ‘which among spiritual people who have not yet reached the state of spiritual marriage […] are usually very great’). Some of these fears are the result of souls being not yet advanced enough to receive what God is communicating to them as blessings; others come from the devil, and cause feelings of distraction, stress and horror in the sensory self: ‘por ser de los demonios y porque con ellos el demonio procura difundir tinieblas en el alma, por oscurecer la divina luz de que goza’ (CB20–21.9, ‘because they come from devils and because through them the devil tries to spread darkness in the soul, to obscure the divine light she is enjoying’). This association of night with the work of Satan stands in absolute contrast to the image of the ‘noche sosegada’ in CB15 as an attribute of the Beloved, let alone to the night at the beginning of the Subida, where the third phase of the journey represents its fulfilment, God himself. How can the same image be applied to God and the devil within the space of a few verses? It is a mistake to look for a one-for-one equivalence in his commentaries between a specific image and its meaning; the sense depends on the particular moment in the journey which the poem is said to represent.27 ‘Flores’ (‘flowers’), for example, stand for the distractions caused by attachment to pleasures in CB3.5 and for the virtues of the soul in CB30. This shifting nature in the interpretation of the 27  Christian exegetes often applied different meanings to the same biblical image; see Silvestre Miralles, La traducción bíblica 280–281; López-Baralt L., San Juan de la Cruz y el Islam. Estudio sobre las filiaciones semíticas de su literatura mística, Serie Estudio de lingüística y literatura 12 (Mexico: 1985) 58–63. Aquinas points out that the lion can be used in Scripture quite properly as a metaphor for God or the devil; Quaestiones quodlibeticae vii.6.14, ad 4.

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same image does not make his explanations inconsistent, because it imitates biblical language itself, where night can stand for a whole range of meanings, from experiences of terror and evil (e.g. Psalm 91.5, John 13.30) to the time for dreams and visions (widely, from Gen.20.3 to Matt.2.19), and from journeying in the darkness (Song 3.1–2, John 3.2) to communion with God (Psalms 42.8, 139.11–12). A similar point can be made about fire, which can symbolise such disparate things as divine revelation (the burning bush, the pillar of fire by night), divine anger (many examples in the Psalms), cleansing and purging (Isa.6.6–7, Mal.3.2), or hell itself (Matt.25.42, Rev.19.20). St John is a careful reader of the language of his poem. The Beloved is a peaceful night (‘noche sosegada’), whereas the devil provokes ‘watchful’ fears (‘miedos de las noches veladores’), fears which bring sleeplessness. It is the contrasting adjectives which prompt the antithetical explanations of the commentary. The singular ‘noche’ represents the ‘sueño espiritual que tiene [el alma] en el pecho de su Amado’ (CB14–15.22, ‘the spiritual sleep she [the soul] has on the breast of her Beloved’), reminiscent of the sleep of both lovers in the closing verses of the ‘Noche’ poem, while the plural ‘noches’ become the spiritual fears which disturb this sweet inward sleep of the soul and which demons are constantly trying to arouse in order to turn the soul away from progressing on the path of transformation. However unwelcome they are, they are an integral part of the way of faith, one of the many obstacles in the second phase of the dark night of the soul as described at the start of the Subida which must be faced and overcome. Night returns for a final time in the penultimate stanza of the ‘Cántico’, where, in a stylistic parallel to the definitions of the ‘Amado’ in stanzas 14–15, it is the last of four images unconnected by any main verb which explicate the mysterious ‘aquello’ (‘that thing’) of the previous stanza which the Beloved both gave and will give to the soul – a breeze, the song of the nightingale, a wooded landscape, ‘en la noche serena / con llama que consume y no da pena’ (CB39 lines 4–5, ‘on a calm night / with a flame which consumes and brings no suffering’). As in the earlier case (CB15 lines 1–2), the imagery of night, unlike the others, occupies two lines and now acquires a further sense, as ‘la contemplación en que el alma desea ver estas cosas’ (‘the contemplation in which the soul desires to see these things’). Such contemplation is dark and is also known as mystical theology:28

28  The reference is to the work of that title by the pseudo-Dionysius, though St John uses it less as a statement of apophatic theology than as the experiential theology which deals with the soul’s journey to union.

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Llámale noche, porque la contemplación es oscura; que por eso la llaman por otro nombre Mística Teología, que quiere decir sabiduría de Dios secreta o escondida, en la cual, sin ruido de palabras y sin ayuda de algún sentido corporal ni espiritual, como en silencio y quietud, a oscuras de todo lo sensitivo y natural, enseña Dios ocultísimamente y secretísima­ mente al alma sin ella saber cómo. CB39.12

(It is called night, because contemplation is dark; and for that reason it is also called by the name Mystical Theology, which means the secret or hidden wisdom of God, in which, without any sound of words or help from any bodily or spiritual sense, as in silence and quiet, in darkness to everything belonging to the senses or nature, God teaches the soul in a most hidden and secret way, without her understanding how.) This version of the night relates most closely to its third phase in the Subida, when the destination of the journey, union with God, is at hand. Moreover, it is combined with flame, the image around which the ‘Llama’ poem turns and which describes the soul as it sets out at the start of the ‘Noche’, full of anxiety but also ‘en amores inflamada’ (‘inflamed with love’). St John only comments on this line in N1.11.1–2, where it signifies the growing desire with which the soul seeks God. He cites three Psalm texts in support of this reading, of which the first, Vg 72.21–22 (KJV 73.21–22 has a different translation) is attributed to David ‘estando en esta noche’ (N1.11.1, ‘when he was in this night’). St John reads this biblical night in a mystical sense, so that David, the supposed author of the Psalms, becomes the archetype of contemplatives, having made the transition from the sensory to the spiritual and entered a state of unknowing. He translates ‘Et ego ad nihilum redactus sum, et nescivi’ as ‘Y yo fui resuelto en nada y aniquilado, y no supe’ (Ps 72.22; N1.11.1, ‘and I became nothing and was annihilated and I knew not’). This biblical ‘nescivi’ has a strong resonance for him. He uses it in the famous last line of CB7, ‘un no sé qué que quedan balbuciendo’ (‘an I-know-not-what’ that they are stammering’), where it is defined as ‘un altísimo entender de Dios que no se sabe decir’ (CB7.9, ‘a very lofty understanding of God which cannot be expressed’). There it refers to the inability of the created order, interrogated by the soul for an answer to her opening question about the Beloved’s hiding-place, to give her anything but an indirect answer: he has gone, but left behind signs of his beauty, which only serves to increase her anguish.29 It appears, too, in his glosa 29  There is a clear reference here to St Augustine, Confessions x.6.

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‘Por toda la hermosura’ (‘For all the beauty’), where the first-person speaker puts aside created beauty for ‘un no sé qué / que se alcanza por ventura’ (‘An I-know-not-what which is gained by good fortune’) (line 3). In all these cases, ‘nescivi’ acts as another marker for the inexpressibility of mystical knowledge, experienced in the darkness of unknowing. The flame of CB 39 which burns in this night but does not consume is linked, not as one might expect, to Moses at the bush which burnt but was not consumed, but to the ‘fuego consumidor’ of God in Deut. 4.24 (CB39.14).30 St John interprets this fire in accordance with traditional Trinitarian doctrine as the love of the Holy Spirit. The first image of the verse, ‘el aspirar del aire’ (‘the blowing of the breeze’) is similarly treated, though in neither case does he give the biblical reference to the wind and flames of the first Pentecost (Acts 2.1–4), perhaps because it is too obvious. The paradoxical flame which consumes without affliction leads him to apply this state to the beatific vision, that is, to the full and perfect love which the soul will enjoy in permanent union with God after death. Even the highest states in this mortal life, he insists, will always come with an element of pain, because the soul is longing for that vision and in the weakness of the corruptible flesh it cannot bear the power of the exalted nature of divine love. 5

Fire, Light, and Darkness in the Llama

The juxtaposition of ‘noche’ with ‘llama’ in CB 39 is repeated in the third stanza of the ‘Llama’. The poem itself, according to St John, refers to this same longing for life beyond physical death, and the rending of the veil which divides it from the beatific vision (L1.1): ¡Oh lámparas de fuego, en cuyos resplandores las profundas cavernas del sentido, que estaba oscuro y ciego, con extrañas primores calor y luz dan junto a su querido! (O lamps of fire, in whose rays of light the deep caverns of the sense, 30  Moses was accepted at the time as the author of the whole Pentateuch.

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which was dark and blind, with wondrous splendours give heat and light beside their loved one!) The explanation given to these lamps and their effects is complex. Beginning from their property of giving out both heat and light (L3.2) he refers them to the divine attributes, such as omnipotence, wisdom, goodness and mercy. Each lamp represents one of these, yet ‘todas estas lámparas son una lámpara que, según sus virtudes y atributos, luce y arde como muchas lámparas’ (L3.3, ‘all these lamps are one lamp, which according to its virtues and attributes, shines and burns like many lamps’), since they all belong to the one God. This Trinitarian exegesis appears to be quite original.31 Each lamp brings the light and heat of love to the soul (3.3) and because they all come from the one source, each is known in the other (3.5). At this point the language of the commentary becomes as lyrical as that of the poem, as John plays with the images of heat and light and connects the ‘llama’ itself with the assonating image of the ‘llaga’, ‘wound’ (verse 2 line 2), before finally reaching the source text in the Song: y así todas ellas están hechas una luz y un fuego, y cada una una luz y un fuego; y aquí el alma, inmensamente absorta en delicadas llamas, llagada sutilmente de amor en cada una de ellas, y en todas ellas juntas más llagada y viva en amor de vida de Dios […] conoce bien […] la verdad de aquel dicho de el Esposo en los Cantares, cuando dijo que las lámparas del amor eran lámparas de fuego y de llamas (8, 6). L3.5

(and so they all become one light and one fire, and each one, one light and one fire; and here the soul, immensely absorbed in delicate flames, subtly wounded by love in each of them, wounded more by all of them together and alive in the love of the life of God in them all together […] knows well […] the truth of what the Bridegroom says in the Songs, that the lamps of love were lamps of fire and of flames.) The exposition of the line ‘en cuyos resplandores’ reveals a further aspect of St John’s self-commentary, the importance he sometimes attaches to apparently 31  It was, however, copied. See Puente Luis de la (1564–1624), In Canticum Canticorum continens Exhortationes sive Sermones, 2 vols. (Cologne, Joannes Kinckium: 1623) vol. 2, 549, where the author translates into Latin more or less verbatim this passage from the Llama. Since the Llama had only been published in 1618, this raises questions about its reception which merit further investigation.

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insignificant words – here, the preposition, ‘en’.32 He gives it the meaning of ‘dentro’, ‘within’, because, unlike material lamps which shed their light abroad, the transformed soul is aflame with love within the ‘lámparas’, the divine attributes (L3.9). Thus: el alma con sus potencias está esclarecida dentro de los resplandores de Dios; y los movimientos de estas llamas divinas […] no las hace sola el alma transformada en las llamas de el Espíritu Santo, ni las hace sólo él, sino él y el alma juntos, moviendo él el alma, como hace el fuego al aire inflamado. L3.10

(the soul and her faculties is illumined within the refulgence of God; and the movements of these divine flames […] come not only from the soul transformed in the flames of the Holy Spirit, nor from the Spirit alone, but from the Spirit and the soul together, the soul moved by the Spirit, as fire acts on inflamed air). The simple preposition ‘en’ comes to bear the full theological weight of a highly charged statement of the unitive experience, in which a mutuality of loving between the partners brings glorification to the soul. Almost as soon as he has said this, though, St John feels obliged to offer an orthodox corrective. God is the unmoved Mover, so that any impression of movement is due to the soul’s imperfect apprehension, because it has not yet reached the state of perfect glory, which can only be attained in the beatific vision beyond bodily death (L3.11). Building paradox upon paradox, St John states that these brilliant outpourings of divine light are also known as ‘obumbraciones’ (‘overshadowings’), the greatest example of which is angelic message to Mary that ‘virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi’ (Luke 1.35) (‘the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee’). He appears to have invented the noun from the Latin, since it is not found in dictionaries of the period (or modern ones): linguistic innovation can be one of the consequences of attempting to describe what mystics claim is beyond words.33 He ties the two terms of the paradox – light and shadow – together by affirming that the lamps themselves cover and protect the soul, ‘y así estas sombras serán resplandores’ 32  Other examples are found in the exposition of the personal pronoun ‘nos’ in CB 16.7 and the prepositions ‘por’ and ‘en’ in CB17.5. 33  The particular characteristics of mystical language were recognised as long ago as M. van der Sandt [Sandaeus], Pro theologica mystica clavis (Cologne, ex officina Gualteriana: 1640), including ‘nova fingendi vocabula libertas’ (2, ‘the freedom to coin new words’).

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(L3.14, ‘and thus these shadows will be radiances’). Similar paradoxes may be found elsewhere in the commentary: the soul is both wounded and healed (2.7) and the light and fire of the lamps is also their antithesis, water (1.1, 3.8), because they too bring the living waters of the Spirit (John 4.14). It is in passages like these, dense in argument, creative in expression, and rich in paradox as they bring together different biblical symbols for the divine presence, that we begin to appreciate the originality of St John’s self-commentary, as he grounds his own poetic text in Scripture in order to expound his teaching on the highest stages of prayer. The effect of this radiance overshadowing the soul is that the lamps illumine even the darkest recesses of the sensory self, ‘las profundas cavernas del sentido / que estaba oscuro y ciego’ (‘the deep caverns of the sense, which was dark and blind’. These caverns are evidently very different from the ‘subidas / cavernas de la piedra […] / que están bien escondidas’, ‘the lofty caverns of stone […] / which are well hidden’), to which the soul hopes to ascend with her beloved towards the end of the ‘Cántico’ (CB 37).34 There they symbolised the deep and exalted mysteries of the wisdom of God in the Incarnation (37.3), and are connected in the exposition with the vision of the ‘back parts’ of God which Moses has when hidden in the cleft of a rock (Exod. 33.18–23). Here, by contrast, St John takes the plural nature of the caverns to represent the three faculties of intellect, will and memory, their thirst for divine Wisdom, their hunger for the perfection of love, and the soul’s melting away to possess God (L3.19–21). The caves are ‘profundas’ because the longings the soul experiences are for a God who is without limit (3.22). Once more, the same image carries a new interpretation, consistent with its place in the trajectory of the poem. No sooner has he begun to interpret the illumined caverns of the senses as the state of spiritual betrothal (L3.23) than he launches into the longest of all the digressions in the Llama commentary, a fierce attack on spiritual directors who lack the experience to understand the signs that God is calling the souls in their charge to unitive prayer and who insist that they must return to meditative practices which are no longer appropriate for them. It takes up a substantial part of the exposition of this third verse of the poem (L3.27–67) and provides a clear window into John’s own experience of prayer and his work as a spiritual director of others. It is also one of the few places in his commentaries where his own first-person voice can be heard, as he enters into an imaginary dialogue with these false guides, lambasting them for holding souls back when God is calling them forward (‘te digo’, ‘I tell you’, L3.48; ‘como he dicho’; ‘as I 34  The caverns themselves are inspired by the imagery of Song 2.14, but their association here with the darkened senses also seems to echo Plato’s myth of the cave (Republic 514a–520a).

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have said’, L3.53 [and variants in L3.65]; ‘yo no lo veo’, ‘I do not see it’, L3.57; ‘ruégote’, ‘I beseech you’, L3.58; ‘no sé qué te diga […] no se sufre aquí en esto alargarme más’, ‘I don’t know what to say […] it’s not appropriate for me to say anything more about this’, L3.75). The term ‘digression’ is perhaps unfair, since much of what he writes is a summary of his teaching in the Subida-Noche: in L3.39 he gives, for example, a shorter account of the signs by which it can be ascertained that a soul is ready to leave behind meditative prayer and enter the contemplative state in S2.13. Nor does he entirely forget the imagery of the verse he is supposed to be explaining, as he recalls the ‘luz caliente’ (‘hot light’) of the lamps (L3.49). Only when we reach L3.70 do we reconnect with the commentary on the line ‘que estaba oscuro y ciego’, the subject of which is ‘sentido’, the sense. St John takes the two adjectives to have distinctive meanings, because in spiritual terms they are not equivalent. The darkness and blindness refer to two kinds of ignorance, of natural or supernatural knowledge, both of which the soul experiences before union. He makes an unexpected connection between Genesis 1.3 (‘Fiat lux’, ‘Let there be light’) and the imagery of the stanza. Until the Lord speaks these words to the soul, she languishes in ‘las tinieblas sobre la haz del abismo de la caverna del sentido del alma’ (L3.71, ‘the darkness over the face of the abyss of the cavern of the sense of the soul’), a single phrase which encapsulates so much of the nature of St John’s self-commentary, as it sets ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep’ (Gen. 1.2) alongside the ‘cavernas del sentido’ of his poem. At the same time ‘abismo’ and its derivatives become central to the commentary, indicating the vast and hidden depths of the divine, as expressed in Psalm 41.8, ‘un abismo llama a otro abismo’ (KJV 42.7, ‘Deep calleth unto deep’). The argument is again tightly constructed. It centres on the human inability to know anything about God unless illumined by supernatural light, and on the way human knowledge is limited by what is familiar to it: así esle imposible alzar los ojos a la divina luz ni caer en su pensamiento, porque no sabe cómo es, nunca habiéndola visto; y, por eso, ni la podrá apetecer, antes apetecerá tiniebla, porque sabe cómo es, y irá de una tiniebla en otra, guiada por aquella tiniebla. L3.71

(Hence it is impossible for her to lift her eyes to the divine light or let it become part of her thinking, because she does not know what it is like, never having seen it, and for that reason nor will she be able to desire it; rather, she will desire darkness, because she knows what it is like, and will go from one darkness to another, guided by that darkness.)

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St John is using the language of apophatic theology, derived ultimately from the Mystical Theology of the pseudo-Dionysius, to insist that what he terms supernatural knowledge of God is resisted by the soul, which prefers to follow its accustomed ways. Among these are the kinds of pleasures to which it is used and for which it therefore develops an appetite. The poem’s two images, of darkness and blindness, beget a third one in the commentary, the cataract which clouds the eye of reason: ‘Y así, en tanto que proponía en el sentido algún gusto estaba ciego para ver las grandezas de las riquezas y hermosura divina que estaban detrás de la catarata’ (L3.72, ‘And thus, as long as a particular pleasure was offered to the sense it was blind to see the greatness and the riches and the divine beauty which lay behind the cataract’). The natural appetite or desire for God is in itself no guarantee that the soul is on the right road, because only when she is open to receiving what God wishes to communicate to her can her sight be restored (L3.75). Finally, St John reaches the last two lines of the stanza, ‘calor y luz dan junto a su querido’ (‘[the lamps] give heat and light beside her [the soul’s] beloved’). This is the spiritual marriage: the lamps shine with their unearthly light and heat into the very depths of the soul and the soul radiates them back in love, thanksgiving and delight. The common preposition ‘junto a’, ‘next to’, ‘beside’, ‘together with’, is given greater theological weight than the nouns: ‘Junto, dice, porque junta es la comunicación del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo en el alma, que son luz y fuego de amor en ella’ (L3.80, ‘it says beside, because the communication of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the soul is all one, and is light and the fire of love in her’). In this state the soul shares in the divine attributes represented by the lamps and ‘en cierta manera es ella Dios por participación’ (L3.78, ‘is in a certain manner God by participation’). The deification of the soul is qualified: it does not become God, but by being wholly united with God’s will it shares in his strength, beauty, justice and all his other attributes, which are the ‘primores’, ‘the splendours’ of the verse. There is, therefore, at this lofty stage a mutuality of giving and receiving between the soul and the Beloved, and it is this which makes marriage so apt a metaphor for unitive prayer: Y así entre Dios y el alma está actualmente formado un amor recíproco en conformidad de la unión y entrega matrimonial, en que los bienes de entrambos, que son la divina esencia, poseyéndolos cada uno libremente por razón de la entrega voluntaria del uno al otro, los poseen entrambos juntamente. L3.79

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(And thus there is formed in actuality a reciprocal love between God and the soul, consistent with the union and self-giving of marriage, in which the goods of both, that is the divine essence, are freely possessed by each, by reason of the voluntary giving of the one to the other, and both possess them together.) 6 Conclusion Our exploration of St John’s commentaries on the imagery of darkness and light in his three lira poems has shown that they are subtle, in dialogue with many voices from the past, and possess a degree of internal consistency between them which may not be immediately apparent. The paradoxical images of the poems are prolonged in the commentaries, which not only explicate them but also create new ones. The female first-person voice of each always expresses itself in relation to a male other, in a dynamic I-Thou relationship, following the long-established reading of the Church or the soul as the bride of the divine bridegroom. The same images receive different, even contradictory explanations, depending on their position in the soul’s trajectory, while apparently insignificant words in the poem are made to bear great theological weight. In the ‘Noche’ the dangers of the night-time search for the Beloved are illumined by an inner, guiding light which leads to a union in the darkness, though the poem only describes what precedes and follows that experience. The ‘Cántico’ begins with a cry of loss and anguish but broadens out into a dialogue between the first person and the Beloved which speaks of an initial search, a being found, and a growing mutuality of love as they travel through shifting landscapes and times. In the exclamatory ‘Llama’ poem, by contrast, the subject is not an unnamed female protagonist but ‘mi alma’ (‘my soul’), which becomes the locus of the flame’s transforming work, enfolding it in a paradoxical pleasurable wound and bringing light and heat to the darkest recesses of the self. As St John comes to reflect on these lyrical outpourings of love, he adopts a more objective stance. In the Subida-Noche the ‘I’ of the poem which journeys through the night becomes the third-person ‘alma’, ‘soul’, the object of an authorial analysis which sits relatively light to the poetic text as a whole, using the four phases of the dark night of the soul as its structuring principle. The Cántico follows the nuptial imagery of its biblical model more closely, as it charts image by image the soul’s progression from a painful sense of loss to a mysterious union with the Beloved. The Llama is a hymn to the

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glories of union itself, though it contains substantive warnings about the errors individuals and their spiritual guides can make. All the time, whether present in the commentary alone or, in the case of the Llama in both poem and prose, the soul is never merely an autobiographical construct: it articulates the voice of any human being who sets out on the journey. St John’s commentaries on his own poetic text constitute an exploration of the human self in process, and especially of those areas largely hidden to the conscious self which must be uncovered, confronted and, where they interfere with progress, discarded. But, as he sees it, there is always more that could be said, perhaps because his own experience as a spiritual director had taught him that there are as many different paths to God as there are individuals: ‘No hay para qué atarse a la declaración’ (‘You don’t need to be tied down to the explanation’). It is guidance he offers, not prescription, except when he feels he must address bad practice. Throughout, the model St John adopts is close to that of a biblical commentary, as he expounds the images of his own poems as an exegete might the biblical text. Since virtually all of them are found in the Scriptures, this is less presumptuous than it may seem, though it is certainly unusual.35 As he does, so other biblical texts are constantly brought into play, in such a way that a single poetic image can attract to itself a large number of them. Some of his interpretations appear to be original, but he is always in dialogue with the past, and especially with those traditions which privileged a mystical reading of the sacred text. At the same time he is careful not to claim the same authority as Scripture’s for his own poetry: ‘Por cuanto estas canciones […] parecen ser escritas con algún fervor de amor de Dios’ (‘Insofar as these songs […] appear to be written with some fervour of love for God’), he writes at the beginning of the Cántico prologue, the verb ‘parecen’ and the partitive adjective ‘algún’ both cautiously modifying any fuller claim of divine inspiration for his verse. It is rare to find a poet expounding the meaning of his own work in this period. Usually it falls to later commentators to do this: Fernando de Herrera (1534–1597), for example, wrote a long and influential commentary on the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega.36 Whether or not St John would have revised his work if he knew it was to be published we cannot know. But his first editor, the Discalced Carmelite prior of Toledo Diego de Jesús (Salablanca; b. 1570) certainly thought it prudent to counter possible objections. He appended three 35  ‘Es original en el santo la manera de comentar los propios poemas a la luz del Evangelio’, ‘The way of commenting on his own poems in the light of the Gospel is original to the saint’; Silvestre Miralles, La traducción bíblica 185. 36  Obras de Garci Lasso de la Vega con anotaciones de Fernando de Herrera (Seville, Alonso de la Barrera: 1580).

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discourses to the 1618 princeps in which he explained and defended the teachings set out in the work.37 In the first two he is at pains to show how John’s terminology and doctrine are entirely orthodox, citing in support venerable predecessors like Dionysius, Bernard, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. He makes it clear, for example, that St John is opposed to any kind of reliance on the presumed authority of visions and other kinds of revelations, which could so easily deceive and mislead people, since he teaches that they should be disregarded, except in a very few cases (673–674). In the third he defends the use of the vernacular for broaching such difficult subject-matter. But perhaps the most revealing comment in these discourses concerns St John’s reliance on the Bible and his lack of reference to the ‘santos’, that is, to those whose interpretations of its text were regarded as authoritative and had been incorporated into the Tradition of the Church: Algunos han reparado porque Nuestro Venerable Padre, en esta, su doctrina tan subida, como alega tanta Escritura, no trae también lugares de Santos, pareciéndoles, que no debe ser esta doctrina tan conforme a ellos, pues no se citan. Pero el engaño es manifiesto, como veremos, y la razón de no traer Santos es, porque este Venerable Padre no pretende alargarse antes abreviar, y dar la sustancial leche de la doctrina, no tanto para que hiziese ruido con autoridades, y erudición, cuanto para que se practicase, y supiesen las Almas por donde habían de caminar, para la cual se apro­ vechó de la Escritura sagrada. 621

(Some have queried why our Venerable Father, who quotes so much Scripture in this lofty teaching of his, does not also cite passages from the Saints, since it seems to them that this teaching cannot be in accordance with theirs, as they are not cited. But, as we shall see, this is clearly mistaken, and the reason for his not citing Saints is because this Venerable Father is trying to be brief rather than write at length, and not so much to make a show with authorities and erudition as for his teaching to be practised and for souls to know the way they should go, for which he used holy Scripture.) 37  Cruz San Juan de la, Obras espirituales que encaminan a una alma a la perfecta unión con Dios, ed. D. de Jesús (Alcalá, Viuda de Andrés Sanches Ezpeleta: 1618). Curiously, fray Diego’s Apuntamientos y advertencias, en tres discursos, which occupy pages 615– 682 of the edition, bear a different publisher’s name, Ana de Salinas, though place and date are the same and pagination is continuous through the volume. They accompanied many of the subsequent editions of St John’s works.

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The argument is somewhat disingenuous, given the length of the commentaries. But it is not hard to understand why fray Diego should have felt sufficiently concerned to address the issue. He wanted to deflect any criticism that such reliance on the Bible alone was too close to the Lutheran insistence on sola Scriptura, the sufficiency of the biblical text itself as the sole infallible source of doctrine. As we have seen, St John’s mystical reading of the Bible and at least some of his expositions are in full accord with those of his revered predecessors, but one can sense the need to tread carefully. We began by pointing to the apparent gap between St John’s verse and his subsequent explanations of its meaning. In fact, from the intense and sensuous beauty of the lira poems to the theological prose of the commentaries there is not so much a great gulf fixed as a single experiment in attempting to express the inexpressible, pressing every kind of linguistic resource into service in order to say something. As fray Diego observed: Porque como esto de que se trata es inefable, usar de todos términos, y acudir a todas frasis, declara divinamente, que no hay ninguna que lleve, y manifieste, como se debe, la inefable Infinidad, y nuestra incapacidad. 630

(Because the matter being dealt with is ineffable, using all kinds of terms and having recourse to all kinds of expressions reveals divinely that there is none which can properly bear or make plain both ineffable Infinity and our own incapacity). Poetry will always suggest more than it states and its readers will always have questions to ask of it, especially when it is as mysteriously beautiful as St John’s. Since by his own repeated confession it can only ever witness to something beyond itself, it is not surprising that sometimes the effort of articulating what that something may be eludes him. When he comes to expound the first two lines of the soul’s hymn to the beauty of her beloved (CB14–15.6–7) he can only paraphrase: Mi Amado, las montañas. Las montañas tienen alturas, son abundantes, anchas, hermosas, preciosas, floridas y olorosas. Estas montañas es mi Amado para mí. Los valles solitarios nemorosos. Los valles solitarios son quietos, amenos, frescos, umbrosos, de dulce agua llenos, y en la variedad de sus arboledas y suave canto de aves hacen gran recreación y deleite al sentido, dan refrigerio y descanso en su soledad y silencio. Estos valles es mi Amado para mí.

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(My Beloved, the mountains. Mountains have heights, they abound, are broad, lovely, beautiful, full of flowers and fragrant. These mountains my Beloved is for me. The lonely, wooded valleys. Deserted valleys are quiet, pleasant, cool and shady, full of sweet water, and in the variety of their forested areas and the sweet song of birds they bring great refreshment and delight to the sense, their solitude and silence gives rest. These valleys my Beloved is for me.) For once, St John’s prose expounds nothing but the lyrical imagery of his verse. For once, no more can or needs to be said. Selective Bibliography Texts

Cruz San Juan de la, Obras espirituales que encaminan a una alma a la perfecta unión con Dios, ed. D. de Jesús (Alcalá, Viuda de Andrés Sanches Ezpeleta: 1618). Cruz San Juan de la, Obras de san Juan de la Cruz, ed. S. de Santa Teresa (Burgos: 1930). Cruz San Juan de la, Cántico espiritual. Primera redacción y texto retocado, ed. E. Pacho, Publicaciones de la Fundación Universitaria Española. Clásicos Olvidados 4 (Madrid: 1981). Cruz San Juan de la, Obras completas, ed. L. Ruano de la Iglesia, 11th edn. (Madrid: 1982). Jerónimo San José de, Historia del venerable padre Fr. Juan de la Cruz (Madrid, Diego Díaz de la Carrera: 1641). Puente Luis de la, In Canticum Canticorum continens Exhortationes sive Sermones, 2 vols. (Cologne, Joannes Kinckium: 1623). Sandt Maximilianus van der, Pro theologica mystica clavis (Cologne, ex officina Gualteriana: 1640). Vega Garcilaso de la, Obras de Garci Lasso de la Vega con anotaciones de Fernando de Herrera (Seville, Alonso de la Barrera: 1580).

Studies

Brändle F. de, Biblia en san Juan de la Cruz, Logos 39 (Madrid: 1990). Chevallier P., “Le ‘Cantique spiritual’: a-t-il été interpolé?”, Bulletin Hispanique 23–24 (1921–1922) 307–342. López-Baralt L., San Juan de la Cruz y el Islam. Estudio sobre las filiaciones semíticas de su literatura mística, Serie Estudio de lingüística y literatura 12 (Mexico: 1985). Muñoz D., Transformed by the Beloved: A Guide to Spiritual Formation with St John of the Cross (Abingdon: 2014).

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Pacho E., Reto a la crítica. Debate histórico sobre el ‘Cántico espiritual’ (Burgos: 1988). Pacho E., San Juan de la Cruz. Historia de sus escritos, Estudios Monte Carmelo 21 (Burgos: 1998). Silvestre Miralles A., La traducción bíblica en san Juan de la Cruz: ‘Subida del Monte Carmelo’, Colección Humanidades 118 (Zaragoza: 2016). Thompson C., The Poet and the Mystic, Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs (Oxford: 1977). Thompson C., St John of the Cross. Songs in the Night (London: 2008).

chapter 9

Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Annotation and SelfExegesis in La Ceppède Russell Ganim 1 Introduction The more than 2500 annotations to Jean de La Ceppède’s Théorèmes (Part I: 1613, Part II: 1622) raise myriad questions about how they relate to the poet’s most notable literary contribution: What is their purpose? How are they to be read? In what ways do they contribute to the uniqueness of La Ceppède’s (c. 1550–1623) aesthetic and devotional project? This essay argues that the commentary contained in the notes plays a vital role in meditative process set forth in the Théorèmes; the annotations create a distinct form of cross-referencing between themselves and with the lyric text. In La Ceppède, self-commentary and self-exegesis are synonymous, with the notes providing insight into the narrator’s intellectual and affective awareness of his devotional experience. Specifically, I will discuss the importance of annotation 4 of Sonnet I, 1, 37 to the work as a whole.1 By far the longest of the poet’s notes, this passage explains Christ’s sweating of blood (based on Luke 22:44) during his agony at Gethsemane. First referenced in the poet’s Avant-propos, this event becomes the touchstone for La Ceppède’s proof of Christ’s humanity. Engaging with the Ancients, the Patristics, and then-contemporary physicians, La Ceppède outlines the case for the bleeding as a natural, i.e. human, phenomenon, rather than a divine one. The poet’s insistence on Christ’s humanity at a crucial moment in Jesus’s suffering serves the purpose of increasing identification between Christ and the reader, who, within the context of spiritual practice, is also known as the meditant or the dévot. Close association between Jesus and the reader underscores, in a personally instructive way, the depth and breadth of Christ’s sacrifice. La Ceppède’s commentary on the debate regarding the duality of Christ’s 1  Unless otherwise noted, all quotes of La Ceppède’s text come from La Ceppède Jean de, Les Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de nostre rédemption, ed. Y. Quenot, Société des Textes Français Modernes 187–188 (Paris: 1988–1989), 2 vols. In what follows, references will be given only in page numbers. Translations of the poetry and the annotations are my own.

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human and divine natures represents his contribution to a major doctrinal controversy of the day, exemplifying his role not only as a poet, but also as a theologian. His annotations effectively amount to a kind of devotional treatise that elucidates the philosophical and spiritual questions raised by Christ’s redemptive act. For La Ceppède, the self-exegetical exercise represented in the image and analysis of Christ sweating blood becomes vital to the creative process. Within the narrative, the poet fully manifests the internalisation of Christ’s suffering several sonnets later in I, 2, 63, when La Ceppède describes his own tears of blood spilling onto the page as verse. The reader then internalises this experience and recognises his own complicity in Christ’s death and suffering. Annotation and text, poet and subject, transfuse in a cathartic convergence of religious experience and literary invention. The result is a unique kind of devout humanism that creates new frames of reference and new forms of expression for the spiritual self. 2

Annotation as Paratext, Exegesis, and Essay

From the standpoint of genre, the Théorèmes is best classified as a meditative epic written in sonnet form. The work consists of two ‘Parts’, with Part I containing three books of 100 sonnets that recount the events of the Passion, beginning with Christ’s departure to Gethsemane and ending with his death on the Cross. Part II is divided into four books of 50, 100, 35, and 30 sonnets each, describing the Resurrection, Christ’s putative descent into Hell to save Old Testament forbears, and finally, the Ascension. The 515 sonnets that make up the entire work are based primarily on biblical and patristic sources: La Ceppède directly references the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in rendering his interpretation of Christ’s redemptive act. This study deals with moments of the Passion related in the first and second books of Part I. Most critics view the initial volume of the Théorèmes as superior to the second, especially with respect to complexity of language, intensity of tone and image, and overall depth of meaning. The rich interplay between the sonnets and annotations under consideration supports this notion. Part I also displays a tighter and more extensive organisation than Part II; its front and back matter feature a more significant number of paratextual elements in the form of a preface, dedicatory sonnets, an Avant-propos, ‘Arguments’, notes, and various tables that enrich the reader’s intellectual and devotional experience.2 The 2  For a full outline of La Ceppède’s paratextual infrastructure, see Fragonard M.M., “Réécriture de soi et quête du sens dans les Théorèmes de Jean de La Ceppède”, Cahiers de littérature du XVIIe siècle, 10 (1988) 181–196 (182).

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centrepiece of La Ceppède’s paratextual framework is, unquestionably, his annotations. They accompany almost every sonnet, with an average of five or six associated with each poem. Most give relatively brief explanations of words or images, while others, such as the focus of this inquiry, delve into complex theological questions regarding Christ’s sacrifice. From a general perspective, Gérard Genette holds that notes constitute paratext because they reveal ‘definitions or explanations of terms used in the text, and sometimes the mention of a specific or figurative meaning’.3 In a manner similar to Genette, Jean Céard states that ‘every commentary is fundamentally digressive […] it is in itself an excursus, that is, an excursion around a text; a text is an invitation to a journey’.4 Although readers could undergo a deep intellectual and spiritual experience without reading the annotations, it is clear by their sheer number and substantive nature that La Ceppède intended for at least the most educated members of his public to read them. If they dismiss the annotations, readers overlook one of the most distinctive features of the work. The didactic character of the commentaries illustrates the theological vitality of the Counter-Reformation, while underscoring La Ceppède’s contribution to the rich Catholic tradition of doctrinal exegesis and debate. Still, the idea that the annotations are a fundamental element of the text raises the question of how La Ceppède intended them to be read. Did he plan for meditants to stop reading mid-sonnet to verify the meaning of an annotated word, or to consult passages from the Vulgate? This scenario is unlikely because in sonnets with either numerous or lengthy commentaries, moving back and forth between the lyric text and the annotations would become too disruptive for the reader to enjoy an uninterrupted, if incomplete, devotional experience. More credible is the notion that La Ceppède viewed the notes as a supplement to the literary text that the dévot was to study and contemplate after reading the sonnet. In addition, the commentaries enable La Ceppède to interject himself as a meditant undergoing a spiritual experience while evaluating his own work. As Marie-Madeleine Fragonard contends, the commentaries in the Théorèmes allow the poet ‘to be his own critic’, which in turn leads readers ‘to question the relationship of the author to his text, or of the text to itself’.5 Fragonard stresses 3  Genette G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: 1997) 325. 4  See Céard J., “Les Transformations du genre du commentaire”, in Lafond J. – Stegman J. (eds.), L’Automne de la Renaissance: 1580–1630. XXIIe colloque d’études humanistes, Tours 2–13 juillet 1979, De Pétrarque à Descartes 41 (Paris: 1981) 102–112 (107). See also Genette, Paratexts 324, who uses almost identical terminology. 5  See Fragonard, “Réécriture de soi et quête du sens dans les Théorèmes de Jean de La Ceppède” 187–188.

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the idea of the notes as a form of ‘re-writing’,6 a concept developed more broadly by Paul Zumthor, who in turn sees rewriting in terms of textual gloss, or ‘elucidation’, whereby ‘the gloss finds itself totally integrated into that upon which it comments’.7 From a historical point of view, Anthony Grafton’s observations on the Glossa ordinaria, which consisted of extended notations on the Vulgate read in medieval and early modern Europe, also stress the notion that commentaries ‘came to be seen as integral parts of the texts they explicated’.8 In La Ceppède, the annotations typify the reflective, self-referential nature of the Théorèmes, and provide extensive analysis of the poetic text itself. The mutually reinforcing nature of the relationship between the poetry and the notes adds an interpretive dimension to the Théorèmes rarely found in other devotional authors of the period. While Guillaume Du Bartas (1544–1590) does incorporate commentary in his La Sepmaine; ou Création du monde (1578) as well as the Seconde Sepmaine (1584–1603), the fact that major devotional poets of the era such as Jean-Baptiste Chassignet (1571–1635), Philippe Desportes (1546–1606), François de Malherbe (1555–1628), Anne de Marquets (c. 1553–1588), and Jean de Sponde (1557–1595) do not annotate their offerings underlines La Ceppède’s distinctiveness in combining literary tradition with meditative practice.9 Because La Ceppède’s circle of friends in Aix-en-Provence and throughout southern France was as wide as it was influential, it is not inconceivable that groups of intimates convened to read and discuss the sonnets, as well as the annotations. The theological questions raised in the notes do remain esoteric, but the fact that they are incorporated into a poetic text has the effect of bringing ecclesiastical discourse to a literary public and literary discourse to an ecclesiastical public. The result is a merging of thought and audience that creates frames of reference original to La Ceppède and his work. Through a singular form of what Jean Rousset calls ‘gloses scripturaires’,10 the reader comes to possess an enhanced understanding of combined literary and devotional practice. With respect to the original nature of his self-commentary, La Ceppède’s decision to incorporate the annotations into his lyric endeavour 6  Ibidem 181. 7  See Zumthor P., “La Glose Créatrice”, in Mathieu-Castellani G. – Plaisance M. (eds.), Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire France/Italie (XIVe–XVIe siècles). Actes du Colloque international sur le commentaire (Paris: 1990) 11–18 (17). 8  Grafton A., The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: 1997) 27. 9  In La Ceppède, prose commentary extends and deepens the description and analysis of Christ’s Passion, thereby enabling the poet and the reader to expand the parameters of what they have heretofore understood regarding Christ’s suffering, death, and ultimately, resurrection. 10   See Donaldson-Evans L.K., Poésie et meditation chez Jean de La Ceppède, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 106 (Geneva: 1969) 40.

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suggests that current poetic practice is insufficient. Neither the lyric nor the devotional text should stand on its own as spiritual exercise. By blending poetry and commentary in a way previously unseen, the poet seeks to create a new devotional audience in the form of a more erudite, if not spiritually complete, reader/meditant. In effect, the annotations add intellectual depth to the exegetical process, enabling La Ceppède to enhance his standing with the learned or ‘docte’ portion of the audience mentioned in the Avant-propos not only by explicating devotional controversies of the day, but doing so through a literary medium.11 La Ceppède, unlike Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591) or Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), is not a mystic. His work follows the Ignatian format of composition/analysis/prayer found in so many other early modern devotional poets. However, reason and interpretation often play just as important – if not more important – roles as does transcendence in ensuring the reader’s apprehension of Christ’s experience. From a general standpoint, the annotations reference one another in a manner similar to the way a sequence of sonnets references itself, and they require the reader to engage both rationally and spiritually with the devotional issues at hand. Terence Cave states that in the annotations, ‘the reader is encouraged to return to the devotional manuals for further meditation’.12 With respect to the overall function of the annotations in the text, Paul Chilton argues: The neglected prose annotations provide much evidence for three important aspects of the work: (i) the precise sources adduced by La Ceppède […]; (ii) La Ceppède’s attitude to, and treatment of his main source, the Bible; (iii) his intellectual orientation and world-picture within the limits of contemporary Catholic orthodoxy.13 Through detailed discourse on various mysteries of the Passion, La Ceppède establishes himself as a staunch defender of the faith, if not a theologian in his own right. In an analogous manner, from the perspective of genre and its 11  Distinguishing between various publics, the poet states that his text is written ‘dedans pour les doctes, & dehors pour les ignorans’ (56, ‘inside for the learned, and outside for the ignorant’). In part, the analysis provided by the commentaires allows for the ignorant to become more learned. 12  Cave T., Devotional Poetry in France c. 1570–1613 (Cambridge: 1969) 203. Cave bases his argument regarding the composition/analysis/prayer format on Martz L.L., The Poetry of Meditation, Yale Studies in English 125 (New Haven: 1954) 26–32. 13  Chilton P., The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppède: A Study in Text and Context, Oxford Modern Languages and Literatures Monographs (Oxford: 1977) 49.

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adaptation, La Ceppède effectively adds the essay to a repertoire that includes various lyric forms, the epic, and tragedy, thus enhancing the originality of an undertaking that seeks to create a comprehensive, if not totalistic, literary and contemplative experience for the reader.14 Within this particular sonnet sequence, La Ceppède’s long digression allows meditants to step back and gather themselves in the midst of what is a potentially frightening moment in Christ’s suffering. This discursive and scholarly pause enables reason to counterbalance the overwhelming emotion readers ostensibly experience as they internalise both Christ’s and the poet’s ordeal. 3 Sonnets I, I, 36 and I, 1, 37: Annotation and the Meditative Sequence In annotation 8 of Sonnet I, 1, 36, La Ceppède prepares the reader for the extensive explanation of Christ’s sweating of blood in annotation 4 of the next sonnet. Annotation 8 appears after verse 11; the poet states that during Christ’s agony at Gethsemane, ‘Un Ange maintenant, conforte ses esprits’ (139, ‘an angel comforts Christ’s spirit’). The phrase sheds light on Christ’s rational and emotional states. In the annotation, La Ceppède explains his use of ‘esprits’ in the plural to contend that while Christ’s reason ultimately prevails, Jesus nonetheless experiences sadness and fear as a natural and vital sign of his human disposition. The poet concludes his observations by remarking that his assertion is based on Thomas Aquinas’s arguments in Question 15, Article 9 of the Summa Theologica, and that this interpretation will be elaborated upon in annotation 4 of Sonnet I, 1, 37. Within La Ceppède’s model of exegesis, annotations become another form of sequencing in the théorème process, whereby the poet raises a theological question regarding the Passion and explores its intellectual and affective ramifications. As Françoise Charpentier suggests, the commentaries enhance the unity of the text, in that they ‘relient les sonnets entre eux, renvoyant à un precedent ou un suivant, ou plus souterrainement le commentaire se commente lui-même’ (‘tie the sonnets to each other, crossreferencing a previous or subsequent poem, or, more subtly, the commentary comments on itself’).15 In this specific instance, the problem under examina14  See Ganim R., “Jean de La Ceppède”, in Conway M. (ed.), Sixteenth-Century French Writers, Dictionary of Literary Biography 326 (Detroit: 2006) 223–224. 15  See Charpentier F., “L’Auto-commentaire de Jean de La Ceppède”, in Mathieu-Castellani – Plaisance (eds.), Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire France/Italie (XIVe–XVIe siècles) 101–110 (105).

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tion is whether or not Christ’s sweating of blood is a natural or supernatural occurrence. Of the approximately 2500 annotations in the Théorèmes, annotation 4 of Sonnet I, 1, 37 is exceptional for two reasons. First, contrary to many notes that consist of only a few sentences or paragraphs, this particular commentary numbers roughly 25 pages in Jean Rousset’s facsimile edition (itself based on the original 1613 and 1622 Colomiez editions)16 and nearly as many pages in Yvette Quenot’s modernised version. With respect to the mise en page, the annotations in the Rousset and the Quenot editions appear in footnote form, and are distinguished by a font that is slightly different in style and size from the sonnets themselves. Their typographic presence, while not equal to that of the poetry itself, is still quite prominent, thus emphasising the crucial role the annotations play in the textual and meditative experience. By virtue of his extensive analysis of a major theological issue of the day, La Ceppède distinguishes himself not only as a poet, but as a Catholic intellectual adding to the conversation regarding Christ’s human and divine identity. Within the poem itself, the main argument La Ceppède puts forth in annotation 4 is found in the sonnet’s turn, which, in distich form, accentuates the rare but natural effect of Christ’s sweating of blood, ‘Rare est ce grand effet, mais naturel pourtant: / Car le croire miracle est affoiblir d’autant’ (vv. 9–10). Simply put, to call the effusion of blood a miracle weakens the significance of the event. In underscoring the human character of Christ’s bleeding, rather than describing it as a mark of his divinity, the poet strengthens the identification between the reader and Christ, and subsequently affirms ‘[l]a ferme verité de sa forte agonie’ (v. 11, ‘the firm truth of his deep agony’). In this vein, annotation 9 in the previous sonnet alludes to Christ’s ‘divers offices’, referring to his both divine and human natures. It follows that the human truth of Christ’s agony allows readers to internalise Christ’s torment and make it their own. Accordingly, it is the term ‘agonie’, annotated in Sonnet I, 1, 37, that becomes the subject of the poet’s lengthy discourse. As part of a sequence of notes itself, this annotation is preceded not only by annotations 8 and 9 of Sonnet I, 1, 36, but also by three notes in Sonnet I, 1, 37. The entire poem reads: On admire beaucoup ces offices divers: Merveilleuse est sur tous cette aide consolante: Mais une rouge humeur1 de son corps descoulante, Du jour de sa merveille esblouït l’univers2. 16  La Ceppède Jean de, Les Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de nostre rédemption: reproduction de l’édition de Toulouse de 1613–1622, ed J. Rousset, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 80 (Geneva: 1966).

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Tous ces tourments prochains (maintenant descouverts Aux yeux de son esprit) rendent si violente, Sa douleur, qu’elle espraint de ses pores ouverts, Une sueur de sang goutte à goutte roulante3. Rare est ce grand effet, mais naturel pourtant: Car le croire miracle est affoiblir d’autant La ferme vérité de sa forte agonie4. Et bien que naturel c’est sans indignité Pour le suppos divin, dont l’amour infinie A plus d’esgard à nous qu’[à] sa divinité.17 (One much admires these varied charges: / marvelous for all is his consoling aid: /but a red humour from his body flows, / from the day of his marvel the universe is dazzled. / All these future torments [now appearing in his mind’s eye] render so violent / his pain, that it squeezes from his open pores, / a bloody sweat rolling drop by drop. // Rare, but natural, is this great effect. / because to believe it a miracle would only weaken / the firm truth of his deep agony. // And though natural it is without indignity / for the godly being, whose infinite love / has more regard for us than for his divinity.) The first annotation refers to the ‘rouge humeur’ (‘red humour’), flowing from Christ’s body (v. 3). In this sequence of annotations, La Ceppède begins with a relatively succinct explanation that the fluid is indeed blood. He cites Tertullian’s work, De Carne Christi, as his main source, and then supplements his argument by asserting that throughout human history, blood has been classified as one of the four humours by ‘Les Medecins & Naturalistes’ and verified by Hippocrates (141). The Greeks and Romans held that in addition to traits such as vitality, blood was linked to courage. As science and faith are seen as 17  In essence, the sonnet initially expresses the poet’s admiration for Christ’s dual being, which enables him to console and redeem all of humanity. The focus then turns to the bloody sweat pouring from Christ’s body as he envisions the pain that awaits him. Explaining the phenomenon, the poet acknowledges that Christ’s sweating of blood, while exceptional, is nonetheless natural, and should be considered neither miraculous nor divine. Because the correspondence between the notes is so crucial to understanding the poem’s meaning, I have reproduced, in this case, the note numbers as they appear in print. La Ceppède’s position of the numbers is such that they correspond directly to the terms explained: in this instance, ‘rouge humeur’, ‘l’univers’, ‘roulante’, and ‘agonie’, respectively.

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buttressing one another in this instance, La Ceppède puts forth both medical and theological evidence to support his claim. Not merely content to poeticise the section of Luke’s Gospel (22:44) on which this episode is based, the narrator seeks to strengthen the authenticity of his work by building what amounts to a treatise on an unshakeable intellectual foundation. Annotation 2, linked to the term ‘l’univers’ at the end of the first quatrain, discusses the astonishment and disbelief surrounding the red humour, as well as its allegorisation by Catholic thinkers such as Nicholas Beda, who emphasised its mystical nature. Similarly, the poet mentions Saint Bernard’s (Bernard of Clairvaux, 1090–1153) interpretation of the event as Christ’s wish to baptise humanity not simply in water, but in his own blood. While not disparaging these various perspectives, La Ceppède seeks to bring the reader/meditant back to the literal notion that, according to the Gospel, Christ did veritably sweat blood: ‘Tant y a qu’il est simplement veritable que Jesus-Christ a sué le vray sang, comme la lettre de l’Evangile le marque expressement […]’ (142) (‘Such that it is simply true that Christ did sweat real blood, as expressly indicated in the letter of the Gospel’). The assertion demonstrates the consistency of La Ceppède’s desire to spotlight the vivid reality of Christ’s suffering, in order to render his protagonist more accessible to a public engaged in a devotional exercise. La Ceppède’s third note explicates the term ‘roulante’ (‘rolling’) in verse 8. Here, the poet cites John of Damascus (676–749) as well as Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) to again affirm that the drops of blood resulted from anguish suffered in the garden. The poet expounds upon this contention by adding that the bloody sweat followed a tormented prayer, and that Christ’s supplication to the Father was itself rooted in a fear of death. Quoting Diego de Estella (1524–1578), the poet states, ‘Il [le Christ] jetta cette sueur pour le grand effort de sa priere, & pour la grande apprehension de la mort […]’ (143, ‘Christ’s sweat sprang from his anguished prayer and great apprehension in the face of death’). As is often the case in La Ceppède’s annotations, the word associated with the note is part of an inductive process whereby a specific concept or image becomes a point of departure for contemplation of a larger devotional problem. In this instance, the term ‘roulante’ signifies the physical movement of Christ’s blood, but also implies the progression of the narrator’s meditation on Christ’s agony. The first annotation highlights blood as one of the four humours, while the second, through the word ‘l’univers’, affirms the absolute, if not ‘universal’ truth that Christ’s bleeding is literal, rather than symbolic. Annotation 3, in turn, points to Christ’s bloodshed as a purgation of the fear all humans experience as they confront their own mortality.

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Bloody Sweat and Its Centrality to La Ceppède’s Theology

In the Avant-propos to the Théorèmes, La Ceppède enunciates his goal to strip poetry of its excessively secular, often lascivious, façade and restore it to the service of God, and of Christ in particular (54–55). Though the Avant-propos does not mention the annotations and their contribution to his text per se, it does contain a reference to Christ’s sweating of blood. In extolling the sacrifice of Christ’s suffering in the prose opening of the Théorèmes, the poet enumerates a number of episodes in the Passion. These include the moment when Christ, ‘a sué le pur sang sous le faix des portes de Gazan, qu’il a porté sur le mont de Calvaire, & noyé sa chere vie dans ce vaste Ocean de son amour eternele […]’ (55–56, ‘sweat pure blood under the weight of Gaza’s gates, which he hauled to Calvary and there drowned his precious life in the vast ocean of his eternal love’). Within the typology of the Old Testament prefiguring the New, the poet suggests that Samson’s carrying the city gates of Gaza to the hill facing Hebron (Judges 16) foretells Christ’s bearing of the Cross to Calvary. For the sonnet in question, I, 1, 37, the reference clearly alludes to annotation 4, with its extended discourse on Christ’s sweating of blood at Gethsemane. In the Avantpropos, La Ceppède annotates the term ‘Gazan’ as ‘Enfer’, meaning that Christ’s torment brings down the gates of Hell to liberate humanity from Satan’s grasp. La Ceppède’s explicit mention of this incident in his Avant-propos foreshadows its appearance in the lyric narrative, and highlights its importance to the poet’s artistic and devotional enterprise. Within the paratextual apparatus of the work, Christ’s sweating of blood is also mentioned in the ‘Argument’, or synopsis, preceding Book One, in which the poet describes Christ’s situation as one in which, ‘Soudain il voit paroistre un Ange du Ciel qui le conforte; il est en agonie; & sa sueur devient comme grumeaux de sang’ (63, ‘Suddenly he sees the appearance of an angel from heaven who comforts him; he is in agony; & with his sweat coming to resemble clumps of blood’). Likewise, the table of the sonnets at the conclusion of Part I summarises I, 1, 37 as recounting that, ‘Sueur de sang de Jesus-Christ au Jardin quoy que naturelle, non indigne pourtant de luy’ (‘Christ’s sweating of blood in the garden, although natural, is however not unworthy of him’).18 La Ceppède’s assertion in these annotations and other paratextual elements, i.e., that Christ naturally sweats blood, is reinforced by the message of the sonnet’s final tercet. Here, the poet states that while the natural character of this event does not detract from Christ’s divinity, it does, more significantly, exemplify the notion 18  Ceppède de la Jean, Les Theoremes sur le sacré mystère de nostre redemption, vol. II (Livres II et III), ed. Y. Quenot (Paris: 1989) 668.

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that Christ’s infinite love for humankind carries more importance than his godly being. Echoing the Samson/Christ analogy in the Avant-propos, Jesus’s agony and sacrifice are a human demonstration of love intended to prevent the rest of humanity from suffering Christ’s trauma. Within the meditative process, text and annotation converge to reveal and analyse one of the most intimate moments of Christ’s sacrifice. As Quenot points out in her commentary on La Ceppède’s annotation, the questions surrounding Christ’s sweating of blood constituted one of the major theological controversies at the time the text was written.19 The debate focuses on whether or not this exceptional gushing of blood should be interpreted as a physical or metaphysical occurrence. More specifically, although the causes of the discharge might be natural, the effects were interpreted by many as divine. La Ceppède contends that both cause and effect transpire on a human level. In expressing what he believes is the correct opinion, the poet, somewhat surprisingly, disagrees with the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which declared the bleeding a manifestation of the divine. In addition to Trent, proponents of the “miracle” interpretation include the Milanese physician Johannes Baptista Silvaticus (1550–1621), and the Franciscan philosopher Francesco Panigarola (1548–1594). These authors hold that while the causes of Christ’s bleeding may be natural, the effects are divine in that they should be read as manifestations of Christ’s God-like being. Moreover, Catholic intellectuals such as Diego de Estella and Cornelius Jansenius (1510–1576) purported that both the causes and effects of the event reflect Christ’s divinity.20 In asserting that the sweating of blood is not a miracle, La Ceppède initially relies on Aristotle (History of Animals) to substantiate his claim, suggesting that the latter provides numerous examples to show this as a natural phenomenon (156). As part of the exegetical process, the long exposition and explanation of Christ’s sweating of blood amounts to another type of ‘theorem’ the poet seeks to prove. In composing his argument, La Ceppède draws on as many viable lay and religious sources as possible to demonstrate the universal truth of Christ’s suffering. The poet’s mission is in part didactic, in that it seeks to extend and deepen the meditant’s intellectual and spiritual experience by showing how both secular and religious authorities converge to illustrate Christ’s glory. Along 19  See Quenot’s critical edition of La Ceppède, Les Théorèmes, vol. 1, 145. 20  As indicated in Quenot Y., Lectures de La Ceppède, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 210 (Geneva: 1986) 119, the Cornelius Jansenius to whom La Ceppède refers is the Bishop of Ghent, and is not to be confused with the Bishop of Ypres, also known as Cornelius Jansenius, who founded Jansenism. It should be noted that in her Lectures, Quenot takes mostly a historiographical approach to the annotations, rather than emphasising their value in terms of literary criticism.

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with referencing Aristotle, La Ceppède enlists the help of Jesuit thinkers such as Juan Maldonat (Maldonatus) (1533–1583) and Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), and prominent doctors in southern France – among them Guillaume Rondelet (1507–1566), Antoine Mérindol (1570–1624), and Jean Fernel (1497–1558) – to reinforce his claim. In making his case that the sweating of blood is a natural phenomenon, La Ceppède admits at the outset that such happenings are rare. However, his reasoning unfolds quickly and intensely, as he describes, in extensive detail, the physical symptoms that produce such an outflow. These include: ([…] l’eschauffement des esprits, l’attenuation du sang, & la dilation des pores sur l’ardente violence de la douleur, & puissante force de l’imagination d’une si horrible mort, rendant manifestement possible par nature cette sueur de sang, & d’autant plus facile en Jesus-Christ: pource [comme disent les Peres, mesmes Maldonat] qu’il estoit de complexion delicate & de rare texture). 16521

That Christ, through his ‘delicate complexion’, is ostensibly predisposed towards this type of bleeding renders La Ceppède’s argument more convincing by nominally offsetting the infrequency of the occurrence. The time spent describing the physiology of sweating blood through the pores is partially matched by the poet’s account of his own consultation with doctors, as well as his research in medical archives. Although the poet’s use of the first person singular pronoun ‘je’ is quite common in the sonnets themselves, it almost never appears in the commentaries. Nevertheless, in citing an example from his native city of a man sweating blood naturally, La Ceppède states that the instance, ‘a esté observé à Aix l’an 1596. & que j’ay aprins de maistre Antoine Merindol Docteur & Professeur royal en Medecine en l’Université d’Aix’ (165–166, ‘was observed in Aix in 1596 and that I learned of the event from master Antoine Merindol, Royal Doctor and Professor of Medicine at the University of Aix’). Quenot specifies that Mérindol was a close friend of La Ceppède’s, and the 21  Here the poet describes the physical and psychological effects of Christ’s anguish, such as his racing (and overheated) mind, the thinning of his blood, and the dilation of his pores. The mental and bodily suffering Christ endures in imagining his death causes him to sweat blood, an occurrence facilitated by his exceptionally fine skin. For a wider sense of how the depiction and interpretation of bodily fluids evolved during this period, see Horstmanshoff M. – King H. – Zittel C. (eds.), Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Anquity into Early Modern Europe, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 25 (Leiden – Boston: 2012).

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personalised nature of the source stresses the importance of the annotation and its message to the poet. At the same time, Mérindol is a secular authority whose credentials are reinforced not simply by his connections to the poet but by contemporary experience. La Ceppède also mentions examining old medical manuscripts at the Bibliothèque d’Observance d’Aix (160), as well as Fernel’s Universa Medicina, and Thomas Fienus’s (1567–1631) De viribus imaginationis tractatus (167–168) as describing such a phenomenon. Certainly, conducting this type of scientific research to supplement a lyric project is exceptional, and its presence prompts readers to contemplate its overall significance. Besides proving Christ’s humanity, which in turn bespeaks his willingness to suffer for the love and redemption of humankind, the erudition represented in this, and other annotations, shows the degree to which La Ceppède reflects the devout humanism of his day. The syncretism of La Ceppède’s work manifests itself primarily in the form of biblical typologies, the adaptation of certain literary genres, and the integration of various philosophical traditions (primarily Neoplatonism) within a framework of Christian beliefs and aesthetics. At the same time, a key element that helps define La Ceppède as an early modern poet in more than just a chronological sense is his embrace of natural philosophy. The very controversy over whether or not Christ’s sweating of blood was corporeal or miraculous illustrates the extent to which inquiry into natural phenomena and theology at times competed with one another. Along these lines, it is useful to recall that Galileo (1564–1642) and La Ceppède were contemporaries. And while the Théorèmes do not deal with heliocentrism or other disputes that instigated Galileo’s condemnation in 1616, the vigour and reach of the Inquisition were still very much in force at the time the text was written. A primary goal of devout humanism, especially in the face of continuous Protestant challenge, is to align the chief tenets of the Catholic faith with scientific and other intellectual pursuits that advance human development. For La Ceppède and other like-minded authors, the answer lies in associating human discovery and creativity with celestial inspiration and design. La Ceppède’s self-exegesis involves examination of his scholarly training and conclusions, as much as it does his artistic and spiritual experience. The application and convergence of both realms within a meditative construct thus stands as a model, most notably to learned or ‘docte’ readers who must define their own modernity in terms of a religion increasingly under scrutiny, if not, at times, duress. In annotation 4, La Ceppède suggests that Christ naturally abhorred death, but nonetheless willed and embraced it, i.e., ‘[il] abhorrat naturelement la mort, toutefois il la vouloit & embrassoit d’une volonté deliberée & resoluë’ (145). In part, it is this contradiction that produces his grief. Later in the note,

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La Ceppède stresses that according to the Greeks, the term being annotated, ‘agonie’, is rooted in two emotions, fear and anger. The latter, which the poet calls ‘ire’, is defined as ‘une passion & mouvement de l’appetit sensitif’ (147– 148, ‘the passion and movement of a hypersensitive impulse’), and also as ‘[la] ferveur du sang’ (148, ‘the fervour of blood’). Ire is sensitive, if not spiritual in nature, but is tempered by clemency and reason. Anger is not necessarily a sin, and, it can in fact move humanity in a righteous way as long as reason plays a moderating role. To highlight this point, La Ceppède cites Plutarch’s aphorism, ‘Les passions sont la matiere de la vertu, comme la raison en est la forme’ (149), where passion is the substance of virtue, with reason being the form. In this discussion, Christ’s humanity is in large part defined by what the poet calls his ‘appetit sensitif’ (148). The aim is to display Christ’s intense emotions which, in the poet’s mind, are natural and appropriate. La Ceppède does not deem it necessary to expend nearly as much effort in defending reason as a motivation for Christ’s actions, since intellect is clearly viewed as superior to affect. Basing his commentary on Aquinas, La Ceppède states that Christ’s agony is rooted in the struggle between reason and passion, with reason emerging triumphant: ‘ces passions de l’inferieure partie ne donnoient aucun empeschement ny trouble à la superieure, c’est à dire, à la raison. […] Voila donques le conflit des mouvements de la peur & de l’ire, & par ainsi la vraye agonie en Jesus-Christ’ (153, ‘these inferior passions ultimately present no obstacle or trouble to the superior component of the human mind, that is, reason […]. Hence the struggle between fear and ire gives rise to Christ’s true agony’). The conflict is not one of mind vs. body or body vs. soul. Rather, the struggle concerns how Christ, in human mode, processes his emotions in a manner that preserves his virtue and conveys the magnitude of his sacrifice to the reader. It is Christ’s reason that allows him to overcome fear and anger in order to accept impending death and continue with the Passion. Christ sets the example for the reader, as intellect and affect properly converge within the devotional experience. As a stalwart advocate of his faith during the Wars of Religion, the poet, through the annotations, seeks to uphold the intellectual tradition the Church historically enjoyed, and to burnish his own image as a Catholic philosopher. As Andréas Pfersmann states, ‘On voit surtout comment le poète se refère à leur ‘autorité’, à la crédibilité de leurs énoncés’ (‘One sees especially how the poet refers to their ‘authority’ as well as to the credibility of their writings’).22 Although La Ceppède does not necessarily contribute any new 22  Pfersmann A., Séditions Infrapaginales. Poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (XVIIe–XXIe siècles), Histoire des idées et critique littéraire 464 (Geneva: 2011) 154.

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material to these centuries-old debates, he possesses the talent necessary to synthesise and integrate them into his lyric endeavour. A large part of La Ceppède’s originality, and of the Théorèmes in general, lies in the poet’s ability to revitalise theological discussions within an artistic context. La Ceppède firmly espouses his religion not by attacking the Reform movement (surprisingly, Protestantism is never mentioned directly in the Théorèmes) but by reinforcing canonical Catholicism through a unique form of self-exegesis that unites literary invention and doctrinal interpretation. All devotional authors of the era – both Catholic and Protestant – rely naturally on language and imagery from Scripture to shape their poetic vision. Much of La Ceppède’s uniqueness lies in his numerous commentaries which, if separated from the poems, would constitute a volume in and of themselves. His poetry stands out by incorporating a level of inspiration and authority unique to the period and not imitated since, as La Ceppède demonstrates not only his mastery of devotional language, but of religious doctrine and history as well. For the meditant willing to explore new avenues of reading and interiorisation, the experience of Christ’s Passion becomes that much more profound and, ideally, salutary. 5

Catharsis, Identification, and Poetic Creation

In his discussion of the sonnet sequence dealing with Christ’s sweating of blood, Lance Donaldson-Evans states that annotation 4 of I, 1, 37, interrupts the narrative flow such that in Sonnet I, 1, 38, La Ceppède needs to re-orient readers with respect to the substance of this episode in the Passion.23 The poet’s admiration in describing the significance of Christ’s bloody sweat is coupled with his exhortation that the devout public ally itself with Jesus as the latter starts his battle: S’escartant donc un peu de sa majestueuse Et divine grandeur, pour à nous s’attacher, Il permet aux douleurs de si prés l’approcher Qu’il en sue le sang: ô sueur fructueuse! Le raisin ne rend point sa liqueur gracieuse Sans premier qu’on ne le presse: ô sacre-sainte Chair, Le pressoir de la Croix n’ose encor’ vous toucher, Et desja vous rendez cette humeur precieuse. 23  See Donaldson-Evans, Poésie et meditation chez Jean de La Ceppède 47.

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O mon ame, contemple icy ton Redempteur, Seul, de nuict, tout couvert d’une rouge moiteur, Ou plustost de pur sang: voy combien il endure. Veille donc, prie donc, et te range à son flanc, Pour toy ce dur combat doit vuider en peu d’heure Ses arteres d’esprits, & ses veines de sang.24 (Distancing himself somewhat from his majestic / and divine grandeur, to attach himself to us, / he allows pain to approach so near / that he sweats blood: o fruitful sweat! // The grape does not render its benevolent liquor/ without first being pressed: o sacrosanct Flesh, / the press that is the Cross dare not yet touch you / and already you yield this precious humour. //O my soul, contemplate here your Redeemer, / alone, at night, all covered in red wetness, / or rather in pure blood: see how much he endures. //Keep vigil, pray, and rally to his side, / for you this cruel combat will shortly empty / his arteries of spirit, & his veins of blood.) The digression brought about by the lengthy commentary is certainly worthwhile for the learned or ‘docte’ members of La Ceppède’s audience seeking to ascertain the ramifications of the incident. But for the majority of readers, a considerable shift in focus is necessary in order to redirect them to the lyric recounting of the Passion. Donaldson-Evans contends that once the narrative train is re-established, Sonnet I, 1, 38 represents the narrator’s internalisation of the scene (168), and clearly, the poem signals a deep apprehension of Christ’s sacrifice on the part of La Ceppède’s narrator.25 Essentially, the sonnet reads as the poet’s exhortation to himself and to the reader to admire the bloody sweat as a human manifestation of Christ’s sacrifice. In this manner, the poem can be interpreted as an appreciation, if not a celebration, of Christ’s willingness to forego the protection of his divine nature in order to suffer for the benefit of humanity. 24  The opening of the poem describes how Christ distances himself from his divine status to become closer to humanity, with the sweating of blood becoming the prime manifestation of his humility. Christ’s body is then compared to a precious grape pressed by the Cross to yield the exquisite life force that is Jesus’s blood. The remainder of the sonnet consists of an internal exhortation whereby the poet beseeches himself, and explicitly his soul, to contemplate the figure of the bleeding Christ and to stand beside him in prayer and solidarity as Jesus awaits the vicious fight ahead. 25  See the commentary on Sonnets (I, 1, 37–38) in Bourgeois C., Théologies poétiques de l’âge baroque. La Muse chrétienne, Lumière classique 69 (Paris: 2006) 333–334. Also see the fascinating semiological and morphological analysis of Sonnets (I, 1, 37–40) in Gœury J., “La représentation du motif de la sueur de sang dans Les Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de nostre redemption”, XVIIe siècle 194 (1997) 145–156.

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At the same time, if one examines the significance of Christ’s agony in the garden and the trope of Jesus effusing blood over the longer course of the narrative, then Sonnet I, 1, 38 should be considered as one of a series of key sonnets that mark the poet’s assimilation of Christ’s suffering as part of the creative and spiritual process. Along these lines, Sonnet I, 2, 63 also warrants attention since it represents a moment where the poet’s identification with Christ’s torment intensifies to the point where the narrator’s empathy expresses itself on both a personal and an artistic level. This poem, along with Sonnet I, 2, 62, details Christ’s flagellation at the hands of the Romans. The beating comes from Pilate’s attempt to temporarily appease the Hebrews who have demanded that Christ be crucified. Within the chronology of the Passion, the poet and reader have witnessed Christ’s anguish at Gethsemane, his betrayal by Judas, his capture and return to Jerusalem, and his trial and torture prior to the Crucifixion. In the narrative progression between Sonnets I, 1, 36–38 and I, 2, 62–63, the bloody sweat that covered only Christ’s forehead and face has now become a torrent of blood running over his entire body.26 As in I, 1, 38, Sonnet I, 2, 63 reveals both suffering and triumph in Christ’s brutalised affliction: Aux Monarques vaincueurs la rouge cotte-d’armes Appartient justement. Ce Roy victorieux Est justement vestu par ces mocqueurs gens-d’armes D’un manteau, qui le marque & Prince & glorieux. O pourpre emplis mon test de ton jus precieux Et luy fay distiller mille pourprines larmes, A tant que meditant ton sens mysterieux, Du sang trait de mes yeux j’ensanglante ces Carmes. Ta sanglante couleur figure nos pechez Au dos de cet Agneau par le Pere attachez: Et ce Christ t’endossant se charge de nos crimes. O Christ, ô sainct Agneau, daigne toy de cacher Tous mes rouges pechez (brindelles des abysmes) Dans les sanglans replis du manteau de ta chair.27 26  It is interesting to note the disparity in length between La Ceppède’s narrative and that of the New Testament. Whereas the Théorèmes devote roughly 125 sonnets to the events between Christ’s sweating of blood and his flogging before Pilate, the Gospels cover the sequence in roughly 40 verses over two chapters, amounting to only a few paragraphs. The reason for the difference, of course, is La Ceppède’s lengthy poetic elaboration on the language and symbols of Christ’s suffering in the service of the meditative experience. 27  The sonnet begins with a general declaration that victorious monarchs justifiably sport a red coat of arms. Christ, though mocked and brutalised by his tormentors is, for the devout public, appropriately identified as triumphant in his bloodied cloak. La Ceppède’s

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(To conquering Kings the red coat of arms /justly belongs. This victorious King /is justly clothed by these mocking soldiers / with a cloak that marks him Prince and glorious //O purple fill my head with your precious juice /and make it distill a thousand purplish tears /that while contemplating your mysterious meaning, / the blood milked from my eyes writes this bloodied Verse // Your bloody colour paints our sins / on the back of this Lamb by the Father thus tasked: /and this Christ carrying you now bears our crimes // O Christ, o holy lamb, find it worthy to hide / all my red sins [fissures of the abyss] / in the bloody folds of your cloak of flesh.) Cross-references between these sonnet groups abound. In Sonnet I, 1, 37, Christ sweats blood as proof of his humanity, while in Sonnet I, 2, 63, the poet supplicates the brutalised Christ to swell his head with holy blood that becomes first tears, then ink. Through this type of transfusive identification, the tears spill onto the page to compose the bloodied lyric not just of Christ’s human sorrow, but of the poet as well. The emulative effect of Christ’s Passion is such that Jesus’s pain is transferred to the narrator, who endures his own agony. What these sonnets convey are two moments of catharsis: in the first, Christ affirms his human nature at the outset of his ordeal, and in the second, La Ceppède’s poet movingly confirms his personal – if not human – bond with Jesus as he creates the art that affirms his faith. Sonnets I, 1, 37–38 and I, 2, 63 are contemplative and declarative in that they paradoxically interpret the images of a vulnerable, if not helpless, Christ as symbols of his unrelenting strength. Accordingly, the sonnets urge the reader to find both consolation and inspiration in these images of presumed defeat. Within the imitative dynamic of devotional practice, the poet’s travails mirror Christ’s. Jesus sweats blood as proof of his humanity. Likewise, La Ceppède’s poet cries blood in a moment of torturous identification with his saviour as evidence of his own human frailty. From an emotional and an aesthetic perspective, the narrator’s tears of blood exemplify the catharsis necessary to unleash his lyric creation.28 It follows naturally that identification from narrator then turns inwards with an entreaty that the image of Christ’s suffering fill his head with purplish tears that then fall on the page as poetry. Continuing his meditation, the poet states that Christ’s blood symbolises human sin, which Jesus has voluntarily assumed in order to redeem the world. The final apostrophe begs Christ to allow the narrator – and by extension the reader – to hide in the folds of Christ’s bloody flesh. 28  In his preface to the facsimile edition (see n. 16), Jean Rousset describes this poem as an illustration of Ignatian spiritual practice, where the exercitant concentrates on a concrete image as a means of apprehending its transcendent meaning. He calls the sonnet a ‘bel exemple d’exercise spirituel: la méditation fixe l’activité imaginante sur la réalité sensible,

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Christ to the poet extends from the poet to the reader, as meditants put themselves in the place of the poet in order to apprehend the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice. The narrator serves as an intermediary between Christ and the dévot so that readers may also internalise Christ’s pain and contemplate their own sin and redemption. To a large extent, Jesus writes the narrative of his sacrifice in blood, which in turn becomes the source for the bloody tears that flow as the poet’s verse. In the face of such terror, both Christ and the poet could have ended their anguish by succumbing to their afflictions. Likewise, the reader can abandon the meditative quest by ceasing to follow the horror recounted in the Théorèmes. Nonetheless, for both the poet and the reader, consolation and inspiration come in the form of Christ’s willingness to take on humanity’s sin, ‘Et ce Christ t’endossant se charge de nos crimes’ (v. 11), so that the promise of redemption can be fulfilled. At the same time, salvation can only be realised if the poet and reader acknowledge their own complicity in the Passion. If meditants imitate the poet’s model, they will pity Christ, and experience the guilt that results from the awareness of sin. First person references such as ‘nos pechez’ (v. 9, ‘our sins’), ‘nos crimes’ (v. 11, ‘our crimes’), and ‘mes rouges pechez’ (v. 13, ‘my red sins’) emphasise the consciousness of transgression on the part of the poet and reader, to the point where the narrator beseeches Christ in the final tercet to hide his sins in the folds of his saviour’s flesh, ‘dans les sanglans replis du manteau de ta chair’ (v. 14). Even if the poet does not purge himself of guilt in this prayer, he at least confesses it, and by beseeching Christ to accept his contrition, takes an important step in ridding himself of this burden. The overall sense of pathos established by the scene not only helps the poet and reader identify with Christ, but moves them to devotional action and discourse, such as asking for God’s protection and forgiveness. The result is renewed motivation to carry on with the devotional and salutary exercise that the Théorèmes represent. 6 Conclusion The devotional tract that is annotation 4 of Sonnet I, 1, 37 serves the purpose of underscoring both the analytical and affective experience that comprises La Ceppède’s project. The exhaustive research behind the poet’s depiction of Christ’s sweating of blood shows the scholarly rigour that defines him not only as a fervent Catholic poet, but as an orthodox Catholic philosopher. What is et la plus charnelle, du mystère’ ([vii], ‘beautiful example of spiritual exercise: the meditation fixes the imagination on sensorial reality, [which is] the most carnal, of the mystery’).

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perhaps more interesting, if not ironic, about the annotation is the manner in which it establishes Christ’s humanity on an intellectual level, in order to describe and prefigure some of the most emotional moments of the text. Christ’s bloody sweat – and later his own thrashed body – not only show his human fragility, but also allow the poet and the reader to examine their own culpability in bringing about Jesus’s suffering. For La Ceppède’s narrator, the sense of guilt over his saviour’s punishment, as well as his admiration for Christ’s resilience, elicits tears of blood that engender the act of writing. Blood becomes a transfusive motif that transcends the body, permeates the mind, and spills back onto the page. In La Ceppède’s meditative system, it becomes a vis viva necessary to self-exegesis, and therefore to devotional and literary practice. Likewise, readers presumably follow the poet by imploring Christ to let them find sanctuary and ultimately salvation in the bloodied openings of his wounds and, by extension, his spirit. Intellectual consciousness of one’s humanity and, accordingly, of one’s sin, gives way to a passionate appeal for deliverance. Ideally, such a dual realisation places the poet and reader in a state of grace, allowing poetry not simply to illustrate redemption, but to enable it. Selective Bibliography Bourgeois C., Théologies poétiques de l’âge baroque. La Muse chrétienne, Lumière classique 69 (Paris: 2006). Cave T., Devotional Poetry in France c. 1570–1613 (Cambridge: 1969). Céard J., “Les Transformations du genre du commentaire”, in Lafond J. – Stegman J. (eds.), L’Automne de la Renaissance: 1580–1630. XXIIe colloque d’études humanistes, Tours 2–13 juillet 1979, De Pétrarque à Descartes 41 (Paris: 1981) 102–112. Charpentier F., “L’Auto-commentaire de Jean de La Ceppède”, in Mathieu-Castellani G. – Plaisance M. (eds.), Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire France/Italie (XIV e–XVIe siècles). Actes du Colloque international sur le Commentaire (Paris: 1990) 101–110. Chilton P., The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppède: A Study in Text and Context, Oxford Modern Languages and Literatures Monographs (Oxford: 1977). Donaldson-Evans L.K., Poésie et meditation chez Jean de La Ceppède, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 106 (Geneva: 1969). Fragonard M.M., “Réécriture de soi et quête du sens dans les Théorèmes de Jean de La Ceppède”, Cahiers de littérature du XVIIe siècle, 10 (1988) 181–196. Ganim R., “Jean de La Ceppède”, in Conway M. (ed.), Sixteenth-Century French Writers, Dictionary of Literary Biography 326 (Detroit: 2006) 223–224.

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Genette G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: 1997). Gœury J., “La représentation du motif de la sueur de sang dans Les Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de nostre redemption”, XVIIe siècle 194 (1997) 145–156. Grafton A., The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: 1997). Horstmanshoff M. – King H. – Zittel C. (eds.), Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Anquity into Early Modern Europe, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 25 (Leiden – Boston: 2012). La Ceppède Jean de, Les Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de nostre rédemption: reproduction de l’édition de Toulouse de 1613–1622, pref. J. Rousset, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 80 (Geneva: 1966). La Ceppède Jean de, Les Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de nostre rédemption. Premier Livre., ed. Y. Quenot, Société des Textes Français Modernes 187–188 (Paris: 1988). Martz L., The Poetry of Meditation, Yale Studies in English 125 (New Haven: 1954). Pfersmann A., Séditions Infrapaginales. Poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (XVIIe–XXIe siècles), Histoire des idées et critique littéraire 464 (Geneva: 2011). Quenot Y., Lectures de La Ceppède, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 210 (Geneva: 1986). Zumthor P., “La Glose Créatrice”, in Mathieu-Castellani – Plaisance (eds.), Les Commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire France/Italie (XIVe–XVIe siècles) 11–18.

chapter 10

Can a Poet be ‘Master of [his] owne Meaning’? George Chapman and the Paradoxes of Authorship Gilles Bertheau 1 Introduction Among Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, George Chapman (1559?–1634) can be said to be remarkable in three regards: not only was he the first poet to translate Homer’s works into English; not only did he choose French subjects for most of his tragedies; but he also stood out among his contemporaries for the substantial amount of self-commentary he wrote. In one of the very few books devoted to Chapman’s poetry, Raymond Waddington points out that his ‘critical remarks […] scattered in the prefaces, epistles, and commendations’ make up ‘a coherent and fully articulated statement of a poetics’.1 It is true: Chapman repeatedly asserted his aesthetic creed in nearly all his works,2 so that his dedicatory epistles, prefaces, and addresses to the reader – without forgetting his Homeric glosses – make up a fascinating corpus for the critic who wishes to study the interplay between the figure of the author, his text, and his readers. On one occasion, one of his poems became the very subject of a paratext, which was published as a work of its own: A Free and Offenceles Iustification, of a Lately Pvblisht and Most Maliciously Misinterpreted Poeme: Entitvled

1  Waddington R.B., The Mind’s Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapman’s Narrative Poems (Baltimore – London: 1974) 5. 2  The only exceptions are The Tragedy of Bussy D’Ambois (the only tragedy published without a dedicatory epistle or address to the reader) and all but one of his comedies. See Heltzel V.B., “The Dedication of Tudor and Stuart Plays”, Wiener Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie 65 (1957) [Korninger S. (ed.), Studies in English Language and Literature, Presented to Professor Dr. Karl Brunner on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday] 74–86 (83–84). The Widow’s Tears (1612) is the only comedy to be dedicated (to a certain Mr John Reed). The authenticity of the dedicatory sonnet in All Fools is much disputed, see The Poems of George Chapman, ed. P.B. Bartlett (New York: 1941) 470. Sir Gyles Goosecappe and The Tragedy of Bussy D’Ambois are the only plays (one a comedy, the other a tragedy) published without the author’s name on the title page.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_012

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‘Andromeda Liberata’.3 The poem entitled Andromeda Liberata, Or the Nvptials of Persevs and Andromeda4 had been composed for the wedding of his new patron, the lately created Earl of Somerset, with Lady Frances Howard, freshly divorced from the third Earl of Essex.5 But the story of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from her rock – meant as an allegory of love – caused such an outcry that he felt compelled to write a Iustification. Published twenty years into his career, this text can be regarded as representative of Chapman’s attitude to poetry and its reception by readers. In the Iustification, as well as in the paratexts of the poem itself, he defends the tenets of his art with the same consistency and pungency that he displays in his poetry, drama, and translations. The Iustification is therefore an apt starting point to study what George Chapman’s self-commentary in general can tell the modern critic about his artistic stance as a poet.6 Indeed, it is one of the purposes of this chapter to show just how consistent the poet’s creeds are throughout his literary production.7 Chapman also demonstrates that there is another meaning to ‘self-commentary’, besides that of commentary by the poet on his own work: commentary on himself as a poet. After a brief synopsis of Andromeda Liberata and the circumstances surrounding its composition, I shall focus on three interrelated questions that arise from his resolution to be ‘in [his] owne wrighting […] master of [his] owne meaning’.8 The first concerns his poetic art. For Chapman, poetry is akin to divinity and predicated on true learning, which must be manifest in deliberately

3  In this chapter, concerned with Chapman’s self-commentary, the word paratext will be used to refer to his dedicatory epistles, prefaces, and addresses to the reader, thus excluding paratexts such as titles, title pages, running-titles, etc., as defined by Gérard Genette in Seuils (Paris: 1987). See Genette G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: 1997). The Introduction in Smith H. – Wilson L. (eds.), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: 2011) 1–14, engages in an interesting discussion of Genette’s definition of paratexts. 4  These pieces will be subsequently referred to as the Iustification and Andromeda Liberata. 5  Robert Carr was created Viscount Rochester in March 1611 and Earl of Somerset on 4 November 1613. He married Frances Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, on 26 December 1613. 6  This is not the opinion of Gerald Snare, who writes that gathering ‘a series of quotations from across the canon of the poet’s work’ is a dangerous procedure to identify ‘a poet’s belief’ because it is ‘our construct, not the poet’s’. See Snare G., The Mystification of George Chapman (Durham – London: 1989) 140. 7  For lack of space, an exhaustive analysis of the entire corpus of self-commentary to be found in Chapman’s work cannot be undertaken here. However, I shall refer to as many works as possible. 8  Chapman George, A Free and Offenceles Iustification, of a Lately Pvblisht and Most Maliciously Misinterpreted Poeme: Entitvled ‘Andromeda Liberata’ (London, Lavrence L’Isle: 1614), fol. *3.

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hermetic language.9 The second will deal with the figure of the reader, felt by the poet to be an obstacle to the accomplishment of his authorship. These two points will lead me to explore what Chapman’s self-commentary reveals about the author’s self-representation, drawing a paradoxical portrait of himself both as a victim and as an ideal reader. 2

Andromeda Liberata: the Meaning of the Allegory

Andromeda Liberata is part of Chapman’s occasional poetry and is the only epithalamion he ever wrote.10 In February 1613, for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Frederick, the Elector Palatine, he composed The Memorable Masque [...] of the Innes of Court, on the theme of Honour making Plutus, god of riches, ‘ingenious’ and ‘liberal’.11 The theme and the genre of the piece were conventional enough to stir no polemic at court and we know that King James took pleasure in seeing it.12 However, the choice of an allegorical subject for the 1614 epithalamion turned out to be a rather risky one. To celebrate matrimony, love, and procreation, Chapman selected the myth of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the rock to which she had been tied after Cepheus, her father, delivered her to the gods’ wrath to save his country.13 After a victorious combat against the monstrous whale, Perseus and Andromeda were joined in marriage and able to beget children. In this poem Chapman embraces the Neo-Platonism of Ovids Banquet of Sence (1595). His debt to Marsilio Ficino appears in his conception of true love:14 9  See Helgerson R., “The Elizabethan Laureate: Self-Presentation and the Literary System”, English Literary History 46, 2 (Summer 1979) 193–220 (215). 10  See The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 10. 11  Chapman George, The Memorable Masqve of the Two Honovrable Hovses or Innes of Court; the Middle Temple and Lyncolnes Inne. As it was performd before the King, at White-hall on Shroue Munday at night; being the 15. of Febr. 1613. At the princely celebration of the most royall nuptials of the Palsgraue, and his Thrice Gratious Princesse Elizabeth, &c. With a description of their whole show, in the manner of their march on horse-backe to the Court from the Master of the Rolls his house: with all their right noble consorts, and most showfull attendants. Invented, and fashioned, with the ground, and speciall structure of the whole worke: by our kingdomes most artfull and ingenious architect Innigo Iones. Supplied, applied, digested, and written, by Geo. Chapman (London, G. Eld for George Norton: 1613), fol. a[4]. 12  A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book: A Facsimile Edition of Folger MS. V. a. 321, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Newark: 1983) 444. 13  Chapman used Natalis Comes’s Mythologiæ as one of his sources: “De Andromeda”, viii, 25 and “De Perseo”, vii, 18 (see The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 462). 14  See Schoell F., Études sur l’humanisme continental en Angleterre à la fin de la Renaissance, Bibliothèque de la Revue de Littérature Comparée 29 (Paris: 1926) 1–20; Jacquot J., George

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Loue did both confer To one in both: himselfe in her he found She with her selfe, in onely him was crownd: While thee J loue (sayd he) you louing mee In you J finde my selfe: thought on by thee, And I (lost in my selfe by thee neglected) In thee recouer’d am, by thee affected.15 When praising love, he also resorts to Mars and Venus, as the divine couple – like the planets named after them – embodies masculine and feminine virtues.16 In accord with this conceit, one can read the story of Perseus and Andromeda as the union of beauty and mind: Amongst the fairest women you could finde Then Perseus, none more faire; mongst worthiest men, No one more manly: This the glasse is then To shew where our complexion is combinde; A womans beauty, and a manly minde.17 The beauty of Andromeda is, ultimately, ‘the beauty of the mind’, conferring ‘true Noblesse’ upon her.18 As to the fight between Perseus and the whale, it is, in the poet’s own terms, a combat ‘to rescue good from ill’.19 The reading Chapman expects from his readers corresponds to the second definition of the word ‘allegory’ in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘A story, picture, etc. which uses symbols to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically Chapman (1559–1634), sa vie, sa poésie, son théâtre, sa pensée (Paris: 1951) 199–224; Wallace R.S., “Chapman’s Debt to Ficino”, Notes and Queries n.s. 17 (1970) 402–403. Chapman even included translated passages from Ficino’s In Convivium Platonis de Amore Commentarium in his poem, as for instance in lines 321–344 (see The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 463). 15  Chapman George, Andromeda Liberata, Or the Nvptials of Persevs and Andromeda (London, Printed for Lavrence L’Isle: 1614), fol. D4v. On Chapman’s aesthetics of concordia discors, see Waddington, The Mind’s Empire 43. 16  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fols. [C4v]–D and [C4v]–Dv. See Waddington, The Mind’s Empire 201. 17  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. C3. 18  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fols. C3v and Fv. 19  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. D2v. For an elaborate interpretation of the poem, see Waddington, The Mind’s Empire 196–214. In particular, Waddington points out the analogy between Perseus killing the whale and the English and Christian legend of Saint George killing the dragon. He sees King James I in the figure of Jove (Perseus is described as ‘Ioues cheefe Minion’, fol. D2).

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a moral or political one; a symbolic representation; an extended or continued metaphor.’ But according to him, his poem was ‘maliciously misinterpreted’: the ‘malicious reader’ saw Perseus and Andromeda as representations of Somerset and Frances Howard.20 3

The Dangers of Topicality

This unwelcome interpretation was due in part to the poet’s own awkwardness. Instead of contenting himself with the philosophical considerations mentioned above, he drew his readers’ attention to the embarrassing topicality of the poem. Topicality was not a new feature to his work, as he had been foolhardy enough to dramatise the story of the Duke of Biron in 1608, when the main protagonists of the affair were still alive, including King Henry IV of France. But in the case of the Somerset wedding, Chapman voiced rather inopportunely what it would have been politic to silence. This marriage, which took place in the context of James I’s pro-Spanish policy, led to the biggest scandal at court for years. In order to marry Robert Carr, Frances Howard (daughter of Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk) had to ask for the annulment of her marriage (she was then only thirteen) with Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, whose friends and allies opposed – like his father before him – the English rapprochement with Spain. On 25 September 1613, a commission declared the nullity of the marriage, on the ground that it had not been consummated. According to his wife, Essex was impotent, a charge that he denied. Ten days before that decision, Sir Thomas Overbury, a friend of Somerset’s who had first approved of the union but later changed his mind, was found dead in the Tower of London, where Somerset had managed to have him imprisoned.21 When George Chapman wrote and entered Andromeda Liberata in the Stationer’s Register (16 March 1614), all this background was common knowledge. It was all but inevitably offensive, therefore, to allude to such controversial circumstances. Nevertheless, the opening lines of the poem immediately remind the readers of what had happened:

20  Chapman, Iustification, fol. [*4]v. 21  The couple was later accused of the murder, tried and condemned. The countess was pardoned by the King, who spared Somerset’s life. Husband and wife were kept in the Tower until 1622. For a summary of the story, see The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 461–462; for an extensive narrative of the events, see White B., Cast of Ravens: The Strange Case of Sir Thomas Overbury (New York: 1965); Lindley D., The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: 1993).

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Flie ye prophane, that dare not view the day, Nor speake to men but shadowes, nor would heare Of any newes, but what seditious were, Hatefull and harmefull euer to the best, Whispering their scandals […].22 Using the word ‘scandal’ in a defence of the couple was double-edged. Yet the poet repeats it in his dedicatory epistle: Forth then (my Lord) & these things euer thirst Till Scandall pine, and Bane-fed enuie burst. And you, (most noble) Lady as in blood In minde be Noblest, make our factious brood Whose forked tongs, wold fain your honor sting Conuert their venomd points into their spring.23 This apology was less than felicitous, for the mention of Lady Frances’s honour referred to her contention that she was still virgo intacta when she married the Earl.24 Yet worse was to follow. In the allegory, ‘Cepheus […] with Iron chaines bound his daughter to a rocke’.25 In the poem, however, Chapman writes that Andromeda was ‘Bounde to a barraine Rocke’.26 Further on, insisting on the ‘instinct of generation’,27 he explains: For he no lesse a Homicide is held, That man to be borne lets: then he that kild A man that is borne: He is bolder farre That present life reaues: but he crueller That to the to-be borne, enuies the light And puts their eyes out, ere they haue their sight.28 22  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. B. 23  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. ¶¶3. 24  See Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard 81–82. Bartlett explains that ‘She was married to Somerset with her hair flowing loose, the sign of a virgin bride’ (The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 463). 25  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, “The Argument”, fol. A2. 26  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. [B4]v. 27  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. Ev. 28  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. E–Ev. A marginal note to line 111 of the “Dialogus” in the Iustification refers to Plato’s Symposium: ‘Quippe non minus homicida consendus est qui hominem praecipit nasciturum; quam qui natum tellite medio. Audacior autem, qui presentem abrumpit vitam, crudelior, qui lucem inuidet nascituro, & nondum natos filios

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The two occurrences – but especially the first one, dealt with in the ‘Dialogus’ of the Iustification – were understood as outrageous allusions to Essex’s alleged impotency. The word ‘Homicide’ can also be considered inappropriate in view of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. The reception of the poem thus prompted the author to publish his Iustification a few months later; the exception taken at these allusions by the Essex circle was an embarrassment to the Somersets. In the ‘Dialogus’ of the Iustification, Pheme says: ‘Your Perseus is displeasd, and sleighteth now / Your worke, as idle, and as seruile, yow’.29 However exceptional in its form, most of the ideas expressed in the Iustification can be found throughout Chapman’s paratexts, both before and after 1614. This repetition reveals a consistent anxious awareness of the perils of authorship, analogous to that of Ben Jonson.30 Throughout his oeuvre, Chapman endeavours to reclaim the proper dignity of true poetry. 4

Self-Commentary and George Chapman’s Art of Poetry

The exclusive conception of poetry displayed in Chapman’s writings could not but result in his being misunderstood by most of his readers. The defiant assertion of his dignity as poeta made the reception of his works contentious, as reflected in the bitterness and petulance that increasingly fill his addresses and dedications. 4.1 ‘The Dreadfull Dignity of Antient and Authenticall Poesie’ Chapman set out his idea of poetry very early on in his career. In the dedication of Ovids Banquet of Sence to Matthew Roydon (1595), he speaks of ‘the diuine discipline of Poesie’ and takes care to separate it from rhetoric: ‘But that Poesie should be as peruiall as Oratorie, and plainnes her speciall ornament, were the plaine way to barbarisme’.31 This sense of the divine nature of poetry, far removed from the mundane use and clarity of rhetoric, leads Chapman suos enecat. Plat. In Sympo.’ This is the source of the lines quoted in the poem. See Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental 17; The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 463. 29  Chapman, Iustification, fol. **2v. 30  In her introduction, Bartlett maintains that Chapman states his ‘poetic creed’ ‘with almost tiresome iteration’ (The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 1–2). 31  Chapman, Ouids Banquet of Sence. A Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie, and his amorous Zodiacke. VVith a translation of a Latine coppie, written by a Fryer, Anno Dom. 1400 (London, I.R. for Richard Smith: 1595), dedicatory epistle to Matthew Roydon, fol. A2 [Early English Books Online (abbreviated as EEBO henceforth), accessed 10 November 2016]. ‘peruiall’ is an idiosyncratic word of Chapman’s, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as meaning ‘transparent, clear’.

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to the notion of the poeta vates, which he stages in Evthymiæ Raptus; Or The Teares of Peace (1609).32 In this poem, he relates his encounter with the spirit of his ‘Princes Homer’, who bestowed upon him the poetic inspiration that the Latin title of the poem underlines.33 The Platonic view that poetry and the poet were connected with the divine was certainly not unprecedented in the Renaissance. Chapman was particularly consistent, however, in its assertion and reassertion.34 In The Memorable Masque (1613), Chapman inserts a text that informs the reader about the reception of the piece, as it begins with ‘To answer certaine insolent obiections […]’.35 This defence serves as an opportunity for him to make a distinction between ‘Insania’ and ‘diuinus furor’: Insania, is that which euery Rancke brainde writer; and iudge of Poeticall writing, is rapt withal; when hee presumes either to write or censure the height of Poesie; and that transports him with humor, vaine-glory and pride, most prophane and sacrilegious: when diuinus furor, makes gentle, and noble, the neuer so truly-inspired writer.36 The opposition between sheer folly and enthusiasm separates the ‘trulyinspired writer’ from the ‘Rancke brained writer’ and was necessary for the poet in order to reclaim the dignity of poetry. This difference between the amateur poet and the ‘laureate’, to use Richard Helgerson’s term, was deemed essential by Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, as well.37 It is a feature of Chapman’s artistic profession, as we can see it when he explained to Matthew Roydon what real poetry is: ‘in my opinion, that which being with a little endeuour serched, ads a kinde of maiestie to Poesie; is better than that 32  ‘These bee they, that as the first and most noble sorte, may iustly bee termed Vates, so these are waited on in the excellenst languages and best vnderstandings, with the fore described name of Poets’, Sir Sidney Philip, The Defence of Poesie (London, William Ponsonby: 1595), fol. C3v. [EEBO, 10 November 2016]. 33  Chapman, Evthymiæ Raptvs; Or The Teares of Peace: With Interlocutions (London, H.L. for Rich. Bonian and H. Walley: 1609) [EEBO 10 November 2016], fol. A4v. 34  ‘Poeta nascitur, Orator fit was a platitude of the period,’ says Charles Kendrick Cannon, “Chapman on the Unity of Style and Meaning”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68, 2 (April 1969) 245–264 (246). 35  Chapman, The Memorable Masqve, fol. C2. 36  Chapman, The Memorable Masqve, fol. C2v. This distinction is repeated in the dedication of Homer’s Odysses (1614) to Somerset. See Homer’s Odysses, Translated according to ye Greeke by Geo. Chapman (London, Rich. Field for Nathaniell Butter: [1614]), fol. A4v. 37  Helgerson, “The Elizabethan Laureate: Self-presentation and the Literary System” 193– 220. See also Cannon, “Chapman on the Unity of Style and Meaning” 249.

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which euery Cobler may sing to his patch’.38 In 1611, he spoke of ‘the bold rimes of euerie Apish and impudent Braggart’.39 For Chapman, the dignity of poetry is far superior to that of the mechanic arts. It is also incompatible with servile imitation and should not serve self-flattery. Chapman’s tone became more petulant in 1613, when he wrote: Euery vulgarly-esteemd vpstart; dares breake the dreadfull dignity of antient and authenticall Poesie: and presume Luciferously, to proclame in place thereof, repugnant precepts of their owne spaune. Truth, and Worth, haue no faces, to enamour the Lycentious, but vaine-glory, and humor.40 Since ‘Poesie’ is the daughter of Antiquity and tradition, what Chapman makes clear in this passage is that it should not be left to those who think they can ‘make verses’41 without abiding by the rules set before them by genuine poets who worship ‘Truth and Worth’. As the adverb ‘Luciferously’ shows, Chapman sees them as yielding to blameworthy arrogance. 4.2 The ‘Misteries and Allegorical Fictions of Poesie’ It is precisely because poetry is divine that Chapman refuses to vulgarise it, in both senses of the word.42 This principle accounts for his reputation of obscurity, established as early as 1595 with his second publication.43 In one of the 38  Chapman, Ouids Banquet of Sence, fol. A2. 39  Chapman George, The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, Neuer before in any languag (sic) truely translated. With a comment vppon some of his chiefe places (London, Nathaniel Butter: [1611]), “Preface to the reader”, fol. A3. 40  Chapman, The Memorable Masqve, fol. C2. 41  My emphasis. The phrase is used by Crispinus, Jonson’s poetaster in Jonson, Ben, Poetaster Or The Arraignement: As it hath beene sundry times priuately acted in the Blacke Friers, by the children of her Maiesties Chappell (London, M.L.: 1602) 3. 1., fol. D3 [EEBO, 15 August 2016]. 42  Nevertheless, in the dedicatory epistle of his second poem, he wrote that he was not ‘professing sacred Poesie in any degree’. See Chapman, George, Ouids Banquet of Sence, fol. A2v [EEBO, 10 November 2016]. With the Epicede or Funerall Song he wrote on the death of Prince Henry (1612), this poem is the only one Chapman published without his name on the title page. 43  See Swinburne C.A., George Chapman: A Critical Essay (London: 1875) 16. See also Bottrall M., “George Chapman’s Defence of Difficulty in Poetry”, The Criterion 16 (October 1936–July 1937) 638–654; The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 1–4 and 9–11; Jacquot, George Chapman (1559–1634) 237–40; Cannon, “Chapman on the Unity of Style and Meaning” 245; Waddington, The Mind’s Empire 1–19. Cannon points out that Elizabethan poets (he names Gascoigne, Lodge, Sidney, and Spenser) valued difficulty in poetry, but ‘not in its literal expression but in its dark meanings underlying the rhetorical surface’ (252).

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complimentary sonnets that follow the dedication of Ovids Banquet of Sence, one can read: ‘Now the true heyre [to ‘the Muses land’] is happily founde out / Who (framing it t’inrich posterities) / Walles it with spright-fild darknes round about, / Grass, plants, and sowes; and makes it paradise’.44 Another one begins: ‘Onely that eye which for true loue doth weepe, / Onely that hart which tender loue doth pierce / May read and vnderstand this sacred vierse / For other wits too misticall and deepe’.45 More famously, John Webster spoke of the ‘full and haightned stile of Maister Chapman’.46 Chapman himself revels in this ‘obscuritie’. As he explains: Obscuritie in affection of words, & indigested concets, is pedanticall and childish; but where it shroudeth it selfe in the hart of his subiect, vtterd with fitnes of figure, and expressiue Epithetes; with that darknes wil J still labour to be shaddowed: rich Minerals are digd out of the bowels of the earth, not found in the superficies and dust of it.47 The implicit praise here of his own work goes along with what can be called an ethics of reading. Understanding the poem should come as a reward for one’s intellectual efforts, in the same way as gems are only found by those who dig deep into the earth, instead of simply looking for them on the surface: ‘truth in her verie nakednesse sits in so deepe a pit that from Gades to Aurora, and Ganges, few eyes can sound her’.48 Michael Drayton emphasises the same ethics of effort in the opening of his Poly-Olbion (1612): Then, whosoeuer thou be, possest with such stupidity & dulnesse, that, rather then thou wilt take paines to search into ancient and noble things, choosest to remaine in the thicke fogges and mists of ignorance, as neere the common Lay-stall of a Citie […] thou hadst rather, (because it asks thy labour) remaine, where thou wert, then straine thy selfe to walke forth with the Muses; the fault proceeds from thy idlenesse, not from any want in my industrie.49 44  Chapman, Ovids Banquet of Sence, fol. A3v. 45  Ibidem. See Sackton A., “The Rhetoric of Literary Praise in the Poetry of Raleigh and Chapman”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, 3 (1976) 409–421 (414). 46  Webster John, The White Divel (London, N.O. for Thomas Archer: 1612), fol. A2v. 47  Chapman, Ovids Banquet of Sence, dedicatory epistle to Matthew Roydon, fol. A2. 48  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book I, “Commentarivs”, fol. Cv. 49  Drayton Michael, Poly-Olbion (London, M. Lownes, I. Browne, I. Helme, I. Busbie: 1612) “To the Generall Reader” fol. A [EEBO, 7 August 2016]. See what Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote in 1875: ‘I take George Chapman and Fulke Greville to be of all English poets the two most genuinely obscure in style upon whose works I have ever adventured to embark in search of treasures hidden beneath the dark gulfs and crossing currents of their rocky and

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Ben Jonson, who in contrast thinks that poets should write clearly, nevertheless is not ready to excuse his readers and hearers for any obscurity they may find in his oeuvre: As wee must take the care that our words and sense bee cleare; so, if the obscurity happen through the Hearers, or Readers want of understanding, I am not to answer for them; no more then for their not listning or marking; I must neither find them eares, nor mind.50 The difficulty Chapman speaks of is a direct consequence of his ideal of the poet as hierophant: As learning, hath delighted from her Cradle, to hide her selfe from the base and prophane Vulgare, her ancient Enemy; vnder diuers vailes of Hieroglyphickes, Fables, and the like; So hath she pleased her selfe with no disguise more; then in misteries and allegorical fictions of Poesie.51 The mention here of the ‘diuers vailes of Hieroglyphickes’ is a clear indication, among others, of Chapman’s indebtedness to the hermetic tradition that he found in Plutarch’s Moralia, especially De Iside & Osiride,52 as well as in Ficino’s writings.53 In his view, this tradition implied three interrelated things: weedy waters, at some risk of my understanding being swept away by the groundswell’ (Swinburne, George Chapman: A Critical Essay 16). 50  Jonson Ben, Timber: Or discoveries, (1623), in idem, The Poems; The Prose Works, ed. C.H. Herford – P. Simpson – E. Simpson (Oxford: 1947), Published online: September 2012, vol. VIII, Oxford Scholarly Editions, Bodleian Library, 623–624 (accessed 10 August 2016). 51  Chapman, Iustification, fol. *2. 52  ‘Now their kings were created either out of the order of their priests, or else out of the degree of knights and warriors […]. And looke whomsoever they chose from out of the order of knighthood, presently after his election he was admitted unto the colledge of priests, and unto him were disclosed and communicated the secrets of their Philosophy, which under the vaile of fables and darke speeches couched and covered many mysteries, through which the light of the trueth in some sort though dimly appeare’. See Plutarch, The Philosophie, commonlie called, the Morals vvritten by the learned philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea. Translated out of Greeke into English, and conferred with the Latine translations and the French, by Philemon Holland of Coventrie (London, Arnold Hatfield: 1603) 1290. 53  See Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental 236. On Chapman’s hermetism see Jacquot, George Chapman (1559–1634) 74–76. On hieroglyphs in the Renaissance, see Dieckmann L., “Renaissance Hieroglyphs”, Comparative Literature 9, 4 (1957) 308–321; Iversen E., “Hieroglyphic Studies of the Renaissance”, Burlington Magazine 100, 658 (January 1958) 15–21.

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teaching, universality, and, to use the term proposed by Phyllis Bartlett, ‘indirection’, i.e., open-endedness.54 In the Iustification, Chapman says that ‘allegorical fictions’ are supposed to conceale, within the utter barke […] some sappe of hidden Truth: As either some dimme and obscure prints of diuinity, and the sacred history; Or the grounds of naturall, or rules of morall Philosophie, for the recommending of some virtue, or curing some vice in generall (For howsoeuer Phisitions alledge; that their medecins, respect non Hominem, sed Socratem; not euery, but such a speciall body: Yet Poets professe the contrary, that their physique intends non Socratem sed Hominem, not the indiuiduall but the vniuersall) […] euer (I say) enclosing within the Rinde, some fruit of knowledge howsoeuer darkened; and (by reason of the obscurity) of ambiguous and different construction. […]: This Ambiguity in the sence, hath giuen scope to the varietie of expositions.55 Like his contemporaries, Chapman followed Horace’s lessons and regarded allegory as a means of education.56 But he also drew a distinction and a comparison between ‘Phisitions’ and ‘Poets’, arguing that the former are only concerned with one ‘individuall’, whereas the latter aim at the ‘vniuersall’. In spite of this difference – akin to what Aristotle says of the poet and the historian in chapter IX of his Poetics – Chapman himself spoke like a physician when he diagnosed the ‘preivdicate […] reader’ with an incurable mental or intellectual disease: ‘But whatsoeuer your disease bee, I know it incurable, because your vrine will neuer shew it.’57 Finally, if he acknowledged the ‘Ambiguity in 54  ‘Allegory implies at the outset an indirection of statement, and – since indirection was Chapman’s natural mode of approach – it afforded him what was probably his favourite form’ (The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 9). See also Murrin M., The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago – London: 1969) chapter 5, “The Auditor’s Response: The Interpretation of Allegory”, in particular 98–105. 55  Chapman, Iustification, fol. *2–*2v. 56  ‘Within society moral allegory provided a necessary ethical education […] and we have already seen that the poets considered contemporary society to be almost totally corrupt and desperately in need of moral reform’ (Murrin, The Veil of Allegory 115). 57  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, “To the preivdicate and peremptory reader”, fol. Av. The analogy – and, in that case, resemblance – between the two professions is staged by Jonson in Poetaster, when Vergil the poet makes himself a physician by prescribing poetry as a remedy to Crispinus, who is commanded to ‘take / Each morning, of old Catoes Principles’, to ‘taste a piece of Terence’, to ‘shun Plautus’ and ‘to read / […] the best Greekes’, 5.3., fol. M4. Previously, Horace had given him two pills to purge his ‘Braine, and

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the sence’, it was only to allow for the poet’s ‘scope’ in the ‘varietie of expositions’, not for the variety of readings or what he calls ‘the spleens prophan / Of humours errant, and Plebeian’.58 This last remark shows how the poet’s autonomy and authorship build themselves up on the denial of the readers’ claim to their own autonomy – at least on that of the ‘Plebeian’ readers.59 5

The Author at War with His Readers

What Michael Murrin wrote on the allegorical poet perfectly applies to Chapman: The allegorical poet served the truth which he had received under inspiration, and this truth exercised the primary operative control over his rhetoric. He did not really cater to his audience but tried to preserve his truth intact and communicate it to those capable of understanding it. This requirement forced him to deal with two different audiences: the many who could never accept his revelation and the few who could.60 The difference between the poet and common scribblers, proceeding from the definition of poetry that we have just analysed, is also apparent in the distinctions Chapman makes among the readers of his works at large. Indeed, he saw himself as having ‘two different audiences’, which he designated as the ‘base and prophane Vulgare’ on the one hand, and, on the other the ‘vnderstander’. 5.1 The ‘Base and Prophane Vulgare’ vs. the ‘Vnderstander’ The adjective ‘prophane’, which marks an incompatibility between the poeta vates and the common readers, recurs ten times in the entire corpus of Chapman’s paratexts. It seems to sum up his opinion that most readers are Stomacke’ (5.3., fol. M2), which resulted in a highly comical scene where Crispinus literally threw up the words of his libel against Horace (5. 3., fol. M3–M3v). 58  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, dedicatory epistle, fol. ¶3. 59  In the same vein, John Marston wrote: ‘let him be pleased to be my reader, and not my interpreter, since I would faine reserue that office in my owne hands, it being my dayly prayer, Absit a iocorum nostrorum simplicitate malignus interpres’. See Marston J., Parasitaster, Or the Fawne as it hath been divers times presented at the Blacke-Friars, by the Children of the Queenes Maiesties Reuels, and since at Powles (London, T.P. for W.C.: 1606), “To my equall Reader”, fol. [A2] [EEBO, 8 August 2016]. Marston’s ‘dayly prayer’ is a quotation from Martial’s Epigrams (I, 1) and can be translated as ‘Let the malicious interpreter keep away from the simplicity of our games’. 60  Murrin, The Veil of Allegory 168.

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incapable of understanding his poetry, which is the subject of his perpetual lament and irritation, whenever the ‘base and prophane Vulgare’, as he calls them in his Iustification,61 are bold enough to pass judgement on it. In that sense, Chapman does not react in the way Jonson does – or says he does – in some of his addresses to his readers. In Seianvs for example, Jonson professes his indifference to his readers’ judgement: ‘But that I should plant my felicity, in your general saying Good, or Well, &c. were a weaknesse which the better sort of you might worthily contenme, if not absolutely hate me for.’62 ‘[N]either praise, nor dispraise from you can affect mee,’ he also writes to ‘the reader in ordinarie’ in his Catiline (1611).63 In contrast, the reader’s response is what prompted Chapman to add an address, at the end of Andromeda Liberata, ‘To the preivdicate and peremptory reader’.64 This sort of reader saw Essex in the ‘barraine Rocke’ and the ‘Homicide’65 and thus accused the poet of smearing the reputation of the Earl by the indecorous allusions to his impotency, which is the main subject of the ‘Dialogus’ in the Iustification: ‘Malice will […] licentiouslie affirme, that my Poeme hath something honourablie applicable, that the rest might the more safely discouer my malignance’.66 ‘[P]reivdicate and peremptory’: these two adjectives make it clear that Chapman was on the defensive. The epithets used by his contemporaries are generally positive or at least neutral. For example, Samuel Daniel addressed ‘the Frendly Reader’ in his Worthy Tract of Paulus Iouius (1585), Michael Drayton ‘the courteous Reader’ in his Harmony of the Church (1591) or ‘the generall Reader’ in his Poly-Olbion (1612), John Marston ‘[his] Equall Reader’ in his Parasitaster, or the Fawne (1606). As to Ben Jonson, he wrote two different addresses, “To the Reader in ordinarie” and “To the 61  Chapman, Iustification, fol. *2. 62  Jonson Ben, Seianvs His Fall (London, G. Elld, for Thomas Thorpe: 1605), “To the Readers”, fol. ¶2v [EEBO, 7 August 2016]. 63  Jonson, Ben, Catiline His Conspiracy (London, Walter Burre: 1611), “To the Reader in ordinarie”, fol. [A3] [EEBO, 7 August 2016]. 64  It is interesting to notice that the copy scanned in EEBO (from the Henry Huntington Library) differs from the copy kept at the Bodleian Library: in the former, the address follows the dedication whereas, in the latter, it comes at the end of the poem. The second arrangement makes more sense with the first words of the address: ‘I am still in your hands’. In each case, the signature is an italic ‘A’ while the “Argument” begins as ‘A2’. It seems to show that this text was written after the printing of the poem – and the scandal it caused – and subsequently inserted into its pages before being bound. This is in keeping with what Roger Chartier says of paratexts in Chartier R., La Main de l’auteur et l’esprit de l’imprimeur XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, Folio histoire (Paris: 2015) 30. 65  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fols. [B4]v and E. 66  Chapman, Iustification, fol. **v.

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Reader extraordinary”, in his Catiline (1611). None of them resisted the classical trope of captatio benevolentiae as much as Chapman did.67 Chapman describes his reader as being over-presumptuous: ‘[…] nor can you know mee, since your knowledge is imagined so much aboue mine, that it must needes ouersee’.68 This ignorance makes his judgement worthless: ‘all the faults you can finde are first in your selues, t’is no Herculean labor to cracke what you breed’.69 To dismiss the incompetent reader, Chapman pits him against the figure of Hercules, to whom the mythological hero Perseus can be compared. This allusion suggests the heroic level of understanding the poet seems to expect from his readers. There is, however, one instance in which Chapman does not hold the reader responsible for his imperfect reading, and that is when he blames the printer, instead: ‘Onely the extreame false printing troubles my conscience, for feare of your deserued discouragement in the empaire of our poets sweetnes’.70 In the case of Andromeda Liberata, the ‘prophane Vulgare’ commits a double injustice: to the poet, but also to the married couple. By misinterpreting the poem, as Chapman puts it, they slander the pair; in spite of their knowledge, they are actually ignorant because of what Bartlett calls their ‘spiritual incapacity’.71 The bad readers are those who mistake greatness for ‘inward Goodnesse’;72 who are learned without being truly noble: As nothing vnder heauen is more remou’d From Truth & virtue, then Opinions prou’d By vulgar Voices: So is nought more true Nor soundly virtuous then things held by few: Whom Knowledge (entred by the sacred line,

67  See Dunn K., Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford: 1994) x. 68  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. A. 69  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. A. ‘cracke’: ‘6. a. intr. To talk big, boast, brag; sometimes, to talk scornfully (of others). Now Obs. or dial.’ (Oxford English Dictionary). See Michael Drayton’s address “To the Generall Reader” above. The phrase ‘Herculean labor’ was a favourite of the translator of Homer as he had already used it twenty years earlier to designate ‘the deepe search of knowledge’ characterising the true poet. See Chapman George, Skia nuktos, The Shadow of Night (London, William Ponsonby: 1594), dedication to Matthew Roydon, fol. Aij. 70  Chapman George, Achilles Shield, Translated as the other seuen bookes of Homer, out of his eighteenth booke of Iliades (London, Iohn Windet: 1598), fol. B3 [EEBO, 17 February 2016]. 71  The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett, 2. 72  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, dedicatory epistle, fol. ¶¶3.

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And gouernd euermore by grace diuine,) Keepes in the narrow path to spacious heauen.73 The opening lines of Chapman’s dedication emphasise the religious, even mystical nature of the true ‘Knowledge’ necessary for the readers to be on an equal footing with the poet, whose absolute model is Homer, ‘the learnd and most diuine / Of all the golden world’.74 This idea was already forcefully expressed in 1595 when Chapman wrote: ‘The prophane multitude I hate, and onelie consecrate my strange Poems to these serching spirits, whom learning hath made noble, and nobilitie sacred’.75 This alliance of learning and nobility and opposition between greatness and goodness are recurrent themes in Chapman’s French tragedies and become the central subject of Evthymiæ Raptus; Or The Teares of Peace. This position reduces the competent readership to only a ‘few’, as Chapman was well aware. As he told Matthew Roydon about The Shadow of Night: ‘I rest as resolute as Seneca, satisfying my selfe if but a few, if one, or if none like it’.76 Despite this stoic posture, however, Chapman vents his anger in the opening lines of Andromeda Liberata: Away, vngodly Vulgars, far away, Flie ye prophane, that dare not view the day, Nor speake to men but shadowes, nor would heare Of any newes, but what seditious were, Hatefull and harmefull euer to the best, Whispering their scandals, glorifying the rest, Jmpious, and yet gainst all ills but your owne, The hotest sweaters of religion.77 The same word ‘vulgar’ is used to designate the scandalmongers who misconstrued the poem as if it intended ‘the dishonour of any person now liuing’,78 as well as the readers who ‘maliciously misinterpreted’ it, as the title of the Iustification shows. Here, Chapman adds their moral and even political faults to their intellectual deficiencies: they are hypocrites (‘hotest sweaters of religion’), and, as such, jeopardise the very order of society itself, preferring 73  Ibidem, fol. ¶3. 74  Ibidem, fol. [¶4]. 75  Chapman, Ovids Banquet of Sence, dedicatory epistle to Matthew Roydon, fol. A2. 76  Chapman, The Shadow of Night, dedicatory epistle to Matthew Roydon, fol. Aij v. 77  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. B. 78  Chapman, Iustification, fol. *3.

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sedition to harmony.79 Moral defects combine with intellectual ones when the author accuses them of ‘putting no difference betwixt Illusion and Truth, the consciences of learned religious men, and the cunnings of prophane’.80 On the contrary, the ‘ingenuous and iudicious Reader’ is the one who ‘retaine[s] in a sound bodie, as sounde a soule’,81 an expression that reveals Chapman’s debt to Neo-Platonism.82 In Achilles Shield, which is one of Chapman’s first translations of Homer, the privileged reader is also called ‘the vnderstander’: You are not euery bodie, to you (as to one of my very few friends) I may be bold to vtter my minde, nor is it more empaire to an honest and absolute mans sufficiencie to haue few friendes, then to an Homericall Poeme to haue few commenders; for neyther doe common dispositions keepe fitte or plausible consort with iudiciall and simple honestie, nor are idle capacities comprehensible of an elaborate Poeme.83 The ideal reader is the one with whom the poet can have an intimate and true intellectual relationship. In the ‘Commentarivs’ of Book XIV in his Iliads of Homer, he writes: ‘And (indeed) where a man is vnderstood, there is euer a proportion betwixt the writers wit & the writes (that I may speake with authority) according to my old lesson in Philosophy: Intellectus in ipsa intellegibilia transit.’84 This definition tells us how Chapman implicitly saw himself: as ‘an 79  See what Vergil says in Poetaster: ‘Tis not the wholsome sharpe Morality, / Or modest anger of a Satyricke Spirit, / That hurts, or wounds the body of the State; / But the sinister Application / Of the malitious, ignorant, and base / Interpreter; who will distort, and straine / The general Scope and purpose of an Author, / To his particular, and priuate spleene’ (Jonson, Poetaster, 5. 3., fol. L2–L2v). 80  Chapman, Iustification, fol. [*4]. 81  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, “To the preivdicate and peremptory reader”, fol. Av. 82   This question is addressed in Waddington R., “Chapman’s Andromeda Liberata: Mythology and Meaning”, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 81, 1 (1966) 34–44. 83  Chapman, “To the vnderstander”, Achilles Shield, fol. Bv. Ben Jonson also used the word when he addressed his reader saying: ‘If thou beest more, thou art an Vnderstander, and then I trust thee’ The Alchemist (London, Thomas Snodham for Walter Burre: 1612), fol. A3, and again in a preliminary text entitled “To make the Spectators vnderstanders”, Loues triumph through Callipolis Performed in a masque at court 1630. By his Maiestie with the lords, and gentlemen assisting (London, I.N. for Thomas Walkley: 1630), fol. A2 [EEBO, 8 August 2016]. 84  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book XIV, “Commentarivs”, fol. S4. The quotation, which already appeared in one of the marginal notes of Ovids Banquet of Sence (fol. B4v), is taken from Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul (III, 4, 429a) and is translated as: ‘the intellect passes over into the very things that are intelligible’ by Braden G. (ed.), Sixteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Malden [USA] – Oxford [UK] – Carlton [Australia]: 2005) 436.

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honest and absolute man’ having ‘few friendes’.85 Self-commentary here is not simply a commentary by the author on his own text, but also a commentary of the author on himself. That Chapman placed the potential readers of his translations of Homer higher than other readers is made even clearer at the beginning of Seaven Bookes of the Iliades where he writes: ‘I suppose you to be no meare reader, since you intend to reade Homer: and therefore wish I may walke free from their common obiections, that can onelie reade’.86 And in the next paragraph, we read: ‘to him that is more then a reader, I write’.87 Before being an ‘vnderstander’, the reader has to show signs of purity, as Chapman implies in the 1611 edition of his Iliads of Homer: ‘Lest with foule hands you touch these holy rites; / And with preiudicacies too prophane, / Passe Homer, in your other Poets sleights; / Wash here’ (fol. [A6]).88 Not only does reading require an ethics, but it is also identifiable with some sort of ceremony of initiation, reminiscent of the mysteries of Isis Plutarch recounts in his Moralia.89 5.2 The Reader as Tyrant Chapman’s anxiety about the reception of his work is nowhere more acute than in the Iustification. Even if the translator of Homer complained earlier of the ‘frontlesse detraction of some stupide ignorants’,90 he never articulated his concern with authorship more clearly than here: Nor did I euer imagine till now so farre-fetched a thought in malice (such was my simplicitie) That the fiction being as ancient as the first world, was originally intended to the dishonour of any person now liuing: but presum’d, that the application being free, I might pro meo iure dispose it (innocently) to mine owne obiect: if at least, in mine owne wrighting, I might be reasonablie & conscionablie master of mine owne meaning.91 85  See above his dedication of The Shadow of Night to Matthew Roydon. 86  Chapman George, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere, Prince of poets, Translated according to the Greeke, in iudgement of his best Commentaries by George Chapman Gent. (London, Iohn Windet: 1598), “To the Reader”, fol. [A6] [EEBO, 6 June 2016]. 87  Chapman, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere, “To the Reader”, fol. [A6]. 88  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, fol. [A6]. 89  See what Ovid says at the beginning of Poetaster: ‘O sacred Poësy, thou spirit of Arts, / The soule of Science, and the Queene of Soules, / What prophane violence, almost sacriledge, / Hath here beene offered thy Diuinities!’, 1. 2., fol. B3. 90  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, “Preface to the reader”, fol. A3v. 91  Chapman, Iustification, fol. *3. ‘conscionablie’: ‘1. According to conscience, with a good conscience; conscientiously, scrupulously. 2. Equitably, reasonably, fairly’ (Oxford English Dictionary). On a similar subject see what John Marston says: ‘it was my care to write so

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These lines are a good indication of the way Chapman intends to defend himself. He pleads not guilty (‘innocently’), invokes his own right (‘meo iure’) and his ‘simplicitie’ (meaning his ingenuousness), accuses the ‘malice’ of the world, asserts his right as an author repeating ‘mine owne’ three times. This defence introduces the judicial and political metaphor he elaborates on in the rest of the text. But the very act of justifying oneself and of pleading not guilty casts a shadow on his predicament. As Kevin Dunn observes, ‘prefatory rhetoric is the rhetoric of the advocate with a bad case, the rhetoric of personal motive’.92 To posit what we may call his self-authorisation, Chapman first emphasises the antiquity of poetry, ‘ancient as the first world’. ‘Allegorical fictions’ have beene of speciall reputation; as taking place of the rest, both for priority of time, and precedence of vse; being borne in the ould world, long before Hieroglyphicks or Fabels were conceiued: And deliuered from the Fathers to the Sonnes of Art; without any Aucthor but Antiquity.93 And, he adds, they have always been ‘held in high Reuerence and Aucthority’.94 It is on this indisputable ‘Aucthority’ and antiquity of allegory that Chapman establishes his claim to poetry. This classical heritage undoubtedly makes him a man of the Renaissance, as Franck Schoell demonstrated long ago. Chapman had read and used antique authors: Plutarch in Xylander’s Latin translation (1560 for the Parallel Lives and 1570 for the Moralia); Epictetus in that of Hieronymus Wolfius; Plato, through the commentaries of Marsilio Ficino, and of course Homer. For instance, in Andromeda Liberata we also know that he was inspired by Natales Comes’s Mythologiæ sive Explicationum Fabularum Libri X (1551).95 Although fortified by this antique authority, Chapman is at the same time an early modern. The way he comments on his own work reveals a sharp awareness – and defence – of individual authorship.

farre from reasonable offence, that euen strangers, in whose state I laid my Scene, should not from thence draw any disgrace to any, dead or liuing. […] I protest, that with my free vnderstanding, I haue not glanced at disgrace of any’. See The Malcontent (London, V.S. for William Aspley: 1604), fol. A2 [EEBO, 8 August 2016]. 92  Dunn, Pretexts of Authority 2. 93  Chapman, Iustification, fol. *2. 94  Ibidem. 95  See Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental, in particular 1–20 (Ficino), 62–98 (Plutarch), 99–131 (Epictetus), 162–177 (Spondanus’s Homer), 179–196 (Comes).

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However, this consciousness is painful: Chapman presents himself as a poet persecuted by the ‘the base, ignoble, barbarous, giddie multitude’,96 who set themselves up as his judges in order to dispute his incontrovertible right. The metaphor runs throughout the Iustification: But as a guiltlesse prisoner at the barre sayd to a Lawyer […] because malice is witty, must Innocence be condemned? […] Or doth any rule of reason make it good, that let the writer meane what he list, his writing notwithstanding must be construed in mentem Legentis? to the intendment of the Reader? If then, for the mistaking of an enuious or vnskilfull Reader, who commonly bring praeiudicia pro iudicijs,97 I shal be exposed to the hate of the better sort, or taken forciblie into any powrefull displeasure, I shall esteeme it an acte as cruell and tyrannous as that of the Emperour, who put a Consul to death for the errour of a publique Crier; misnaming him Emperour in stead of Consul. For my selfe I may iustly say thus much, that if my whole life were layd on the racke, it could neuer accuse me for a Satyrist or Libeller, to play with worthie mens reputations.98 What these words reveal is Chapman’s utter incomprehension – or rejection – of the gap that may exist between the author’s intention and the reader’s reception of it. It seems simply inconceivable to him that both parties may be equally free and autonomous. He cannot understand that just as the poet endeavours to be regarded as an author, so the reader is no longer constrained by what he reads. Here, the tyranny of the multitude not only jeopardises the poem, but also the author’s ‘life and reputation’ and ‘Integritie’.99 There is no more safety for an author at the hands of an ‘enuious Reader’ than there is for a subject at the hands of a Roman tyrant. The image of the ‘prisoner at the barre’ as well as Chapman’s defence of his autonomy as a poet echo what Ben Jonson says in Catiline: ‘Now, it approcheth your censure chearfully, and with the same assurance that innocency would appeare before a Magistrate.’100 The image of the trial also reminds us of Admiral Chabot’s predicament in The Tragedy of Chabot Admiral of France (1639), where he is judged and most unjustly condemned. Chapman repeatedly claims his innocence in the same way as Chabot does in 96  Chapman, Iustification, fol. *3v. 97  ‘Their prejudices instead of their judgements’. 98  Chapman, Iustification, fols. [*4]v–**. 99  Chapman, Iustification, fols. **v and [*4]. The word ‘integrity’ also appears in the dedicatory epistle of Andromeda Liberata. 100  Jonson, Catiline His Conspiracy, dedicatory epistle to William, Earl of Pembroke, fol. A2v.

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the play: ‘My cause has so much innocence / It shall not need thy prayer,’ he tells his wife before his trial (3. 1. 18–19). The admiral insists: ‘I will not wrong my right and innocence, / With any serious plea in my reply’ (3. 2. 164–165). Our author, however, replies in a long and ‘serious plea’.101 The comparison of the ‘multitude’ with a ‘cruell and tyrannous’ emperor can be more fully appreciated in the light of Chapman’s conception of ‘mans morall Monarchie’, where the soul holds the ‘Scepter’.102 The arbitrary power of the ‘multitude’ of his readers over himself as an author enters into conflict with what he calls ‘royall humanitie’ elsewhere.103 The analogy with monarchy is furthered by the hereditary and patriarchal way in which ‘allegorical fictions’ are transmitted ‘from the Fathers to the Sonnes of Art’.104 What Chapman defends in political terms is, as it were, nothing less than his poetic sovereignty. Despite such lofty principles, Chapman was misunderstood. His sorry situation is staged in the second part of the Iustification (‘Dialogus’), where the poet makes his comment through the persona of Theodines (the divinely inspired Poet) trying to justify himself before Pheme (Rumor). In spite of himself, the people have condemned the author, which leaves him alone, as Pheme notes in the ‘Dialogus’: ‘All friends haue left you’.105 This isolation resembles the predicament of one of Chapman’s tragic heroes just before his arrest, the Duke of Byron in The Tragedy of Byron. His companion D’Auvergne wonders: ‘Have we yet any friends?’ (4. 1. 97). And just before his execution, Byron himself exclaims: ‘O all the world forsakes me!’ (5. 4. 62), lamenting: ‘I have lost my arms, my fame, my wind, / Friends, brother, hopes, fortunes, and even my fury’ (5. 4. 71–72).106 The same melancholy trope of abandonment, showing that the poet has cast himself as a tragic hero of poetry, occurs in the memorial verses to prince Henry printed in The Whole Works of Homer (1616): ‘To all Tymes future, This Tymes Marck extend; / Homer, no Patrone founde; Nor Chapman friend’.107 101  Chapman George – Shirley James, The Tragedy of Chabot Admiral of France / La Tragédie de Chabot, Amiral de France (1639), ed. G. Bertheau, Textes de la Renaissance 200 (Paris: 2016) 196–198, 226. The word ‘innocence’ appears five times in the first part of the Iustification. 102  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, dedicatory epistle, fol. ¶¶2v. 103  Chapman, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere, fol. A4. 104  Chapman, Iustification, fol. *2. 105  Chapman, Iustification, fol. **3. 106  References are taken from Chapman George, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608), ed. J. Margeson, The Revels Plays (Manchester: 1988) 213, 262. See Robert K. Presson, “Wrestling with This World: A View of George Chapman”, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 84, 1 (January 1969) 44–50 (44). 107  Chapman George, The Whole Works of Homer, Prince of Poets in his Iliads and Odysses, Translated according to the Greeke (London, Nathaniell Butter: [1616]), no signature (the poem faces Chapman’s portrait on the left page).

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The evocation of torture (‘if my whole life were layd on the racke’), a symbol of the multitude’s tyranny, can be seen in relation with The Tragedy of Chabot, where the admiral’s secretary is put to the rack (3. 1. 1). The detail enables the playwright to characterise King Francis as a tyrant. Chapman even equates his poem and his life when he defies his judges to find ‘any harmefull intention’ in it:108 ‘as I said of my life, so of my lines; here is the Poeme; let euerie sillable of it be tortured by any how partiall and preiudicate soeuer’.109 This rather striking analogy between the text and the poet’s body recalls his statement to the ‘preivdicate’ reader: ‘I am still in your hands’.110 Even before that, in 1608, Chapman speaks of ‘these poor dismembered poems’, complaining about the effects of censorship on The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron.111 Similarly, when referring to the quotations in Seianvs, Ben Jonson writes: ‘least in some nice nostrill, the Quotations might sauour affected, I doe let you know, that I abhor nothing more; and haue onely done it to shew my integrity in the Story, and saue myself in those common Torturers, that bring all wit to the Rack.’112 The anxiety of defacement that Lynn S. Meskill speaks of vis-à-vis Jonson turns into a fear of being anatomised in Chapman.113 What is at stake in self-commentary is not only the works themselves, but also the author’s self-representation.

108  Chapman, Iustification, fol. **v. 109  Ibidem, fol. **. 110  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, fol. A. 111  Chapman, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, dedication to Sir Thomas Walsingham, 67. As Lukas Erne observes about the Byron plays, Chapman was the ‘first dramatist to dedicate a play that had been performed in front of a paying audience’, Erne L., Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: 2013) 123. In The Tragedy of Bussy d’Ambois, Tamyra’s body is submitted to her husband’s torture. Montsurry says: ‘Till thou writ’st / I’ll write in wounds (my wrongs’ fit characters) / Thy right of sufferance. Write’ (5. 1. 124–26). See Bussy D’Ambois (1607), in Brooke N. (ed.), The Revels Plays (London: 1964) 118. 112  Jonson, Seianvs, “To the Readers”, fol. ¶2–¶2v. “To the Reader extraordinary”, Jonson also says: ‘to you I submit my selfe, and worke,’ Catiline His Conspiracy, fol. [A3]. 113  Meskill L.S., Ben Jonson and Envy (Cambridge: 2009), chapter 3, “Defacement: anxiety and the Jonsonian imagination”, 75–109. See in particular Meskill’s words about the preface to his Masque of Blacknesse (1608), where Jonson speaks of the ‘carkasses’ of the ‘spectacles’. Chapman developed this obsession with dissection and anatomy in The Tragedy of Chabot; see Bertheau G., “François Ier ou l’anatomie du ‘roi moderne’ dans La Tragédie de Chabot de George Chapman”, Seizième siècle 10 (2014) 279–303 (285–286).

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The Impossible Quest for Autonomy

However much Chapman strove to assert his control over the reception of his works, he realised how difficult it was to achieve his autonomy as an author. His position is paradoxical. His Homeric commentaries proclaim his authority against previous translators even as he describes himself as prey to Envy; however, he reveals his indebtedness to another author, Jean de Sponde. 6.1 The Author as Prey to Envy After presenting himself as the prisoner of a tyrant, Chapman describes himself as prey, ready to be devoured, ‘By such as backebite the highest, the lowest must looke to be deuor’d’.114 In the Iustification, he compares his poem to a fly: Whiles I slept in mine innocencie, the enuious man hath beene here, who like a venomous spider, drawing this subtle thred out of himself, cunningly spred it into eares of the manie […] where multiplying and getting strength it was spred into an Artificall webbe, to entangle my poore poeticall flie […].115 Having equated his life and his poem, Chapman represents himself here as at the mercy of the spider of Envy, which will tie him up in its threads, deprive him of his liberty and finally kill him. We thus reach the ultimate level of the allegory developed in the Andromeda Liberata affair. It is tempting – and I think relevant – to see in the spider another guise of the monster that Perseus has to fight against to deliver Andromeda. In the ‘Apodosis’ of the poem, Chapman not only makes the analogy between Perseus and Somerset transparent, but also gives it a new twist: Monsters kill the Man-informing Arts: And like a lothed prodegie despise The rapture that the Arts doth naturalise, Creating and immortalising men.116 If we remember that ‘The monstrous beast’ stands for ‘the rauenous Multitude’117 and that the same multitude has attacked the poet in his work, then the poet 114  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, address to the reader, fol. A. 115  Chapman, Iustification, fol. [*4]v. 116  Chapman, Andromeda Liberata, “Apodosis”, fol. F. 117  Ibidem, fol. B3.

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himself is like Perseus. He has to fight against the enemy of art to make ‘high and triumphant way / To his starre crownd deed’.118 This identification is retrospectively confirmed by the beginning of the dedicatory epistle of The Shadow of Night: Men must be shod by Mercurie, girt with Saturnes Adamantine sword, take the shield from Pallas, the helme from Pluto, and haue the eyes of Graea (as Hesiodus armes Perseus against Medusa) before they can cut of the viperous head of benumming ignorance, or subdue their monstrous affections to most beautifull iudgement.119 The allusions here confirm the metapoetic character of Andromeda Liberata. Nothing short of the mythological figure of Perseus will enable the poet to resist the annihilating gaze of Medusa, associated with Envy.120 Like Jonson, Chapman was keenly aware of its presence and malevolent power, most especially in his Homeric translations. At the end of his Iliads of Homer, he acknowledges the fact that it cannot be avoided: […] go vnualu’d Booke Liue, and be lou’d. If any enuious looke Hurt thy cleare fame; learne that no state more hie Attends on virtue, then pin’d Enuies eye.121 In the ‘Commentarivs’ of book III, Chapman writes: ‘But how soeuer enuy and preiudice stand squirting their poison through the eyes of my Readers, this shall appeare to all competent apprehensions, I haue followed the Originall with authenticall expositions’.122 This statement can only be understood in connection with the complaint he voiced in ‘The preface to the reader’, published in the same work: ‘But there is a certaine enuious Windfucker, […] buzzing into euery eare my detraction; affirming I turne Homer out of the Latine onely, &c.’123 This ‘detraction’ is precisely what prompted Chapman to write commentaries to his translation of The Iliads.

118  Ibidem, “Apodosis”, fol. F. 119  Chapman, The Shadow of Night, fol. Aij. 120  See Meskill, Ben Jonson and Envy, chapter 2, “An anatomy of envy”, 42–74. 121  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, fol. Gg3. 122  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book III, “Commentarivs”, fol. F. 123  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, fol. A4.

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6.2 Chapman as Ideal Reader of Homer Whereas readers might become calumniators of his works, Chapman prides himself on being the sole genuine ‘vnderstander’ of Homer, as he says his translation testifies. The ‘Commentarii’ he wrote on eleven out of the twenty-four books of The Iliads of Homer belong to the Renaissance tradition of philological and moral glosses.124 And if they were only that, they would not merit special note here. In fact, however, they are a monument of self-authorisation: they publicise Chapman’s authority both as a translator and as a poet.125 Textual commentary therefore turns into commentary on the authorial self. In each of the ‘Commentari[i]’, Chapman takes up specific instances of the Greek version of The Iliads (with references to the lines in his translation), gives the Latin version of his predecessors, sometimes called ‘our common readers’,126 aiming to show that his own translation is accurate and that any other is inaccurate. The linguistic technicality of these commentaries was probably lost on most of his ‘meare’ readers who were unversed in the Greek tongue, thus providing further evidence that his target was indeed the ‘vnderstander’.127 Chapman’s comments develop into two directions: a defence of Homer against his critics and a justification of his translation against previous translators. To legitimise his Herculean enterprise, Chapman had to gainsay the greatest of Homer’s critics: Joseph Julius Scaliger (1484–1558), who posthumously published Poetices libri septem (1561), the fifth book of which, ‘Criticus’, contains a harsh criticism of Homer. Chapman mentions the book in a passage where Helen attends the fight between Hector and Priam: ‘The chiefe end of whose coming yet, enuiously and most vainly Scaligers Criticus taxeth […] iesting (with his French wit) at this Greeke Father and fount of all wit’.128 What is at stake in this contention is the reputation of Homer compared to that of Virgil. Commenting on line 72 of book II, Chapman asks his reader to compare Vergil’s Aeneid with his own rendition of Homer:

124  The ‘Commentari[i]’ are to be found at the end of books I, II, III, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, and XXIV (in the form of a post-script). At the end of book III, he explains: ‘And here haste makes me give end to these new Annotations […], since time […] will not otherwise let me come to the last twelve,’ fol. F. It shows that Chapman, conscious of the competition between commentary and the work itself, gave priority to the latter. 125  When he lists the four functions of Renaissance glosses, Gerald Snare does not include this one (The Mystification of George Chapman 146–148). 126  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book I, “Commentarivs”, fol. C2. 127  On the state of Greek studies in Renaissance England, see Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental 132–140. 128  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book III, “Commentarivs”, fol. [E6].

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Now compare this with Homers, but in my translation; and iudge if to both their ends, there be any such betternesse in Virgils […] Especially, since Virgil hath nothing of his owne, but onely elocution; his inuention, matter, and forme, being all Homers: which laid by a man; that which he addeth, is onelie the worke of a woman, to netifie and polish.129 Chapman adopts this same tone of violent disparagement when he attacks previous translators of Homer such as Laurentius Valla, Eobanus Hessus, Hugues Salel, and Jean de Sponde, to whom he refers as Spondanus. His disdain, as he sees it, justifies the existence of his comments: Since I dissent from all other Translators, and Interpreters, that euer assaid exposition of this miraculous Poeme […] I am bound by this briefe Comment, to shew I vnderstand how all other extants vnderstand; my reason why I reiect them; and how I receiue my Author.130 Chapman is always prompt to point out other translators’ mistakes, as in the ‘Commentarivs’ of book XV: ‘I must here be enforced […] to cite the originall words of it; which of all Homers translators and commentors haue bene most grosly mistaken; his whole intent and sence in it, vtterly falsified.’131 Without going into detail about his criticism, some of which is unjustified,132 it is worth noting that, just as Chapman asserts his authorship against bad readers, he also asserts his authority as translator against unskilled translators. At the end of book XIX, he writes: But here (being weary, both with finding faults, and my labour) till a refreshing come, I wil end my poore Comment. Holding it not altogether vnfit with this ridiculous contention of our Commentors, a litle to quicken you, and make it something probable, that their ouersight in this trifle, is accompanied with a thousand other errors in matter of our diuine Homers depth and grauitie.133

129  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book II, “Commentarivs”, fol. [D5]v. The same censure of Vergil is voiced in a marginal note of his Georgicks of Hesiod (London, H.L. for Miles Partrich: 1618) 6. 130  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book I, “Commentarivs”, fol. Cv. 131  Ibidem, Book XV, “Commentarivs”, fol. [T6]. 132  This is what Franck Schoell explains in Études sur l’humanisme continental [...] 166. 133  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book XIX, “Commentarivs”, fol. [Aa6]v.

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It is particularly interesting to notice that from 1609 onwards, all of Chapman’s translations of Homer were published in folios, while his other works (including other translations) were printed in quartos. Unlike Ben Jonson, Chapman did not go to the trouble of collecting his dramatic pieces in the prestigious format: his most distinct assertion of authorship (materially proclaimed by the choice of the folio) was made through his translations of Homer. 6.3 In the Shadow of ‘Spondanus’ Among the translators of Homer Chapman cites, Spondanus (Jean de Sponde) takes pride of place. In spite of the criticism he levels at his work (in the commentaries of books XIII, XV, XVI, XVII, and XVIII), Chapman often quotes him and calls him affectionately ‘our good Spondanus’ or ‘our most diligent Spondanus’.134 Indeed, he makes the French Calvinist author his; it is no mere coincidence that he ends his work by a ‘salutation of Poesie’ borrowed from this source.135 As it turns out, this ‘salutation’ is not the only thing Chapman borrowed from this fellow translator of Homer. Thanks to Franck Schoell, we know that Chapman read and used Sponde’s commented Latin edition of Homer, published in Basel in 1583. What is of peculiar interest here, however, is that Chapman also used Sponde’s comments in his own glosses. For example, the beginning of the first ‘Commentarivs’ at the end of Book II of his Iliads is directly translated from Sponde. The same is true of the last marginal note to Book VIII in his Odysses.136 Chapman’s indebtedness to Jean de Sponde can be discerned in many passages of the dedicatory epistles, prefaces, and addresses appended to his Homeric translations. Out of the sixteen mentioned by Schoell,137 I shall quote only two. The first one is the dedication of Achilles Shield to Essex, the first twenty lines of which are taken from the gloss of Book XVIII of Sponde’s Iliad. The second one belongs to ‘The Preface to the Reader’ of The Iliads of Homer. The passage begins: To all sciences therefore, I must still (with our learned and ingenious Spondanus) preferre it [i.e., ‘Poesie’]; as hauing a perpetuall commerce 134  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book XIV, “Commentarivs”, fol. R4 and Gg3. He also mentions him in Homer’s Odysses as for examples at fols. Cv, I3v, K2v. 135  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Book XIV, “Commentarivs”, fol. R4 and Gg3. 136  Ibidem, Book II, “Commentarivs”, fol. [D5]–[D5]v and Homer’s Odysses, fol. M3. Allardyce Nicoll’s modern edition of The Odyssey faithfully reproduces the layout of these marginal notes, including the long ones that cover the margin and bottom of fol. B2. See Chapman’s Homer: the Odyssey, ed. A. Nicoll, Bollingen Series 41 (Princeton – Oxford: 2000) 14. These examples are provided by Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental 167–168. 137  Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental [...] 169–173.

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with the diuine Maiesty; embracing and illustrating al (sic) his most holy precepts; and enioying continuall discourse with his thrice perfect, and most comfortable spirit,138 This account of poetry’s ‘commerce’ with divinity was inspired by Jean de Sponde’s ‘De Origine et dignitate poeticae’, the second part of his ‘Prolegomenia in Homerum’, which is a long preface to his translation of Homer. It thus seems that even a text that falls into the category of self-commentary can hide another author underneath; another instance of allusion. It is clear that Chapman modelled his English Homer (at least his Iliads) on Jean de Sponde’s French version: the anagram written on the name of Prince Henry139 echoes the one Sponde wrote on the name of the King of France; Chapman’s “Of Homer”140 responds to Sponde’s “De Homero”; The Iliads of Homer ends with a post-script, followed by a prayer (‘salutation of Poesie’), like Sponde’s Iliad; Chapman’s comments vie with Sponde’s glosses. These correspondences led Schoell to write: ‘Chapman n’a rien tant ambitionné qu’être le Sponde anglais’ [Chapman had no greater ambition than to be the English Sponde].141 That Chapman applied the art of imitatio is no wonder, but the fact that he applied it to a contemporary adds to the paradox of his authorial status. It would be vain speculation for the critic to wonder whether Chapman was in good faith when he responded to his detractors in the Andromeda Liberata affair by saying that he did not mean any harm. What is certain is that he was sorry to have embarrassed Somerset, the patron he had chosen for himself after the death of the heir to the throne. And in spite of the opprobrium surrounding the earl, the old poet remained true to him and in 1622, the year when the Somersets were released from prison, he even dedicated Pro Vere to him. Dedicating a poem, which was quite critical of the king, to a fallen favourite was an unambiguous and arguably imprudent political gesture.142 It was not the first – nor the last – such move in Chapman’s career. The elitist conception of poetry that Chapman consistently expressed throughout his life and in his writings enabled him to sculpt a figure of the 138  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, fol. A3. 139  “An Anagram of the name of ovr dread prince”, i.e. “HENRYE PRINCE OF VVALES / OVR SVNN, HEYR, PEACE, LIFE”, Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, fol. A4v [some mistake must have occurred in the printing of the signatures, since the dedication to Prince Henry covers five pages, beginning at fol. *2 and ending at fol. A4, which should have been *4. The Folio therefore contains one signature A4 and one signature A4]. 140  Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, fol. A4v–[A5]v. 141  Schoell, Études sur l’humanisme continental 175. 142  In Pro Vere, written as a tribute to Sir Horace Vere, Chapman blamed the king for his inaction against Spain’s attack on the Palatinate.

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author as a sovereign. But it is precisely that choice that proved untenable: it led him to antagonise his readers and fret over his contentious reception. The political terms in which he describes the relationship with his readers in the Iustification owe something to the context of the Andromeda liberata affair; nevertheless, they shed an instructive light on the rest of his writings. The tyranny he said he suffered at the hands of malicious and envious interpreters contributed to staging his authorial persona, likening it to the most distinctive of his tragic heroes: Byron and Chabot. The sovereignty that Chapman dreams of often changes into victimhood. The case of George Chapman does not fall easily into the trend in recent criticism on early modern authorship, especially that of playwrights, to see it as the result of a collaboration between the author, the printer, and the bookseller, rather than to focus on the author’s sole agency.143 However, one of the paradoxes of Chapman’s insistence on his own authorship is that it is most pronounced in his translation of Homer. He obviously did not think, as we do today, that translation was a lesser degree of authorship. The self-commentary he wrote on these translations shows him to be both a Renaissance poet, sharing a deep classical culture with his contemporaries, and an early modern, anxious to assert his individual dignity as an author. But it seems that Chapman himself, before the critic, understood – and voiced in his self-commentary – that the sense of the text could not be found outside a negotiation between author and reader, however much he felt such a negotiation to fall beneath his own dignity. Yet, it is precisely this experience that produced an outstanding amount of self-commentary where the author, not hidden under the mask of poetic or dramatic fiction, can say “I”. Selective Bibliography Texts

Chapman George, Skia nuktos, The Shadow of Night (London, William Ponsonby: 1594). Chapman George, Ouids Banquet of Sence. A Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie, and his amorous Zodiacke. VVith a translation of a Latine coppie, written by a Fryer, Anno Dom. 1400 (London, I.R. for Richard Smith: 1595). 143  Regarding the development of such a critical outlook, see Brooks D.A., From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 36 (Cambridge: 2000) 1–13; more recently, Smith – Wilson (eds.), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: 2011) 8; Hirschfeld H., “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship”, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 116, 3 (May 2001) 609–622.

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Chapman George, Achilles Shield, Translated as the other seuen bookes of Homer, out of his eighteenth booke of Iliades (London, Iohn Windet: 1598). Chapman George, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere, Prince of poets, Translated according to the Greeke, in iudgement of his best Commentaries by George Chapman Gent. (London, Iohn Windet: 1598). Chapman George, Bussy D’Ambois (1607), ed. N. Brooke, The Revels Plays (London: 1964). Chapman George, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608), ed. J. Margeson, The Revels Plays (Manchester: 1988). Chapman George, Evthymiæ Raptvs; Or The Teares of Peace: With Interlocutions (London, H.L. for Rich. Bonian and H. Walley: 1609). Chapman George, The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, Neuer before in any languag (sic) truely translated. With a comment vppon some of his chiefe places (London, Nathaniel Butter: [1611]). Chapman George, The Memorable Masqve of the Two Honovrable Hovses or Innes of Court; the Middle Temple and Lyncolnes Inne. As it was performd before the King, at White-hall on Shroue Munday at night; being the 15. of Febr. 1613. At the princely celebration of the most royall nuptials of the Palsgraue, and his Thrice Gratious Princesse Elizabeth, &c. With a description of their whole show, in the manner of their march on horse-backe to the Court from the Master of the Rolls his house: with all their right noble consorts, and most showfull attendants. Invented, and fashioned, with the ground, and speciall structure of the whole worke: by our kingdomes most artfull and ingenious architect Innigo Iones. Supplied, applied, digested, and written, by Geo. Chapman (London, G. Eld for George Norton: 1613). Chapman George, Andromeda Liberata, Or the Nvptials of Persevs and Andromeda (London, Lavrence L’Isle: 1614). Chapman George, A Free and Offenceles Iustification, of a Lately Pvblisht and Most Maliciously Misinterpreted Poeme: Entitvled ‘Andromeda Liberata’ (London, Lavrence L’Isle: 1614). Chapman George, Homer’s Odysses, Translated according to ye Greeke by Geo. Chapman (London, Rich. Field for Nathaniell Butter: [1614]). Chapman George, Chapman’s Homer: the Odyssey, ed. A. Nicoll, Bollingen Series 41 (Princeton – Oxford: 2000). Chapman George, The Whole Works of Homer, Prince of Poets in his Iliads and Odysses, Translated according to the Greeke (London, Nathaniell Butter: [1616]). Chapman George, Georgicks of Hesiod (London, H.L. for Miles Partrich: 1618). Chapman George – Shirley James, The Tragedy of Chabot Admiral of France / La Tragédie de Chabot, Amiral de France (1639), ed. Gilles Bertheau, Textes de la Renaissance 200 (Paris: 2016). Drayton Michael, Poly-Olbion (London, M. Lownes, I. Browne, I. Helme, I. Busbie: 1612).

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Jonson Ben, Poetaster Or The Arraignement: As it hath beene sundry times priuately acted in the Blacke Friers, by the children of her Maiesties Chappell (London, M.L.: 1602). Jonson Ben, Seianvs His Fall (London, G. Elld, for Thomas Thorpe: 1605). Jonson Ben, Catiline His Conspiracy (London, Walter Burre: 1611). Jonson Ben, The Alchemist (London, Thomas Snodham for Walter Burre: 1612). Jonson Ben, Timber: Or discoveries, (1623), in idem, The Poems; The Prose Works, ed. C.H. Herford – P. Simpson – E. Simpson (Oxford: 1947) online: September 2012, vol. VIII, Oxford Scholarly Editions, Bodleian Library (accessed 10 August 2016). Jonson Ben, Loues triumph through Callipolis Performed in a masque at court 1630. By his Maiestie with the lords, and gentlemen assisting (London, I.N. for Thomas Walkley: 1630). Marston John, The Malcontent (London, V.S. for William Aspley: 1604). Marston John, Parasitaster, Or the Fawne as it hath been divers times presented at the Blacke-Friars, by the Children of the Queenes Maiesties Reuels, and since at Powles (London, T.P. for W.C.: 1606). Plutarch The Philosophie, commonlie called, the Morals vvritten by the learned philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea. Translated out of Greeke into English, and conferred with the Latine translations and the French, by Philemon Holland of Coventrie (London, Arnold Hatfield: 1603). Webster John, The White Divel (London, N.O. for Thomas Archer: 1612).

Studies

Bertheau G., “François Ier ou l’anatomie du ‘roi moderne’ dans La Tragédie de Chabot de George Chapman”, Seizième siècle 10 (2014) 279–303. Bottrall M., “George Chapman’s Defence of Difficulty in Poetry”, The Criterion 16 (Oct. 1936–July 1937) 638–654. Braden, Gordon (ed.), Sixteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Malden [USA] – Oxford [UK] – Carlton [Australia]: 2005). Braunmuller Albert R. (ed.), A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book: A Facsimile Edition of Folger MS. V. a. 321 (Newark: 1983). Brooks D.A., From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 36 (Cambridge: 2000). Cannon C.K., “Chapman on the Unity of Style and Meaning”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68, 2 (April 1969) 245–264. Chartier R., La Main de l’auteur et l’esprit de l’imprimeur XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, Folio histoire (Paris: 2015). Dieckmann L., “Renaissance Hieroglyphs”, Comparative Literature 9, 4 (1957) 308–321. Dunn K., Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford: 1994).

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Erne L., Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: 2013). Genette G., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory 20 (Cambridge: 1997). Helgerson R., “The Elizabethan Laureate: Self-presentation and the Literary System”, English Literary History 46, 2 (Summer 1979) 193–220. Heltzel Virgil B., “The Dedication of Tudor and Stuart Plays”, Wiener Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie, 65 (1957) [Korninger S. (ed.), Studies in English Language and Literature, Presented to Professor Dr. Karl Brunner on the Occasion of his Seventeenth Birthday] 74–86. Hirschfeld H., “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship”, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 116, 3 (May 2001) 609–622. Iversen E., “Hieroglyphic Studies of the Renaissance”, Burlington Magazine 100, 658 (January 1958) 15–21. Jacquot J., George Chapman (1559–1634), sa vie, sa poésie, son théâtre, sa pensée (Paris: 1951). Lindley D., The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: 1993). Meskill Lynn S., Ben Jonson and Envy (Cambridge: 2009). Murrin M., The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago – London: 1969). Presson R.K., “Wrestling with This World: A View of George Chapman”, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 84, 1 (January 1969) 44–50. Sackton A., “The Rhetoric of Literary Praise in the Poetry of Raleigh and Chapman”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, 3 (1976) 409–421. Schoell F., Études sur l’humanisme continental en Angleterre à la fin de la Renaissance, Bibliothèque de la Revue de Littérature Comparée 29 (Paris: 1926). Smith H. – Wilson L. (eds.), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: 2011). Snare G., The Mystification of George Chapman (Durham – London: 1989). Swinburne C.A., George Chapman: A Critical Essay (London: 1875). Waddington R.B., “Chapman’s Andromeda Liberata: Mythology and Meaning”, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 81, 1 (1966) 34–44. Waddington R.B., The Mind’s Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapman’s Narrative Poems (Baltimore – London: 1974). Wallace R.S., “Chapman’s Debt to Ficino”, Notes and Queries n.s. 17 (1970) 402–403. White B., Cast of Ravens: The Strange Case of Sir Thomas Overbury (New York: 1965).

chapter 11

Critical Failures: Corneille Observes His Spectators Joseph Harris 1 Introduction The playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) is doubtless the most extensive self-commentator in seventeenth-century French theatre. In 1660, he published a three-volume edition of his complete works to date, with each volume prefaced by a lengthy discourse on dramatic theory and a short analysis (‘examen’) of each individual play.1 It is certainly tempting to regard the theories that emerge in these writings as effectively post hoc justifications for Corneille’s own dramatic decisions and innovations; indeed, one of Corneille’s foremost commentators, Georges Forestier, has bemoaned the critical refrain that ‘Corneille, the French author who expressed his aesthetic ideas at greatest length, should above all not be taken seriously as a critic or theoretician’.2 And while we should not overlook the strategic or self-justificatory impulses within Corneille’s theoretical writings, it is perhaps both more charitable 1  Le Théâtre de Pierre Corneille revu et corrigé par l’auteur (Rouen, Augustin Courbé: 1660), 3 vols. As the editor of Corneille’s Pléiade edition, Georges Couton, reminds us, modern editions of the work invariably take liberties with Corneille’s original ordering by publishing all three Discours alongside each other as parts of a single text. See Corneille Pierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Couton, 3 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: 1980–1987) vol. 3, 1391. All editions published in Corneille’s lifetime spread the three Discours over each of the three volumes. The first discourse, “Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique” (‘Discourse on the Usefulness and Parts of the Dramatic Poem’) prefaces the first volume, covering his plays (mostly comedies) from Mélite (1629) to L’Illusion comique (1635). The second, “Discours de la tragédie” (‘Discourse on Tragedy’), covers the period of his early tragic works, from Le Cid (1636) to Théodore (1644), and the third, “Discours des trois unites, d’action, de jour, et de lieu” (‘Discourse on the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place’), covers his most recent plays, from Rodogune (1644) to La Toison d’or (1660). The later 1682 edition contained a fourth volume of plays, with some prefatory material for each play but – despite Corneille’s apparent earlier intentions – no fourth discourse. The ‘examens’ themselves vary in length between about one and nine pages, running to an average of about three pages each in modern editions. Perhaps surprisingly, at least for a modern reader expecting each ‘examen’ to precede its respective play, Corneille bunches the ‘examens’ for each volume together after the opening ‘Discourse’. For more information, see Corneille, Writings on the Theatre, ed. H.T. Barnwell, Blackwell’s French Texts (Oxford: 1965) xxxiii. 2  Forestier G., Essai de génétique théâtrale: Corneille à l’œuvre (Paris: 1996) 23.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_013

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and more constructive to consider his theories, as I shall do here, as part of a general process of experimentation, observation, and critical reflection on Corneille’s part.3 This is certainly, at least, how Corneille himself would have us read his dramatic theory. At the end of his first ‘Discourse’, Corneille is keen to remind us that he has one key advantage over all other theoreticians, whether contemporaries like the abbé d’Aubignac or even canonical figures like Aristotle. According to Corneille, his three decades of playwriting experience have granted him an unrivalled level of dramatic expertise. While he does not exactly flout the precepts that Aristotle laid out for drama, he interprets them in his own way, being guided more by experience and reflection than by dry philological debate. ‘Le commentaire dont je m’y sers le plus’, he announces, ‘est l’expérience du théâtre et les réflexions sur ce que j’ai vu y plaire ou déplaire’ (‘The commentary I use most often is my experience of the theatre, and my reflections on what I have seen produce pleasure or displeasure there’).4 Corneille draws his corpus of modern examples almost exclusively from his own works – for fear, he claims, of offending contemporary playwrights or damning them with faint praise.5 He presents himself as plain-speaking and reliable in his self-commentaries, insisting that he will analyse his own works ‘sans ambition, et sans esprit de contestation’ (III, 141, ‘without ambition and without seeking to be combative’); elsewhere he comments: ‘je n’ai point accoutumé de dissimuler mes défauts’ (I, 840, ‘I am not accustomed to concealing my faults’). And, indeed, Corneille the theoretician is often refreshingly critical of Corneille the dramatist, especially where his earliest plays are concerned. In this contribution, however, I shall explore how Corneille’s self-criticism is often mediated through a third party: the audience. Audience response is fundamental to the cycle of experimentation, observation, and reflection that underlies Corneille’s dramatic method. By 1660, Corneille had encountered both stunning box-office successes like Le Cid (1636) and utter catastrophes 3  For more information on Corneille’s self-commentaries, see Gossip C.J., “Corneille as SelfCritic”, Seventeenth-Century French Studies 23 (2001) 101–110. Christopher J. Gossip addresses Corneille’s (self-)critical writings from a range of illuminating perspectives (compositional, textual, and theoretical), and explores some of the apparent inconsistencies between his different theoretical accounts of plays such as Le Cid and Horace. Gossip’s study, however, makes only glancing reference to the question of audience response, which I hope to demonstrate here is fundamental to Corneille’s own dramatic practice. 4  Corneille, Œuvres complètes III, 141. All quotations from Corneille will be from this edition, referenced with volume and page number. All translations are my own. 5  In fact, Corneille does make occasional brief references to works by authors who had recently died, such as Tristan l’Hermite (La Mariane, 1637) and Battista Filippo Ghirardelli (Constantino, 1653).

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like Pertharite (1651) – the play whose failure drove Corneille from the stage for seven years – and this chapter will explore how he attempts to come to terms with his audiences’ sometimes quite unexpected responses. As I have argued elsewhere,6 early modern dramatic theorists often draft in hypothetical spectators to give some putative empirical support for their own theories, effectively telling budding dramatists ‘if you do this, audiences will respond like that’. Of course, real spectators do not always behave the way that theoreticians predict, or that dramatists hope. So whereas my previous research has been scrupulously concerned only with theoretical models of spectatorship, this contribution will explore how Corneille attempts to come to terms with the – sometimes quite unexpected – responses of his actual audiences. Corneille is well aware of potential discrepancies between theory and practice. Indeed, his own appeals to actual audience response can sometimes mask a subtly subversive attitude towards orthodox dramatic theory. For example, although Corneille never quite dares to reject Aristotle’s claims about tragic catharsis, he does encourage his readers to test the philosopher’s theories for themselves while watching Le Cid: J’ai bien peur que le raisonnement d’Aristote sur ce point ne soit qu’une belle idée, qui n’ait jamais son effet dans la vérité. Je m’en rapporte à ceux qui en ont vu les représentations: ils peuvent en demander compte au secret de leur cœur, et repasser sur ce qui les a touchés au théâtre, pour reconnaître s’ils en sont venus par là jusqu’à cette crainte réfléchie, et si elle a rectifié en eux la passion qui a causé la disgrâce qu’ils ont plainte. III, 146

(I do really fear that Aristotle’s reasoning here is only a fine idea that is never actualised in real life. I appeal to those who have seen it in performance; they can consult the secrets of their heart, and reconsider what touched them in the theatre, to recognise if they achieved this reflected fear, and if it corrected in them the passion that caused the disgrace they pitied.) Actual audience response thus provides some sort of bedrock of reality that cannot be challenged. Accordingly, Corneille’s general policy, as he explains in a prefatory letter to one of his less popular plays, is to defer to his audience’s aesthetic judgement: 6  Harris J., Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (Oxford: 2014) 12–13.

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J’aurais tort de m’opposer au jugement du public, il m’a été trop avantageux en d’autres ouvrages pour le contredire en celui-ci, et si je l’accusais d’erreur ou d’injustice pour Théodore, mon exemple donnerait lieu à tout le monde de soupçonner des mêmes choses les arrêts qu’il a prononcés en ma faveur. II, 269

(I would be wrong to challenge the public’s judgement; it has been too favourable towards me about other works for me to contradict it in this case, and if I accused it of error or injustice for Théodore, my example would authorise everyone to suspect the same of those judgements it has pronounced in my favour.) As Corneille realises, there is no point arguing with the box-office. He is often amenable to the public’s verdict, even when his own instinct is to disagree. Yet Corneille is also fascinated by his audiences’ responses. Unlike Racine, whose prefaces generally seek to steer his readers towards the ‘correct’ way of reading his tragedies by satirising his critics or playing them off against each other, Corneille is far more ready to acknowledge his own mistakes.7 Indeed, Corneille often seizes the opportunity to explore the complexities of audience response. Why, he asks, do audiences dislike the role of the Infanta in Le Cid but tolerate the equally superfluous character of Sabine in Horace (1640)? Why are they happy with evocations of bigamy and divorce in Sertorius (1661) but take offence against them in his next play, Sophonisbe (1662)? Such questions are not merely rhetorical; they allow Corneille to delve into his audience’s psychology. Corneille would probably have agreed with Voltaire’s claim the following century – articulated, as it happens, in response to Corneille’s own first tragedy Médée (1635) – that ‘une pièce de théâtre est une expérience sur le 7  Unlike Corneille, Racine never wrote any extensive works of dramatic theory. In contrast to Corneille’s typical practice, Racine’s prefaces are targeted primarily at critics and educated readers; he takes up much of his prefatory material responding to or anticipating learned criticisms about his plot or treatment of historical sources. Even when Racine does speak about spectators and audience response, it is generally the ideal or intended spectator – rather than his actual, empirical audience – that interests him. That said, one of Racine’s most striking accounts of actual audience response occurs in relation to his one comedy Les Plaideurs. Mocking certain spectators for fearing that their laughter was not in accordance with ‘the rules’, Racine satirises those would-be intellectuals who allow their critical judgement to be skewed by a basic misunderstanding of dramatic theory’s remit. See Racine Jean, Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Forestier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: 1999), vol. I., Théâtrepoésie 302; and my discussion in Harris, Inventing the Spectator 10.

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coeur humain’ (‘a play is an experiment on the human heart’).8 The spectator plays a crucial role in Corneille’s cycle of experimentation, observation, and reflection; reflecting on audience response – especially unexpected responses – allows Corneille to develop new theories, both of audience psychology and of a dramaturgy best able to cater for this. And this is particularly the case when spectators do not behave the way that playwrights want or expect them to; in this respect, failures are critical to the whole process of trial and error that guides Corneille’s dramatic practice. 2

Between Spectators and Critics

Of course, audiences do not form a homogeneous mass, and it can be helpful to distinguish between different types of spectator. Broadly speaking, we can divide Corneille’s spectators into three basic camps: the vast horde of ordinary spectators; superior spectators (grandees such as Cardinal Richelieu and other dedicatees of Corneille’s printed plays); and self-appointed ‘experts’ (critics, theoreticians, and rival playwrights). Although there were, of course, many people in this latter camp – Corneille’s box-office success and idiosyncratic practices won him both critics and supporters amongst the period’s literati – I am not going to be focusing on them here.9 They are not typical, disinterested spectators, and their responses, Corneille sometimes implies, may be guided more by professional self-interest than by objective, dispassionate judgement. Above all, however, this latter group can be distinguished from Corneille’s other spectators because they articulate their praise and criticisms verbally. Unlike the vast majority of spectators, who generally respond in an unreflective, immediate fashion, the ‘experts’ define and defend their opinions with arguments – arguments which can in turn draw, as Corneille’s do, on the responses of actual audiences for support.10 8  Voltaire, Commentaires sur Corneille, ed. D. Williams, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 54 (Banbury: 1975) 27. 9  Over the years there have been various critical editions of these ‘learned’ arguments with Corneille. See, for example, Hédelin François, abbé d’Aubignac, Dissertations contre Corneille, ed. N. Hammond – M. Hawcroft, Textes littéraires 95 (Exeter: 1995); La Querelle du ‘Cid’ (1637–1638), ed. J.-M. Civardi, Sources classiques 52 (Paris: 2004); Bourque B., Jean Donneau de Visé et la querelle de ‘Sophonisbe’: écrits contre l’abbé d’Aubignac, Biblio 17, 208 (Tübingen: 2014). 10  This appeal to audience response can sometimes be problematic. For example, I explore the fraught relationship between one of Corneille’s most outspoken critics, the abbé d’Aubignac, and Corneille’s – real and imagined – audiences in Harris J., “D’Aubignac

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These two other types of spectator play broadly the same role in Corneille’s theory, but it is worthwhile briefly distinguishing them. To start with, there is the vast mass of anonymous spectators whose collective judgement ensures a play’s commercial success or failure. These spectators are not, necessarily, critically literate, but this should not matter. The rules, as understood by Corneille and his contemporaries, were not learned, abstract precepts but reflections of natural judgement. All one needs to do to judge a play properly, claims Corneille, is to abandon oneself to one’s natural instincts, since the rules of theatre will have their effect ‘sur ceux même qui faute de les savoir s’abandonnent au courant des sentiments naturels’ (III, 127, ‘even on those who, without knowing them, fall back on their natural feelings’). Importantly, then, being consciously familiar with dramatic convention is not for Corneille a prerequisite of sound judgement; ignorant spectators may not be able to explain their opinions, but their opinions are no less valid for all that. Yet above these ordinary theatregoers there may also be occasional superior spectators: men of natural taste and discernment like Cardinal Richelieu, to whom Corneille dedicates his second tragedy Horace. Indeed, while he strives for popular success, Corneille is also quick to remind his readers when his plays are endorsed by the great and good. For example, he twice refers, very proudly, to the various ‘illustres suffrages’ (‘illustrious votes of approval’) won by his tragedy Cinna (1641).11 Whereas general public acclaim for a play does not prevent Corneille from self-criticism, he is happier to suspend his own critical judgement when his plays have met with approval from such superior spectators. As he suggests, to find flaws and pick holes in such works is to discredit the judgement of his more illustrious spectators. As he puts it in the ‘Examen’ to Cinna, Ce Poème a tant d’illustres suffrages, qui lui donnent le premier rang parmi les miens, que je me ferais trop d’importants ennemis, si j’en disais du mal. Je ne le suis pas assez de moi-même pour chercher des défauts où ils n’en ont point voulu voir, et accuser le jugement qu’ils en ont fait, pour obscurcir la gloire qu’ils m’en ont donnée. I, 910

théoricien, d’Aubignac querelleur: les enjeux des Dissertations contre Corneille”, Revue d’histoire du théâtre 261 (2014) 25–34. 11  Twenty-five years later, Corneille also refers to the ‘quantité de suffrages illustres et solides’ (‘good number of illustrious and solid voices of support’) in favour of his Othon (III, 461).

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(This poem has had so many illustrious voices ranking it the best amongst my works that I would make myself too many important enemies if I spoke ill of it. I am not such an enemy of myself as to seek out flaws where they did not wish to find any, and to accuse their judgement of it in order to eclipse the glory they have given me.) Although these superior spectators are often the most discreet of all in articulating their judgements, an attentive dramatist can nonetheless discern their opinions. In the dedication of Horace, for example, Corneille describes how he can ‘read’ Richelieu’s judgements from his expression: Vous nous en [of theatre] avez facilité les connaissances puisque nous n’avons plus besoin d’autre étude pour les acquérir, que d’attacher nos yeux sur Votre Eminence quand elle honore de sa présence et de son attention le récit de nos Poèmes. C’est là que lisant sur son visage ce qui lui plaît, et ce qui ne lui plaît pas, nous nous instruisons avec certitude de ce qui est bon, et de ce qui est mauvais, et tirons des règles infaillibles de ce qu’il faut suivre, et de ce qu’il faut éviter. C’est là que j’ai souvent appris en deux heures ce que mes livres n’eussent pu m’apprendre en dix ans; c’est là que j’ai puisé ce qui m’a valu l’applaudissement du Public, et c’est là qu’avec votre faveur j’espère puiser assez pour être un jour une œuvre digne de vos mains. I, 834

(You have made it easy for us to develop our understanding of it [theatre], since the only study we now need to acquire this understanding is to attach our eyes onto Your Eminence when he honours the reading of our poems with his presence and attention. It is there that, reading on his face what pleases and fails to please him, we learn with certainty what is good and what is bad, and draw categorical rules about what to follow and what to avoid. It is there that I have often learned in two hours what my books could not have taught me in ten years. It is there that I have drawn what has earned me the public’s applause, and it is there that, with your favour, I hope to draw enough to produce a work worthy of your hands.) As John D. Lyons has argued, this passage powerfully shifts critical authority away from the self-appointed experts who had so blamed Corneille’s previous play Le Cid and towards the spectator – or at least towards the ‘super-spectator’ Richelieu himself: ‘Corneille persists in placing an audience-centred aesthetic

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ahead of a scholarly, abstract one’.12 Yet although Lyons may be right to deduce from this passage that ‘audiences are not all of equal importance to the playwright’,13 Corneille often likes to imply that the judgements of the great and good on the one hand, and of the ordinary spectators on the other, are rarely in great tension. Corneille often proves to be no less attentive to the collective responses of his general audience than he is to the austere visage of the esteemed Cardinal. In such cases, Corneille is thus effectively reduced to the role of spectator himself – albeit an astute one apparently able to infer complex critical subtleties from his silent and largely impassive audience. Practically speaking, of course, the range of audience responses visible to an external observer, however attentive, is by its nature relatively limited. Once we move beyond the mere popularity of a play (which is indicated quite clearly by the total number of spectators and the length of the play run) and into the more subjective realm of audience emotion, it becomes clear that spectators have only a relatively simple palette of emotional responses that the observing dramatist can discern: tears, laughter, jeers or whistles of disdain, enthralment, perhaps an occasional frisson of expectation, and so forth. Throughout his theoretical writings, Corneille generally remains on the level of reliable observer, noting (for instance) the tears shed by audiences at Le Cid (III, 146) and – as we saw with catharsis earlier – leaving their inner thoughts and feelings as a private matter for his readers to reflect on. Despite this, however, Corneille does sometimes see fit to delve deeper into his spectators’ minds or souls, and to pronounce on their far more private and less externally visible emotional responses. He claims, for example, that the popularity of his heroic tragedy Nicomède (1651) demonstrates how ‘la fermeté des grands coeurs, qui n’excite que l’admiration dans l’âme du spectateur, est quelquefois aussi agréable, que la compassion que notre art nous commande de mendier pour leurs misères’ (II, 641, ‘the constancy of great hearts, which excites only wonder in the spectator’s soul, is sometimes as pleasant as the compassion that our art tells us to beg for their woes’). 3

Gambles: Trials and Errors

Throughout his dramatic career, Corneille is something of an experimenter, trying things out and reflecting on their success or failure. Forestier has 12  Lyons J.D., Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France, Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 18 (West Lafayette, Indiana: 1999) 17. 13  Ibidem 18.

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described his practice, quite appropriately, as a ‘dramaturgie de la gageure’ – a dramaturgy of the gamble.14 Corneille himself would concur; in his own words, ‘il est bon de hasarder un peu’ (II. 641, ‘it is good to take a few risks’) rather than risking growing stale by slavishly following Aristotle’s precepts. Sometimes these gambles pay off. Corneille expresses relief and pride when his own innovations, such as his resolutely non-Aristotelian hero Nicomède, meet with unexpected public acclaim. Indeed, Corneille expresses a particular affection for both Nicomède the play – claiming in the Examen that ‘je ne veux point dissimuler que cette pièce est une de celles pour qui j’ai le plus d’amitié’ (II, 642, ‘I do not want to hide the fact that this play is one of those for which I feel the most affection’) – and for Nicomède the title character, ‘ce héros de ma façon’ (II, 642, ‘this hero of my making’). Corneille’s discreet litotes here (‘I do not want to hide’) echoes a quite insistent succession of litotes in the play’s original preface (‘Au Lecteur’), in which he explains that La représentation n’en a point déplu, et comme ce ne sont pas les moindres vers qui soient partis de ma main, j’ai sujet d’espérer que la lecture n’ôtera rien à cet ouvrage de la réputation qu’il s’est acquise jusqu’ici, et ne le fera point juger indigne de suivre ceux qui l’ont précédé. II. 641

(The performance did not displease, and since these are not the weakest verses that I have penned, I have cause to hope that reading this work will not detract from any of the reputation it has so far acquired, and will not lead it to be judged unworthy of following those that preceded it.) Rather than openly defying established dramatic conventions, Corneille’s fourfold succession of litotic constructions here politely but insistently gestures towards alternative configurations that, although not standard, are not impossible. Whereas Corneille is relatively discreet about Nicomède, he is rather more open about the popularity of his greatest dramatic success, the highly controversial tragicomedy Le Cid. This play was criticised, among many other things, for its transgressions of propriety or bienséance. Twice, the hero Rodrigue scandalously pays a visit to his beloved Chimène shortly after killing her father in a duel. While acknowledging this transgression, Corneille cites an unnamed but apparently authoritative critic who claims that ‘leur conversation est remplie 14  See Forestier G., “Une dramaturgie de la gageure”, Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 85, 5 (1985) 811–819.

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de si beaux sentiments, que plusieurs n’ont pas connu ce défaut, et que ceux qui l’ont connu l’ont toléré’ (I, 702, ‘their conversation is filled with such fine sentiments that many did not spot this flaw, and that those who did could tolerate it’). The expert whom Corneille quotes here has not been identified; although the quotation echoes sentiments expressed by the leading literary critic Guez de Balzac,15 it may of course be pure fabrication on Corneille’s part. In any case, Corneille’s mysterious defender here suggests that the aesthetic qualities of the scene effectively override any ethical problems. Yet Corneille himself goes one stage further, claiming that audiences not only ‘tolerated’ these scenes, but actively willed them to take place. He describes with some relish the frisson that spread through the audience in the first of these scenes: J’irai plus outre, et dirai que tous presque ont souhaité que ces entretiens se fissent; et j’ai remarqué aux premières représentations, qu’alors que ce malheureux Amant se présentait devant elle, il s’élevait un certain frémissement dans l’Assemblée, qui marquait une curiosité merveilleuse, et un redoublement d’attention I, 702

(I will go further still, and say that everyone almost wished that these conversations took place – and I noticed during the first performances that once this wretched suitor presented himself before her, there spread through the audience a certain trembling that indicated a marvellous curiosity and a doubling of attention) Thwarting the audience’s expectations can, therefore, produce both pleasure and curiosity: Corneille’s transgression of conventional audience expectations both satisfies his spectators’ secret wishes and produces a sense of intrigue about what will happen next. Their curiosity is ‘merveilleuse’ (‘marvellous’); they have been drawn into a world outside the bounds of standard dramaturgy. The scene thus caters for desires that his spectators had imagined were illicit. Corneille invents a similarly transgressive scene about a decade later in his tragedy Rodogune (1644). In this play, the villainous queen Cléopâtre promises the throne of Syria to whichever of her twin sons murders their beloved, the princess Rodogune. Attempting to counter this plan, Rodogune announces in turn that she will marry whoever kills their own wicked mother. Corneille congratulates himself on having invented this horrific riposte: 15  Corneille’s editor Georges Couton supports this hypothesis (see Corneille, Œuvres completes, vol. I, 1485, n. 2).

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Je dirai plus: quand cette proposition serait tout à fait condamnable en sa bouche, elle mériterait quelque grâce, et pour l’éclat que la nouveauté de l’invention a fait au théâtre, et pour l’embarras surprenant où elle jette les princes, et pour l’effet qu’elle produit dans le reste de la pièce qu’elle conduit à l’action historique. II, 203

(I will say more: even if this proposal were entirely blameworthy in her mouth, it would deserve some mercy for the dazzling effect that this novel invention produced in the theatre, for the surprising perplexity into which it plunged the princes, and for the effect it produces during the rest of the play, whose action it brings back in line with history.) What would certainly merit condemnation in real life can be very powerful onstage, Corneille claims. Corneille congratulates himself on the ‘novelty’ of this plot twist, the shock it produces in those onstage, and on the way it leads events to the known historical outcome. Interestingly, Corneille prefaces both these accounts with similar formulations: ‘je dirai plus’ (‘I will say more’) for Rodogune, and ‘j’irai plus outre’ (‘I will go further still’) for Le Cid. As Corneille implies, the models of theatre he is proposing go beyond those established by dramatic orthodoxy, producing pleasures that are unaccounted for by established norms and rules. Corneille finds a precedent for this practice in Aristotle himself: Aristote dit qu’‘il y a des absurdités qu’il faut laisser dans un Poème, quand on peut espérer qu’elles seront bien reçues; et il est du devoir du Poète, en ce cas, de les couvrir de tant de brillants, qu’elles puissent éblouir’. Je laisse au jugement de mes auditeurs si je me suis assez bien acquitté de ce devoir pour justifier par là ces deux Scènes. I, 702

(Aristotle says ‘there are absurdities that should be left in a poem when one can hope that they will be received well; and it is the poet’s duty, in such cases, to cover them with such jewels that they can dazzle’. I leave my spectators to judge whether I have performed this duty well enough to justify these two scenes.) As with his account of catharsis earlier, Corneille again here appeals to his audience’s private judgement rather than reporting his own interpretation of their responses in the auditorium. Yet Corneille uses different techniques to

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distract spectators from the ‘absurdities’ in both plays. In Le Cid, as we have seen, spectators are distracted by sporadic moments of beauty – the disparate ‘fine sentiments’ to which Rodrigue’s appearance gives rise. In the later Rodogune, in contrast, Rodogune’s shock ultimatum is successfully worked into the overall dramatic narrative, producing emotional interest while helping to lead the plot towards its historically attested denouement. One corollary of Corneille’s dramatic theory is that a dramatic flaw only really counts as such if spectators cannot help but notice it. The plot of Le Cid, for example, may be flawed, but it is so compelling that most spectators ‘n’ont pas voulu voir les défauts de sa conduite, et ont laissé enlever leurs suffrages au plaisir que leur a donné sa representation’ (I, 699, ‘did not want to see the flaws in its construction, and gave their vote to the pleasure that its performance gave them’). With such plays, spectators must actively make what Corneille elsewhere calls ‘une réflexion malicieuse et critique’ (III, 189, ‘a malicious and critical reflection’) in order to detach themselves from their immediate pleasure and judge things objectively. So with some deft misdirection, audiences can be distracted from a play’s weaker aspects. Only occasionally does Corneille make glaring mistakes; for example, he regrets flagging up his play’s adherence to the unity of time in Le Cid, admitting that this actually draws attention to the implausibility of his action-packed plot (III, 171–172). 4

Corneille as Self-Critic

For the most part, Corneille’s audiences prove gratifyingly oblivious to technical flaws. Indeed, Corneille himself often proves to be the hardest audience to please. He frequently picks up on mistakes that his audiences either failed to spot, or were prepared to overlook. He expresses surprise that spectators still enjoy his curious metatheatrical ragbag L’Illusion comique (1635), and deduces that ‘tout irrégulier qu’il est, il faut qu’il ait quelque mérite, puisqu’il a surmonté l’injure des temps, et qu’il paraît encore sur nos Théâtres’ (I, 615, ‘irregular as it is, it must have some worth, since it has weathered the abuses of time and still appears on our stages’). He also remarks that audiences enjoyed his Héraclius (1647) even though its plot was so complicated that even the sharpest minds of the court complained it was too taxing (II, 361). Sometimes, Corneille takes advantage of his audiences’ laxness. Indeed, he sometimes admits to having written in bad faith, catering for audience expectations against his own better judgement. In 1660, for example, he dismisses the episode of madness and hallucination in his first play, Mélite, as a deliberate concession to public taste: ‘Je la condamnais dès lors en mon âme; mais

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comme c’était un ornement de Théâtre qui ne manquait jamais de plaire, et se faisait souvent admirer, j’affectai volontiers ces grands égarements’ (‘Even then I condemned it in my soul, but as it was an ornament that never failed to please, and which often produced awe, I willingly adopted such grand, affected displays of disorder’). Yet Corneille admits having made similar concessions more recently too, for example when he brought all the main characters back onstage at the end of Nicomède: Le goût des spectateurs, que nous avons accoutumés à voir rassembler tous nos personnages à la conclusion de cette sorte de poèmes, fut cause de ce changement, où je me résolus, pour leur donner plus de satisfaction, bien qu’avec moins de régularité. II, 644

(The reason behind this change was the taste of spectators, whom we have accustomed to seeing all our characters gathered together at the end of this sort of poem; I made this change to give them greater satisfaction, even with less regularity.) These self-criticisms have a double function; they apparently illustrate Corneille’s good faith, modesty, and impartiality, while also allowing him to demonstrate his critical acumen. Sometimes, however, the problems that audiences are prepared to overlook are quite fundamental ones. Corneille claims to be baffled by how early spectators were able to tolerate the fifth acts of his first two comedies, Mélite (1629) and La Veuve (1631). As he points out, the principal romantic plotline has already been resolved long before the end of both plays. The main lovers are already reunited; their only remaining dramatic function is to be ‘témoins au mariage de ceux du second ordre’ (III, 127, ‘witnesses to the marriage of the secondary characters’), and their only remaining interests are to uncover what trickery had separated them in the first place – something which the spectators already know. These two early plays thus suggest a subtle but important difference between the tastes of Corneille’s early audiences and his own tastes in the 1660s. Early spectators, it seems, understood the play more holistically, and deemed a plot complete only after all loose ends are tied up and all misunderstandings clarified. Corneille’s stance in 1660, however, imagines plays being constructed around one determinate dramatic crux or nœud (here, the separation of the lovers) whose resolution marks the end of the play. From Corneille’s later perspective, the ending of these early plays thus ‘languishes’ or drags. Yet the actual audiences of Mélite and La Veuve a generation earlier had demonstrated that spectators had not always minded this.

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Such indulgent audiences are convenient for Corneille the dramatist but problematic for Corneille the theoretician. In fact, their readiness to tolerate such flawed endings is all the more problematic for a further reason. As we have seen, for Corneille, spectators can be distracted from technical flaws provided that their interest has been sufficiently engaged. Here, however, it is precisely his spectators’ enthralled engagement that Corneille cannot account for. These are precisely the types of endings that ought to put spectators off. The explanation cannot simply be that his early spectators did not know the ‘rules’ governing theatre, since it is axiomatic for Corneille that dramatic rules should work independently of whether spectators know them or not.16 Corneille’s best explanation is that theatre in the 1630s was so flawed and irregular that spectators were simply used to nothing better (III, 127). As he implies, audience pleasure cannot be fully determined by theoretical rules; in practice, he suggests, culture-starved audiences will enjoy whatever even vaguely approximates decent theatre, whether or not this follows ‘the rules’. So a flawed play can entertain certain audiences (those of 1630) but will not satisfy others (those of 1660), and what pleasure it can produce cannot be accounted for simply by the rules. Such moments, then, suggest a fault-line in Corneille’s universalist assumptions. If audience tastes can be shaped by convention or habit, then their responses do not reflect universally valid dramatic rules after all. Tastes, it seems, can change – and Corneille’s tastes with them. Indeed, Corneille finds fault even with his perennially popular Le Cid. For all its original success (and, for that matter, its present popularity), Corneille explains in 1660 that Rodrigue’s readiness to die for Chimène would no longer be appropriate: Pour ne déguiser rien, cette offre que fait Rodrigue de son épée à Chimène, et cette protestation de se laisser tuer par don Sanche, ne me plairaient pas maintenant. Ces beautés étaient de mise en ce temps-là, et ne le seraient plus en celui-ci. La première est dans l’original Espagnol, et l’autre est tirée sur ce modèle. Toutes les deux ont fait leur effet en ma faveur; mais je ferais scrupule d’en étaler de pareilles à l’avenir sur notre Théâtre. I, 702

16  Seventeenth-century France is well known – notorious, even – for its attempts to codify a set of supposedly universal rules governing theatre. For my argument here, the specific forms that these rules might take – the three unities, verisimilitude (vraisemblance), and so forth – are of course far less important than the period’s general principle that such rules exist. For more on whether or not spectators’ conscious knowledge of the rules should affect their aesthetic experience, see Harris, Inventing the Spectator 10.

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(To be entirely honest, the offer that Rodrigue makes of his sword to Chimène, and his insistence on letting himself be killed by Don Sanche, would not please me now. These beauties were prized at that time, but they no longer would be nowadays. The former is in the Spanish original, and the latter is modelled on it. The success of both counts in my favour, but I would be wary of deploying anything similar in future on our stage.) The object of his own explorations and experiments is itself, potentially at least, in a state of slow flux. To complicate matters further, the continued popularity of this play – which had continued to be republished and sporadically performed throughout the 1650s, and would remain popular well into the following century17 – suggests that audiences may even have some vague sense of historical relativity, and would be prepared to accept things from earlier plays that might not please them in modern ones. Although, frustratingly, Corneille does not explain why Rodrigue’s readiness to die has now become old-fashioned, he does imply that some changes come about through the force of practice alone. However universal the rules of theatre were understood to be, the fact remains that the tastes of spectators – and, for that matter, of playwrights – can change. Even within a lifetime, the habits and conventions of one generation of playwrights can settle down into established rules through the force of practice alone. The tradition of keeping the stage occupied throughout each act is one such convention. As Corneille explains, Nous y avons tellement accoutumé nos spectateurs, qu’ils ne sauraient plus voir une scène détachée sans la marquer pour un défaut. L’œil et l’oreille même s’en scandalisent, avant que l’esprit y ait pu faire de réflexion. III, 177

(We have so accustomed our spectators to it that they can no longer see a detached scene without regarding this as a flaw; the eye and even the ear are scandalised before the mind has been able to reflect on it.) Dramatic practice shapes precepts; conventions and habits become ossified into rules through the force of practice alone. This is not the sort of rule that only self-appointed experts can spot. Spectators’ very senses – their eyes and 17  See Mongrédien G., Recueil des textes et des documents du XVIIe siècle relatifs à Corneille (Paris: 1972) 126–163.

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ears – have become attuned to this convention, and the mind casts its judgement only belatedly, and superfluously. 5

The Critical Audience

So far, we have seen how tolerant audiences can be of flaws that Corneille himself condemns. Yet audiences are not always this indulgent. Sometimes, Corneille’s gambles and experiments do not pay off, and he does not succeed in dazzling or distracting his spectators. As we shall see, though, Corneille responds to these failures in different ways. Interestingly, only very rarely does Corneille claim to be truly shocked or surprised by his audiences’ responses. As I mentioned earlier, in 1662 he claims to be perplexed that audiences were shocked by his tragedy Sophonisbe and its evocations of bigamy and divorce, since they had not raised an eyebrow at very similar themes in Sertorius the previous year (III, 383). Here, at least, Corneille is able to reach for a neat and quite persuasive explanation. Three decades earlier, another playwright, Jean Mairet, had produced his own, influential Sophonisbe; although this play had been rather cavalier in its relationship to its historical sources, it had, Corneille reasons, become anchored in the general public’s mind as a reputable historical source (III, 383–384).18 Of course, such handy explanations are not always available, and Corneille often resorts to another technique when addressing adverse criticism. Corneille’s procedure here becomes apparent when he discusses his failed martyr-tragedy Théodore. Here, Corneille first explores the general explanation given at the time: that audiences did not like the threat of prostitution that hangs over the heroine. This is the explanation, he says, that is offered by ‘la meilleure et la plus saine partie de mes juges’ (II, 271, ‘the best and soundest of my judges’). He then waxes ironic that modern audiences are decorous and delicate enough to be offended by a plot that takes pride of place in Saint Ambrose’s Lives of the Virgins, and despite his having used all his dramatic and poetic skills to make the theme acceptable. Yet – in quite a typical move – Corneille now criticises his play on very different grounds: that while some of the play’s characters are ‘vigoureux et animés’ (II, 271, ‘vigorous and animated’), 18  Mairet’s play takes various liberties with Livy’s source material, not least by having the heroine’s first husband Syphax die in battle and by ending with the suicide of her second husband Masinissa (Massinisse). For more on these changes, see Harris J., “Suicide Justified: Corneille’s Sophonisbe”, European Drama and Performance Studies 7 (2016) 59–72.

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the heroine Théodore herself is not. The scene in which she competes with her fellow Christian Didyme for the glory of dying first, he claims, bores audiences even though it is very short. In a strange sleight of hand, Corneille thus cites the ‘official’ explanation of his play’s failure, and then distances himself from it, offering another criticism of his own. Corneille uses the same technique at greater length when discussing his earlier tragedy Horace. Here, Corneille ostensibly accepts the public’s judgement that the murder of Camille in Act IV is a dramatic flaw, but he disagrees with the general consensus about why. As he explains, she was not meant to shock audiences by dying onstage, as she did in the first performances; this was the fault of the actress, and he has taken steps to insert a clarifying stage direction in later editions (I, 839). Yet Corneille now goes on to offer two or three further explanations of the play’s failure. Firstly, he explains that Camille’s murder is too sudden and unexpected to please audiences; nothing in the previous acts can prepare them for the brutal deed itself (I, 840). Secondly, the murder breaks the unity of action by creating a new plotline that does not follow inevitably from the first. As Corneille implies, spectators might therefore have been shocked by the sudden deed but attributed their shock to the visual impression of the murder onstage. Corneille’s third reason is that Camille takes centre stage in the second half of the play, consigning her sister-in-law Sabine to a secondary role. He reasons that this might be a similar flaw to that of his catastrophic failure Pertharite: Ce défaut en Rodelinde a été une des principales causes du mauvais succès de Pertharite, et je n’ai point encore vu sur nos Théâtres cette inégalité de rang en un même acteur, qui n’ait produit un très méchant effet. Il serait bon d’en établir une Règle inviolable. I, 841

(This flaw in Rodelinde was one of the principal causes of Pertharite’s failure, and I have not yet seen any individual character have such an unequal role without producing a very bad effect. It would be good to establish this as an unbreakable rule.) On one level, Corneille’s self-criticisms here reinforce his image as an honest, reliable commentator. Yet with both Horace and Théodore, we can see Corneille subtly attempting to wrest critical control from his spectators. In both cases, Corneille agrees that the play is flawed, but suggests that popular explanations of its failure are themselves wrong. As Corneille implies, spectators misattribute their distaste to a more superficially obvious reason – such as prostitution or onstage murder – while only the seasoned playwright can spot the far more serious underlying technical flaws that underlie their response.

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Corneille struggles valiantly to use the same technique in relation to his abject failure Pertharite. As I mentioned earlier, Pertharite was such a failure – in Corneille’s words a ‘disgrace’ (II, 722, ‘disgrâce’) – that he withdrew entirely from playwriting for seven years. It was during this self-imposed ‘retirement’ that Corneille started to write the Discours themselves. It might be tempting to read his dramatic theory as, at least in part, an attempt to ‘work through’ the failure of Pertharite – just as it arguably bears scars from the Le Cid controversy two decades earlier. Yet his words on Pertharite itself are very few indeed. As he announces at the start of his brief commentary (‘examen’), ‘le succès de cette tragédie a été si malheureux que, pour m’épargner le chagrin de m’en ressouvenir, je n’en dirai presque rien’ (II, 721, ‘the response to this tragedy was so wretched that, to spare myself the displeasure of remembering it, I shall say almost nothing about it’). As we have seen, Corneille had previously attempted to ‘explain away’ his dramatic failures in ways that still left him the critical upper hand. In particular, he could afford to be dismissive about his earliest ventures, some of which were by now three decades old. He tries to adopt the same technique here: he admits, for example, that the play is weakened by the fluctuating importance of one character, Rodelinde. But he cannot mask the troubling fact that this play – his most recent of all – marked a fundamental misjudgement on his own part, and hence a profound gulf between his tastes and those of his audience. And this misjudgement did not just concern some secondary feature of the play, but the very crux of the plot itself: ‘Ce qui l’a fait avorter au théâtre a été l’événement extraordinaire qui me l’avait fait choisir’ (II, 721–722, ‘What made it flop at the theatre was the extraordinary event that made me choose it’). So what spoiled the play for its spectators was the very event that had attracted Corneille in the first place. And what was the event that so repelled spectators, according to Corneille? Interestingly, it was not, as we might have expected, the queen Rodelinde’s brutal insistence that she will marry her suitor only if he first murders her son. Nor is it the fact that this shocking threat ends up going nowhere once the hero’s sudden reappearance takes the plot in a new direction entirely. In fact, Corneille does not mention this episode at all. Rather, what he singles out is the behaviour of the dispossessed king Pertharite, who, on returning to Lombardy, forsakes all claims on his kingdom in order to be reunited with his wife: On n’a pu supporter qu’un roi dépouillé de son royaume, après avoir fait tout son possible pour y rentrer se voyant sans forces, et sans amis, en cède à son vainqueur les droits inutiles, afin de retirer sa femme prisonnière de ses mains; tant les vertus de bon mari sont peu à la mode. II, 722

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(People could not bear seeing a dispossessed king, having done all he could to return to his kingdom without armies or friends, offer his victor all its useless rights so as to rescue his wife from the imprisonment of his clutches – so unfashionable are the virtues of a good husband.) Corneille again satirises modern tastes, lamenting about how unfashionable ‘the virtues of a good husband’ have become. Spectators, he implies, have no time for modest, uxorious heroes: they want ambition and heroism. In Corneille’s hands, the play’s unpopularity thus becomes a condemnation of the modern public’s values. The hero’s apparent return from the dead provides another bone of contention between Corneille and his audience. ‘On n’a pas aimé la surprise avec laquelle Pertharite se présente au troisième acte, quoique le bruit de son retour soit épandu dès le premier’ (II, 722, ‘People did not like Pertharite’s surprising arrival in the third act, even though his return had been rumoured since the first’). Although Corneille does not dwell on this point, his second clause here clearly implies that his audience should have paid greater attention to the earlier clues that Pertharite was in fact alive and well. Some of the blame for the play’s failure, Corneille implies, must fall to the spectators, who were too inattentive, and too cynical about marital love, to appreciate the play properly. Some of the play’s problems, it seems, stem more from audience taste or audience inattention than from any inherent problems in the material. With his first play, Mélite, Corneille had been ahead of his time, consciously pandering to audience tastes against his own better judgement. By the time of Pertharite, however, audience tastes have overtaken the now unfashionable playwright. And although Corneille will know critical success again, his sporadic theoretical writings after 1660 suggest that he no longer fully trusts his spectators’ judgement after all. Indeed, the audience he envisages in the preface (‘Au lecteur’) to his penultimate play Pulchérie is ultimately one of critical but indulgent readers, not one of spectators. Somewhat defensively, Corneille here attempts to contextualise the play’s modest success by painstakingly listing all the sub-optimal conditions of the first performance (the theatre’s unfortunate location, the reputation of its actors, the play’s subject matter, and so forth) and by insisting that it stood up adequately against each (III, 1172). By this late stage, Corneille seems no longer to be concerned with justifying his plays or reflecting on his dramatic practice. His formulations and arguments now sound wearily defiant. His characters are no longer ‘heroes of my making’ like Nicomède, but defiantly ‘contre le goût du temps’ (III, 1172, ‘against modern tastes’; my emphasis). And yet Corneille finds comfort in the fact that such plays can still attract a modest success despite all the ‘entêtements du siècle’

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(III, 1172, ‘follies of the age’). Although Corneille claims that he does not want to ‘prévenir’ (‘pre-empt’) his readers’ judgement (III, 1171), his primary purpose here seems to be to give his play a second hearing in the readers’ imagination: he invites them first to imagine the play shorn of the mediocre conditions of the first performance, and then to imagine that the original performance had been as successful as this imagined one. This brief consideration of Corneille’s post-1660 play Pulchérie throws into relief a problem that was already latent within his dramatic theories. As we have seen, Corneille’s model of experimentation, observation and reflection had indicated a sense that audience response was somehow fixed – waiting to be discovered by trial and error. Yet it now seems that audience tastes are themselves changeable, and so thwart any sense that any universal set of rules can be established. Perhaps unexpectedly, it seems that Corneille himself – ahead of his time in the 1630s, and sadly outdated by the 1670s – is the more stable, fixed point. 6 Conclusion Corneille’s strategies when addressing his dramatic failures bear some strange similarities to his own practices as a dramatist. As a tragedian, Corneille has as his task to take certain historical events (such as the downfall of a hero) and to work them into a causally coherent narrative. These events themselves are too famous or notorious to be altered or gainsaid, but they can be reinterpreted or recast to fit the overall narrative. As a self-commentator, Corneille is likewise faced with some awkward, unalterable historical realities (the downfall of certain plays), but he shows a similar talent for rewriting and reinterpreting these events to suit his own ends. Earlier on, we saw Corneille present stagecraft as a precarious balancing act, in which the playwright makes up for absurdities and flaws in one place with judicious use of beauty and brilliance elsewhere. He seems to do something very similar in his commentaries, deliberately downplaying his talents as a playwright in order to emphasise his skills as a critic and theoretician. And Corneille’s strategy for engaging with his failures in his self-commentaries is striking. Far from brushing aside criticisms of his work, Corneille typically attempts to dazzle his readers with displays of critical acumen by unveiling further flaws that his audiences had not even spotted. In this respect too, Corneille again invests his commentaries with a curious narrative dimension. For Aristotle, the tragic denouement is supposed to be surprising and yet causally motivated – so the spectator can suddenly see, in retrospect, the

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underlying, previously undetected causality that leads from the hero’s flaw to his downfall.19 The reader of Corneille’s commentaries is often led to a strangely similar moment of anagnorisis – a new, surprising, retrospective, definitive understanding of the play’s own ‘fatal flaw’ that had led inexorably to its downfall. Interestingly, then, even when he has officially abjured the stage, as he insists he has done after the failure of Pertharite, Corneille cannot help but adopt in his commentaries the same techniques that he has been using in his plays. Perhaps, then, he could not shake off the playwriting bug; perhaps Corneille’s self-commentaries themselves suggest that it was only ever a matter of time before he returned to the stage. Selective Bibliography La Querelle du ‘Cid’ (1637–1638), ed. J.-M. Civardi, Sources classiques 52 (Paris: 2004). Aristotle, Poetics, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D.A. Russell. – M. Winterbottom (Oxford – New York: 1989) 51–97. Bourque B.J., Jean Donneau de Visé et la querelle de ‘Sophonisbe’. Écrits contre l’abbé d’Aubignac, Biblio 17, 208 (Tübingen: 2014). Corneille Pierre, Le Théâtre de Pierre Corneille revu et corrigé par l’auteur (Rouen, Augustin Courbé: 1660), 3 vols. Corneille Pierre, Writings on the Theatre, ed. H.T. Barnwell, Blackwell’s French Texts (Oxford: 1965). Corneille Pierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Couton, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: 1980–1987), 3 vols. Hédelin François, abbé d’Aubignac, Dissertations contre Corneille, ed. N. Hammond – M. Hawcroft, Textes littéraires 95 (Exeter: 1995). Forestier G., “Une dramaturgie de la gageure”, Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 85, 5 (1985) 811–819. Forestier G., Essai de génétique théâtrale: Corneille à l’oeuvre (Paris: 1996). Gossip C.J., “Corneille as Self-Critic”, Seventeenth-Century French Studies 23 (2001) 101–110. Harris J., Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (Oxford: 2014). Harris J., “D’Aubignac théoricien, d’Aubignac querelleur: les enjeux des Dissertations contre Corneille”, Revue d’histoire du théâtre 261 (2014) 25–34. 19  See Aristotle, Poetics, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D.A. Russell – M. Winterbottom (Oxford – New York: 1989) 1452a, 63. I discuss the cognitive and emotional effects of this model at length in Harris, Inventing the Spectator 112–117.

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Harris J., “Suicide Justified: Corneille’s Sophonisbe”, European Drama and Performance Studies 7 (2016) 59–72. Lyons J.D., Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France, Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 18 (West Lafayette, Indiana: 1999). Mongrédien G., Recueil des textes et des documents du XVIIe siècle relatifs à Corneille (Paris: 1972). Racine Jean, Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Forestier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: 1999), 2 vols. Voltaire, Commentaires sur Corneille, ed. D. Williams, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 54 (Banbury: 1975).

chapter 12

Self-Criticism, Self-Assessment, and SelfAffirmation: The Case of the (Young) Author in Early Modern Dutch Literature Els Stronks 1

Introduction: Poetic Self-Commentary in the Dutch Republic

There are few theoretical reflections on vernacular poetry in early modern Dutch literature, and even fewer such reflections that shed light on the role of critical self-consciousness in the making and experiencing of poetry by Dutch authors and their readers. The most famous and influential theoretical work in this respect, Joost van den Vondel’s Aenleidinge ter Nederduitsche dichtkunste (1650, Introduction to Dutch Poetry), regards self-criticism as the key prerequisite for quality and excellence. Vondel modelled this manual for poets on Horace’s Ars Poetica,1 and intended it to be a description of existing practices. Whether that is indeed the case is questionable.2 Nevertheless, even if Vondel put forth a desideratum rather than portraying reality truthfully, his considerations raise crucial questions regarding the role played by self-criticism in early modern Dutch poetics.3 According to Vondel, poets should not release their works into the public domain before rereading and revising them several times, going over them with a fresh eye each time:

1  Vondel Joost van den, Aenleidinge ter Nederduitsche dichtkunste, ed. K. Blokland et alii (Utrecht: 1977) 12. 2  Grootes E. – Schenkeveld-van der Dussen R., “The Dutch Revolt and the Golden Age (1560– 1700)”, in Hermans Th. (ed.), A Literary History of the Low Countries (Rochester: 2009) 153–292. 3  While Vondel was an authoritative figure in the Dutch Republic, he was not as well-known and influential outside his home country. His reception was limited to the German lands, ‘where language affinity facilitated accessibility and where the Netherlands at that time functioned as a role model, especially in the field of cultural politics’. See Gemert G. van, “Between Disregard and Political Mobilization – Vondel as a Playwright in Contemporary European Context: England, France and the German Lands”, in Bloemendal J. – Korsten F.W. (eds.), Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679): Dutch Playwright in the Golden Age, Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe 1 (Leiden – Boston: 2011) 171–198 (197).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_014

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Maer om veiliger en vaster te gaen, geef uwe dichten niet in uwen eersten yver aen den dagh. Laetze een goede wijl onder u rusten: ga’er dan eens en anderwerf, ja zevenwerf, met versche zinnen over. (However, if you wish to proceed more safely and securely, do not publish your poems in the first flush of enthusiasm. Sit and brood on them for a good while: then reread them with a fresh judgment, not once or twice, but seven times over.)4 Vondel expected poets to be the first readers and critics of their own works, who should seriously question their own capacities and literary outcomes. He even instructs poets to postpone the act of writing itself until they have carefully pondered their initial ideas about the content: Beveel het papier niet terstont al wat u in den zin schiet, maer toetst uwe inbeeldingen, vonden en gedachten ofze der penne en den dagh waerdigh zijn. (Do not at once commit to paper whatever comes to mind, but assess whether your fancies, inspirations and thoughts are worth writing down and publishing.)5 Vondel also maintains that poets should never rely solely on their own appraisal. Before publication, one should instead solicit both aesthetic and moral judgements from external readers, preferably from severe critics comparable to the iconic Aristarchus of Samothrace: ‘Een Dichter heeft zijne luimen: hierom laet het gedicht van eenen Aristarchus, ja verscheide keurmeesteren keuren. Dese zullen uitmonsteren wat misstaet, zoo wel dat de Kunst, als de zeden betreft’ (‘A poet has his good days and his bad days: for this reason, have your poem criticised by some Aristarchus, indeed by several critics. They will sift out everything that is not fitting in terms of both art and morals’).6 The two forms of self-critical inquiry recommended by Vondel – inquiry into one’s inventions and, later, the scrutiny and potential revision of what one has written – do not necessarily leave visible traces in a poet’s finished published work. As such, they do not qualify as self-commentary interpreted as 4  Vondel Joost van den, Introduction to Dutch Poetry, trans. L. Gilbert – Th. Hermans, Dutch Crossing 10 (1986) 50–63 (61). 5  Ibidem 57–58. 6  Vondel, Aenleidinge ter Nederduitsche dichtkunste 54; idem, Introduction to Dutch Poetry 61.

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the author’s annotations or explanations accompanying his or her own work. However, this self-conscious attitude does engender subtle self-reflective forms of self-commentary which may be paired with more extrinsic modes of self-exegesis. The aim of this contribution is to analyse such self-reflective moments in diaries with limited manuscript circulation, paratexts such as dedicatory poems and prefaces, statements on their own works and status as poets in letters and other documents. If analysed as modes of authorial selffashioning,7 what do such traces of self-consciousness, self-assessment and, ultimately, self-affirmation reveal about the interrelation between the poet’s aspirations and the social constraints, expectations and perceptions at play in the newly formed Dutch Republic? The underlying assumption is that early modern self-commentary can have various manifestations. Self-exegetical apparatuses appended to primary texts have been the major centre of attention thus far and have been discussed at length by Sherry Roush in her monograph devoted to self-commentary in Italian poetry from Dante to the seventeenth century. In particular, Roush argues that Dante, with his prosimetric work Vita Nova (c. 1295), was the first to merge the lyric dimension with self-exegesis.8 Existing studies have already acknowledged the connection between self-commentary and techniques of self-fashioning. On the one hand, for example, Roush has argued that, when provided by the poet himself, commentaries – normally the responsibility of an author distinct from the author of the original text – entail an autobiographical perspective. On the other hand, in a recent study on Latin poetry in the Dutch Republic, Tom Deneire has demonstrated that for certain poets, annotations aimed at ‘conferring a measure of authority on one’s own poetry by presenting it as worthy of commentary (usually only the classics or canonical poets are edited with commentary)’.9 7  For the pioneering explorations of this notion, see Greenblatt S., Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: 1980). 8  Roush S., Hermes’ Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella, Toronto Italian Studies (Toronto: 2002) 25. Barry Smith has counter-argued that the genre had already been established long before Dante attempted his theoretical account of poetic self-commentaries: the Bible contains elements of self-commentary (e.g. Neh. 8:8), as does the work of Homer. See Smith B., “Textual Deference”, American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1991) 1–12 (2). 9  Deneire T., “Neo-Latin and Vernacular Poetics of Self-Fashioning in Dutch Occasional Poetry (1635–1640)”, in idem (ed.), Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts: Dynamics of NeoLatin and the Vernacular, Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts 13 (Leiden – Boston: 2014) 33–58 (49–50). On the techniques employed by Dante to build authority, see Ascoli A.R., “Auto-commentary: Dividing Dante”, in idem, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: 2008) 175–226.

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In the case of early modern Dutch vernacular authors, there is a specific reason to chart self-commentaries of any type against the backdrop of selflegitimising techniques. At the end of the sixteenth century, at the beginning of what was to be labelled the ‘Dutch Golden Age’, few texts of merit in the Dutch language could meet the standards of the international literary sphere. The ambition to equal classical models, as well as contemporary poetry in Italian and French, made this lack of tradition feel like a shortcoming that the Dutch could not overcome simply by copying foreign models. In the absence of a court culture, a crucial role in the promotion of Dutch language and literature was played by chambers of rhetoric and the ‘Nederduitsche Academy’ (‘Dutch Academy’), as well as by prominent poets such as the learned professor Daniël Heinsius (1580–1655) from Leiden, famous for his Latin poetry but also a pioneer in his attempts to write in the vernacular as testified by his Emblemata Amatoria (1601, Love Emblems) and his Nederduytsche Poemata (1616, Poems in Dutch).10 In a shared desire to raise the status of vernacular literature, Dutch authors developed an ambiguous attitude towards foreign examples: they were appropriated but at the same time ignored.11 Efforts to construct a Dutch literary canon did not, as far as I can tell, result in Dutch equivalents of Dante’s Vita Nova. The annotations added by Heinsius’s friend Petrus Scriverius to De Lofsanck van Iesus Christus (‘Hymn of Jesus Christ’) and included in the second imprint of Heinsius’s Nederduytsche Poemata, come close to the standard set by Dante, but at the same time they make apparent that exegesis provided by the author himself was perhaps deemed inappropriate or perceived as obsolete in the context of Dutch literature.12 We might never possess a satisfactory answer as to why this specific form of self-exegesis is absent from early modern Dutch literature. Yet subtle critical undertones of self-reflection and self-exegesis may be detected in a number of works and genres, and they will be examined here to gain insights into ideas about the literary careers of certain writers or certain groups of writers in the

10  Schenkeveld-van der Dussen R., Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt: Themes and Ideas, Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature 28 (Amsterdam: 1991) 11–20. 11  See Prandoni M., “Vive la France, A bas la France! Contradictory Attitude Toward the Appropriation of French Cultural Elements in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century: The Forewords of ‘Modern’ Poetry Collections”, in Noak B. (ed.), Wissenstransfer und Auctoritas in der frühneuzeitlichen niederländischsprachigen Literatur, Berliner Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeitforschung 19 (Göttingen: 2014) 179–194. 12  Strien T. van – Stronks E., Het hart naar boven. Religieuze poëzie uit de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: 1999) 51.

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Dutch Republic.13 To this end, I have selected sources that can be seen as instruments of authorial self-growth. I shall begin by exploring forms of self-reflection in egodocuments such as the diary of schoolmaster and writer David Beck (1621–1656) and the notebooks of Arnoud van Buchel (1565–1641). I shall also investigate self-fashioning strategies in the Latin autobiographic prose by the famous female author Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) as well as in the three translations of the Aeneid by Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679). Lastly, the self-criticism of young Dutch authors will be examined in detail. Roush analyses the case of the Italian poet Girolamo Benivieni (1453–1542), who appended a prose apparatus to a reissue of his Canzoni e sonetti dell’amore (Poems on Earthly Love, newly entitled Canzoni e sonetti col commento in 1500) that he had first published eleven years earlier and had since come to regret. His annotations tried to reform this youthful collection by interpreting it with patristic piety and imbuing it with an ethical and didactic meaning. As Roush clarifies, ‘by seeking to render any ambiguity in a system of fixed (in this case, moralized) meaning, Benivieni closes down his poetry.’14 The Dutch poet Justus de Harduwijn (1582–1636) underwent a similar process. When he became a Roman Catholic priest as an adult, he distanced himself from his earlier work (which he then characterised as ‘Venus ghejanckel’ [‘Whining of Venus’]) composed at the age of twenty-one in his poetry collection De weer­ liicke liefden tot Roose-mond (‘The Profane Love for Sweet Rose’).15 Analogously, but for a different reason, the Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) disowned his youthful work in his autobiography De vita propria sermonum inter liberos libri II (1677). In his memoirs, Huygens portrayed his young self as a poor poet with little to be proud of, in hindsight, because of the lack of literary quality displayed in his work: Ikzelf verbaas mij erover, dat men zoveel waarde toekende aan die zwakke probeersels van een nog onvolgroeide muze, die niet eens in haar eigen taal schreef en ook nog de nodige ontwikkeling miste. Ik meen het echt als ik zeg dat ik op die leeftijd niets gepresteerd heb, waarmee de ge­leerden rekening zouden moeten houden of waarvoor de gewone mensen bewondering zouden moeten hebben. De poëzie in het Frans (en ik zou eraan toe durven voegen, die in het Nederlands) was in die tijd 13  For a definition of ‘career-criticism’, see Cheney P., Introduction, in Cheney P. – De Armas F.A. (eds.), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto: 2002) 3–24 (4). 14  Roush, Hermes’ Lyre 113. 15  Harduwijn Justus de, Goddelicke lof-sanghen (Ghent, Jan vanden Kerchove: 1620).

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bij ons Hollanders niet van dien aard, dat wij daar momenteel nog mee voor de dag zouden kunnen komen zonder ons belachelijk te maken. De vooruitgang die de laatste tijd op beide terreinen geboekt is, is zo groot en zo plotseling ingetreden, dat het haast een wonder lijkt. (I myself wonder why people valued the mediocre products of my young and undeveloped Muse, who did not even express herself in her own language at that time and lacked refinement. I truly mean it when I say that I did not produce anything at that age worth the attention of scholars or the admiration of common people. All poetry written in either French [and, I might add, in Dutch] by any poet in the Dutch Republic was of very poor, ludicrous quality. The extensive and sudden progress we have all made in that area is close to miraculous.)16 Based upon both the aesthetic judgement of older poets on their own works written at a younger age and the statements made by emerging authors, I shall explore what specific prerequisites were suggested for young authors. I will also try to chart the effect on young poets of Vondel’s suggested practice of re-reading one’s work many times before handing it over to a critical audience. How were young authors able to enter the world of the mature adult author, and could a self-critical attitude be of any assistance in this process? 2

Private Forms of Self-Reflection

The type of authorial self-assessment that Vondel advocates is perhaps best found in the manuscript culture of the Dutch Republic. Although the number of printed texts in early modern Europe was growing, manuscripts remained a lively and important sphere of exchange between authors and their readers. The situation could certainly have been otherwise – especially in the Dutch Republic, where printers were geographically concentrated, highly networked, and institutionally embedded, and where the publishing industry

16  Written between 1629 and 1631, Huygens’s memoirs were published in 1677. See Blom F.R.E., “Constantijn Huygens en de ontwikkeling van de poëzie in de landstaal”, in Nellen H.J.M. – Trapman J. (eds.), De Hollandse jaren van Hugo de Groot (1583–1621) (Hilversum: 1996) 97–111 (100). For a Dutch translation of Huygens’s memoirs, see Huygens Constantijn, Mijn jeugd, trans. C. Heesakkers (Amsterdam: 1987) 122 (the English translation here is mine).

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was prosperous.17 In spite of this, manuscript culture flourished in the Dutch Republic – as it did in Great Britain, France, Italy and Spain.18 Nelleke Moser, for instance, points to the existence of a ‘literaire sociabiliteit’ (‘literary sociability’, i.e. the sharing of handwritten copies of texts and the convention of including poetry quotations in letters), which remained a thriving business well into the eighteenth century, and to ‘social poetry’ (i.e. manuscripts of occasional poems, often filled with readers’ handwritten comments).19 Manuscript culture could therefore offer an informal setting for the interaction between readers and authors as described by Vondel: perhaps authors felt they could share their self-reflective comments more openly with a familiar audience. Genres that circulated in handwritten form and were most likely to contain the author’s and his or her readers’ comments encompassed diaries, travel accounts, memoirs, letters and autobiographies. In particular, diaries were far less private than they are now and were sometimes even printed.20 One of the earliest and most prolific writers whose main subject was himself and his own work was Arnoud van Buchel, or Arnoldus Buchelius. Born in 1565 as the illegitimate son of a priest but converting to Protestantism around 1591, Buchel studied in Leiden and Douai, from where he travelled to Paris, Italy and Germany throughout his life. Buchel’s most renowned work is his Commentarius rerum quotidianarum [...] (Commentary on daily matters [...]), better known as Diarium (Diary).21 For many years Buchel constantly edited and revised this work, as

17  Buringh E. – Zanden J.L. van, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscript and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries”, Journal of Economic History 69 (2009) 409–445; Rasterhoff C., Painting and Publishing as Cultural Industries: The Fabric of Creativity in the Dutch Republic, 1580–1800, Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam: 2017). 18  See, for instance, Richardson B., Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: 2009); Anderson R., “‘The Merit of a Manuscript Poem’: The Case for Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poet. 85”, in Marotti A. – Bristol M.D. (eds.), Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Columbus: 2000) 127–171. 19  Moser N., “‘Poezijlust en vriendenliefd’: Literaire sociabiliteit in handschrift en druk na 1600”, Spiegel der Letteren 49 (2007) 247–264; Haugen K., “Imaginary Correspondence: Epistolary Correspondence and the Rhetorics of Disbelief”, in Houdt T. Van – Papy J. – Tournoy G. – Matheeussen C. (eds.), Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia 18 (Leuven: 2002) 117–136 (123). 20  See Dekker R., Family, Culture and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr, Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange, Egodocuments and History 5 (Leiden – Boston: 2013). 21  Published only in 1905 by Gisbert Brom and Lambregt Abraham van Langeraad (Utrecht).

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Judith Pollmann concluded after examining it thoroughly.22 The two main volumes Buchel produced – part autobiography, part chronicle – were written between 1593 and 1600. A few small notebooks (‘rapiaria’), one of which has been preserved (Ms. 761, Utrecht University Library), served as the basis for the finished product, a fair copy that was regularly corrected and supplemented until approximately 1625. The notes begin in 1560 and continue until they come to an abrupt end in 1599. Buchel described his journey to Cologne in a separate, smaller manuscript (Ms. 762, Utrecht University Library).23 In both rapiaria, we find crosses or long lines in the margins which seem to indicate sections Buchel had selected for inclusion in the Diarium. A brief comparison shows that he did not use all the entries from his rapiaria. What he did use he often rephrased, summarised, or even rewrote (for instance, his own poems). Buchel therefore made himself an editor of his own work, and it is clear that he aimed to produce a well-organised document, more orderly than the rapiaria. He also supplemented the Diarium with texts from other notebooks or sources.24 The notebook he filled while travelling contains descriptions of every historical or archeological site that he visited. From the notes he jotted down, it is apparent that he often questioned the information he had received about these places and was used to incorporating such doubts into his manuscript. Here is one example: Ick vinde in de genealogie in Duvenvoirde Gijsbertam, abdisse van Reinsburch, anno 1577 gestorven, quam hic omissam video, unde dubito. (In the genealogy of Duivenvorde: Gisberta, abbess of Reinsburg, deceased in 1577, but because she is not listed here, I am in doubt.)25 For this reason, Buchel’s diary can be considered to be a form of note-taking, both for himself and his (occasional) external reader. The notes alerted his 22  Pollmann J., Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641), Studies in Early Modern European History (Manchester: 1999). 23  See Keussen H., “Die drei Reisen des Utrechters Arnoldus Buchelius nach Deutschland, insbesondere sein Kölner Aufenthalt”, Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein insbesondere das Alte Erzbistum Köln 85 (1908) 90–114. 24  In 1801 this was in the possession of Gerlach Theodorus van der Capellen (1734–1805), Lord of Schonauwen (see Ms. 799, fol. 174), as was Buchel’s Inscriptiones (Ms. 1648). In 1881, the State Archives in Utrecht gave it to the University Library of Utrecht. 25  Buchel, Inscriptiones 61. A translation into modern Dutch is provided by the Utrecht Archive: ‘Ik vind in de genealogie van Duivenvoorde: Gijsberta, abdis van Rijnsburg, in 1577 gestorven, maar omdat zij hier ontbreekt, twijfel ik’ (http://www.hetutrechtsarchief .nl/collectie/handschriften/buchelius/inscriptiones/061).

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readers to be aware of uncertainties or information that needed to be checked. Overall, these notes served not only as references to the sources, but also as a critique of these sources and an indication of his own way of using them. The critical reflections upon his own writings and his gathering of information reveal that Buchel’s self-reflection is humanistic in nature. As with many of his other activities and actions – as Pollmann has noted in her biography – they were aimed at engaging in the critical examination of existing information in an attempt to contribute to the development of evidence-based knowledge.26 In a mixture of Dutch and Latin, Buchel provides comments that serve as factual gloss for the learned scholar that he aspired to be.27 In the diary kept by the schoolteacher David Beck from 1624 onwards, intended for his children to read, we find another form of interaction between existing texts (oral or printed), an author’s own work, and an author’s selfreflection. In this diary, Beck dealt with his conversations with neighbours and colleagues concerning sermons he had attended, but mostly books he had read. In an article tellingly entitled “Autobiographical Reading and Writing: The Diary of David Beck (1624)”, Jeroen Blaak highlighted that what Beck wrote owed as much to what he read as it did to the author himself.28 Indeed, Beck not only listened to or read new texts, but also frequently reread certain texts, including his own poems that he had transcribed in his manuscript: ‘a few […] books received regular attention throughout the year. His own poetry was one of them.’29 One could classify Beck’s comments on his own work as self-commentary, though this term is not employed by Blaak. In a poem on the passing of Maurice of Orange transcribed in the diary, autobiographical insights result in an intriguing combination of self-reflection and occasional poetry:

26  Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic 97. 27  The mixture of Dutch and Latin/Greek is also found in other notebooks and diaries produced by humanists, such as the four volumes by Gisbert Cuper (1644–1716), burgomaster of Deventer. See Chen B., “Politics and Letters: Gisbert Cuper as a Servant of Two Republics”, in Keblusek M. – Noldus B. (eds.), Double Agents. Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 154 (Leiden – Boston: 2011) 71–94. 28  Blaak J., “Autobiographical Reading and Writing: The Diary of David Beck (1624)”, in Dekker R. (ed.), Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context since the Middle Ages, Publikaties van de Faculteit der Historische en Kunstwetenschappen 38 (Hilversum: 2002) 61–89 (61). A full transcription of the diary can be found in Beck David, Spiegel van mijn leven: Haags dagboek 1624, ed. S. Veldhuijzen, Egodocumenten 3 (Hilversum: 1993). 29  Blaak, “Autobiographical Reading and Writing” 73.

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Mauritius, die waert den Phenix onser dagen, Vermaert van Occident tot bij den morgen-roodt; Geeft mijnen rouw de schuldt, indien ik uwe doodt Niet in Poeetscher stijl op huijden kan beklagen. Mijn Musa, siende dij van Atropos verslagen, Gaf dadelijk den geest, door droefheidt over-groot: Want dat uw sterven haer, ja totter doodt verdroot, Mijn levendich gesucht en’ geestloos dicht gewagen. Gij waert haer vuer, haer stof, haer leven en’ geluijt: Uw’ leven gaf haer stem: nu is den geest daer uijt. En mits Uw Cijpres-loof verdort mijn lauwer-bladen, En’ schoonste Blommekens, is ’t vremdt (o Helden-glans!) Dat ik, die voormaels sank in Goden-tael uw’ daden, Beklage dijnen doodt in menschen-tael althans? (Maurice, the Phoenix of our lifetime, renowned from the East to where the sun sets, blame it on my sorrow if I right now prove incapable of mourning your death properly as a poet. My muse, while watching your defeat by Atropos [one of the Three Fates], has passed away because of my sorrows. Her lively voice has been silenced by your death. For you gave her inspiration, made her live, gave her a reason to write and a voice. You were her all. Now that your laurels have faded, hers also fade. O lovely flowers, is it strange for me to mourn his death in words deriving from the human language, while I used to sing about his heroic deeds in the language of the gods?)30 Beck’s writing is a continuous flow of self-reflection and self-assessment on his poems.31 In this case, the ‘self’ that the poet exposes is meant to exercise influence over its audience, while at the same time reflecting on the private process of writing. Beck incorporates the rhetorical technique of self-assessment into his laudatio and mourning for the prince to emphasise his modest position and his dependence upon the prince’s virtues. Despite the fact that this rhetorical technique of amplification is largely topical, building the entire poem around this subject seems to indicate that he saw the occasion of the prince’s death mostly as an opportunity to make his poetic voice heard. 30  Quoted from diary transcriptions as found in Kossmann F., “Een Haags dichter onder Maurits”, Oud-Holland 39 (1921) 76–85 (80). See also Vooys C.G.N. de, “Een lijfpoëet van Prins Maurits”, Oud Holland 37 (1919) 177–188. 31  Blaak, “Autobiographical Reading and Writing” 80–82.

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In both Beck’s and Buchel’s case, self-reflection – intended only for the author and a few readers close to him – contributed to the formation of the poet’s self. On the one hand, Buchel envisioned himself as a writer who casts a critical eye on his own writing as well as his sources and the information they provided, and intended to use those sources in such a manner that he could be deemed an authority for his few readers. On the other hand, Beck focused to a much greater extent on his ability to imitate the example of authors or heroes that he found inspiring. In his case, too, his handful of readers (his own children) acted as a sounding board because the circle of listening, reading, and writing was designed to improve his work as a poet, for their benefit as well as his own. 3

Public Forms of Self-Legitimation and Self-Fashioning

In the learned culture that nurtured early modern Dutch literature, the use of Latin was one of the most powerful means of bolstering one’s public image. Through examination of copies of Latin works circulating in the Dutch Republic, Tom Deneire was able to establish that marginal notes were a common means of conferring status on one’s own writing. As can be expected, poets like Jacobus Zevecotius (c. 1596–1642) and Adrianus Hofferus (1589– 1644) referred to classical and biblical sources in their Latin verses. More striking is the addition of Latin glosses to their vernacular poetry. Deneire discusses this particular example: In a Dutch poem on the siege of ’s-Hertogenbosch Hofferus adds a marginal reference to William of Orange’s motto: “Symbola Principum Auriacorum: Saevis tranquillus in undis”, where the poem reads: “Uw Vader was gerust in ’t midden van de baren” (“Your Father was calm in the middle of the waves”) […]. The same is found in Hooft, who explains in one of his songs that he uses the Dutch word “pril” in the sense of venustus. Rather surprisingly, such Latin notes in vernacular poetry – the opposite is never found – are not that uncommon.32 Deneire concludes that Latin annotations to one’s own vernacular poetry add the extra element of claiming intellectual (and sociocultural) authority through the esteemed Latin language. This demonstrates the striving of authors such as 32  Deneire, “Neo-Latin and Vernacular Poetics of Self-Fashioning in Dutch Occasional Poetry (1635–1640)” 51.

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Hofferus and Hooft to validate their vernacular poetry by linking it to practices that were common in learned humanist circles.33 Further proof for Deneire’s thesis is found, for instance, in the career of the most remarkable female Dutch author of the period, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678). Van Schurman began writing in Latin and established a learned network of female contacts (e.g., Queen Christina of Sweden, Birgitta Thott of Denmark, Dorothy Moore of Ireland and England, Bathsua Makin of England, Marie Jars du Gournay of France, and Marie du Moulin of France and Holland), before turning to write in Dutch on religion, the issue of greatest importance to her.34 As a female writer, she needed to garner recognition and admiration for her accomplishments in Latin (amongst other languages): this allowed her to achieve the authority that she sought in religious matters when writing in the vernacular.35 Later in her life, in 1670, she joined Jean Labadie’s community of radical Christians. To explain her decision to her followers and friends, she wrote a treatise entitled Eukleria, written not in the vernacular but in Latin, the ‘language of authority’.36 The Dutch theologian Mirjam de Baar notes: As far as its structure is concerned, we can see parallels between the Eukleria and Augustine’s Confessions. As a seventeenth-century woman, however, Anna Maria van Schurman was in a very different position from that of the authoritative Church Father, who was completely free to produce theological works by virtue of his office. The narrative perspective van Schurman chose allowed her to link the “I” of her constructed life story and the “I” of her scholarly argument, thus enabling her to make a

33  Ibidem 49–50. 34  Beek P. van, “‘Alpha Virginum’: Anna Maria van Schurman”, in Churchill L.J. – Brown P.R. – Jeffrey J.E. (eds.), Women Writing Latin from Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, 3 vols., Women Writers of the World 6 (New York – London: 2002), vol. 3, 271–293. For van Schurman’s Dutch poetry, see Beek P. van (ed.), Verbastert Christendom: Nederlandse gedichten van Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), Christelijk erfgoed 4 (Houten: 1992). 35  Irwin J., Anna Maria van Schurman: Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated and Other Writings from Her Intellectual Circle (Chicago: 1998). 36  Baar M. de, “Gender, Genre and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Religious Writing: Anna Maria van Schurman and Antoinette Bourignon as Contrasting Examples”, in Bollmann A. (ed.), Ein Platz für sich selbst: Schreibende Frauen und ihre Lebenswelten (1450–1700) / A Place of Their Own: Women Writers and Their Social Environments (1450– 1700), Medieval to Early Modern Culture / Kultureller Wandel vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit 13 (Frankfurt am Main: 2011) 135–163 (150).

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contribution, almost as a matter of course, to the theological discourse of her day.37 The appropriation of the narrative structure of Augustine’s Confessions and the use of Latin jointly served as means to persuade her audience. The highly controversial act of joining Labadie’s community obviously required Van Schurman to engage in such persuasion. The narrative structure of the autobiography in particular provided her with a means for self-expression and selfreflection, for instance when she writes about her unusual education: Hierbij kwam dit bijzonder voordeel mijner opvoeding, dat mijn ou­ ders, als ik zeven jaar was, mij niet langer als twee maanden in de Franse school gehouden hebben. […] Zij hadden’er meer zin aan dat ik [bij] mijn meester de schrijf- en telkonst, ook de zingkonst zo wel door stem als op instrumenten, nevens mijn broeders leerde.38 (I profited the most from my parents’ decision – when I was seven years of age – to let me attend the French school for no longer than two months. They preferred me to be educated at home, together with my brothers; I was therefore educated in mathematics, writing, singing, and music.) The autobiographical narrative thus allowed her to emphasise that she was educated as a boy, in support of her self-fashioning as a learned author. By writing in Latin (the Dutch translation quoted here dates from eleven years later), she was able to demonstrate her education. In the example of Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679), it is obvious that not only writing but also translating Latin could boost one’s career, and that publishing self-commentaries upon one’s translation helped that process. The dedications of Vondel’s Vergil translations to wealthy patrons (the Prince of Orange, the son of the Amsterdam burgomaster Cornelis de Graeff, and the burgomaster himself) and other paratextual additions can be perceived as forms of self-authorisation and self-fashioning aimed at acquiring patronage 37  De Baar, “Gender, Genre and Authority” 151. See also Baar M. de, “‘Now as for the Faint Rumours of Fame Attached to My Name [...]’: The Eukleria as Autobiography”, in idem et alii (eds.), Choosing the Better Part: Anna Maria van Schurman, Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 146 (Amsterdam: 1996) 1–22. 38  Originally published in Latin (Eucleria, seu melioris partis electio, Tractatus brevem vitae ejus Delineationem exhibens. Altonae ad Albim, Cornelis van der Meulen: 1673), translated into Dutch more than a decade later: Eucleria of Uitkiezing van het Beste Deel (Amsterdam, Jacob van Velde: 1684) 20.

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Figure 12.1

(Detail of) the title page of Publius Virgilius Maroos Wercken vertaalt door J. van den Vondel (Amsterdam, Abraham de Wees: 1646). Image © Universiteitsbibliotheek Universiteit Utrecht, sign. MAG: Z QU 28

as a poet – necessary because the autodidact Vondel struggled to make ends meet. As Frans Blom and Sophie Reinders have argued, Vondel hoped to attract patronage so he could write his planned epic on the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine.39 In an introductory poem added to the last of his three translations (in both prose and poetry, published between 1646 and 1660), Vondel compared the creation of these translations to the quest of Aeneas. By the time his readers finished this preliminary poem, they might already have spotted the depiction of Augustus, sitting on a globe supported by Vergil, on the title page of Vondel’s translation [Fig. 12.1]. The link with Augustus on the title page is further developed and connected with Vondel’s career in the introductory poem, in which the poet describes how his muse travelled across the seas and landed on Vergil’s ‘werkstuk in Latijn’ (‘work written in Latin’): Myn zangheldin belande in ’t ende met verlangen Uit d’overrijcke zee van Maroos Herderszangen, En Lantgedichten, en Eneas dappren toght; Een werkstuk in Latijn door al zijn leên volwrocht En waerdigh aen August eerbiedigh op te draegen; Toen alle volcken Rome op haeren middagh zagen, Den vorst in ’t hooftgezagh, en ’t aerdtrijck, onder hem 39  Blom F.R.E. – Reinders S., “‘Men zou Virgilius zien opgaen in zijn’ tolck’: De functie van Vergilius in het artistiek ondernemerschap van Joost van den Vondel”, De zeventiende eeuw: Cultuur in de Nederlanden in interdisciplinair perspectief 27 (2011) 194–213. Available at: http://www.de-zeventiende-eeuw.nl/index.php/dze/article/view/1550/1577 (accessed 7 August 2017). The quotations that follow are taken from this article unless otherwise stated, translations are mine.

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Gebogen, luistren naer d’ontzaghelijcke stem Van eenen eenigen, geheilight om, door wetten En maght gesterckt, een wijs op recht en vrê te zetten: (In the end, my muse landed, being inspired by the lavishly rich sea of Maro’s pastoral poetry and Aeneas’s heroic quest, written in Latin and deeply elaborate in nature, rightfully dedicated to the honourable Augustus, who ruled Rome at the height of her power, when he alone, empowered by authority and blessings, controlled the world that obeyed him and the laws he established to bring peace and prosperity to the world.) The muse believes to have found a patron in de Graeff, just as Vergil had in Augustus. Vondel then goes on to argue: Nu ziet mijn zangheldin, na’et landen, wacker om Naer een’ Mecenas, die, genoodt in ’t heilighdom Der Zanggodinnen, zoo veel goddelijcke driften Kan schatten, uitgeleert in toetsen en in schiften Van stoffen, zin, en zwier, en aert, en maet, en klanck. Zy komt Mecenas GRAEFF dit Nederduitsch gezangk In zijne schaduw dan voorzingen, magh haer d’eere Gebeuren, datze uit zijn scherpluistrende oordeel leere Hoe verr’ haer wedergalm van Maroos voorzangk dwaelt, En wat haer glans verschilt van ’t licht, dat uit hem straelt. (Now that my muse has landed, she is looking for a Mecenas who – invited into their sanctuary – values the holiness and achievements of the Muses and the treasures displayed in the graceful, sonorous, elegant and sensible arts they produce. She believes to have found one in de Graeff and recites her Dutch poetry for him: if only she were endowed with the honour of working in his shadow and were able to draw wisdom from his critical judgement and use this wisdom to compare herself to the light that Maro produces.) Vondel then makes reference to the myth of Icarus: he would not dare to attempt comparison with Vergil, because he fears he would end up like Icarus, who died as a result of his ambition and had a sea named after him: Hoewel ick schroom naer d’eer des Mantuaens te streven Met wasse pennen, en om laegh, beneên zijn’ faem

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Blijf drijven, om geen zee te noemen naer mijn’ naem. Nu zinge ick midlerwijl gezang van korter adem.40 (I am hesitant to claim my reputation could be comparable to that of Vergil, my wings constructed from feathers and wax do not lift me up that high and no sea should be named after me, so I tone down my Muse.) Vondel then assesses his ‘past performances’ as the author of tragedies on Amsterdam’s heroes (Gysbreght van Aemstel, Batavische Gebroeders) and a poem on the inauguration of the new town hall, Inwydinge van ’t Stadthuis:41 Het zy mijn zangheldin uw Kapitool omvadem’, Of koninginnen, en veltheeren innehael’, Of ons tooneel stoffeere, of, als de nachtegael, Van tack in tack springe, en langs uwe graft, vol ooren, Een byschrift, grafschrift, of een liergezang laet’ hooren, Of een bekranste bruit, van ’t leckre bruitsbancket, Op Hymens tortslicht, groete, en vrolijck danss’ te bedt. De zangbeminners zijn belust op keur van wijzen, En watertanden naer verandering van spijzen. (Whether my muse describes the city [Amsterdam] and its rulers and warriors, or devotes herself – jumping from branch to branch like a nightingale – to epigrams or occasional poetry on funerals and weddings, or recites a hymn to a laureled bride and accompanies her to her bed with this joyful song: those who love poetry love my work and long for it, in all its variety.) He continues with an assessment of his own poetical power and impact. The burgomaster de Graeff, as well as others from Amsterdam’s regency, would be positioned next to ‘de stamvaders en de helden’ (‘the founding fathers and heroes’) as described by Anchises in book VI of the Aeneid, if they would commission an epic poem from him: Indien de tijt my gunt, naer ’s Mantuaners wetten, Den krijghshelt Bato met opklinckende trompetten 40  D  e werken van Vondel: Zesde deel: Vondels Vergilius-vertalingen, ed. J.F.M. Sterck et alii (Amsterdam: 1932) 91. My translation. Available at: (accessed 7 August 2017). 41  Blom – Reinders, “‘Men zou Virgilius zien opgaen in zijn’ tolck’” 209.

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In top te voeren, naer den eisch van ’t vrye lant, […]; men zal de boschnon hooren melden, Voorspellen op een ry de vaders en de helden Der volgende eeuwen, die alom met raet en daet Zich queeten in gevaer, tot nootweer voor den staet, […] Zoo trou in ’t leveren, gelijckze ’t trou beloofden.42 (If I were given the time to write a tragedy in the style of the Aeneid, I would be able to lift up the hero Bato and highlight the loyalty he embodied as the hero who freed our country with the blast of trumpets. […] One will hear the fortune teller of the woods, as she predicts how a range of burgomasters of Amsterdam and heroes will counteract the dangers that threaten their realm […], being as loyal as they plead to be.) ‘I can make them immortal’, Vondel proclaims, and he uses the public selfassessment of his capacities as a poet to make his case. His self-commentary is therefore meant to be an advertisement of his talents and to show his willingness to use them for the benefit of others. In a sense, Vondel’s paratexts resemble early modern (Italian) author-ordered poetry books described by Olivia Holmes, in which narratives of authors’ lives – labelled here as another form of self-commentary – governed the arrangement of their poetry. As Holmes explains, these efforts indicate that authors like Petrarch were much more concerned with their historical selves than were their immediate predecessors.43 The same kind of ‘career criticism’ is found in Vondel’s paratextual additions endowed with self-reflective undertones, through which the author was able to orchestrate both his self-representation and self-promotion. 4

Self-Criticism, Self-Promotion, and the Young Poet

How could young poets enter the early modern literary field? That step obviously required years of experience as well as self-criticism and self-promotion. Working within a paradigm that valued authors’ maturity and careful polishing of talent over youthful inexperience, how did young authors perceive and assess their own works? And how could they manifest themselves as poets?