Medieval and Early Modern Authorship
1006
2011
978-3-8233-7667-5
978-3-8233-6667-6
Gunter Narr Verlag
Guillemette Bolens
Lukas Erne
10.2357/9783823376675
CC BY-SA 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.de
Reports of his death having been greatly exaggerated, the author has made a spectacular return in English studies. This is the first book devoted to medieval and early modern authorship, exploring continuities, discontinuities, and innovations in the two periods which literary histories and institutional practices too often keep apart. Canonical authors receive sustained attention (notably Chaucer, Gower, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Marvell), and so do key issues in the current scholarly debate, such as authorial self-fashioning . the fictionalisation of authorship, the posthumous construction of authorship, and the nexus of authorship and authority . Other important topics whose relations to authorship are explored include adaptation, paratext, portraiture, historiography, hagiography, theology, and the sublime.
"This rich, challenging and exceptionally well conceived collection addresses the construction of authorship in medieval and early modern England, and revises received opinion in important ways. All the essays are worth attention; several should be considered essential reading. "
Stephen Orgel, J. E. Reynolds Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University
<?page no="0"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25 Medieval and Early Modern Authorship Edited by Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne <?page no="1"?> Medieval and Early Modern Authorship Edited by Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne <?page no="2"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Lukas Erne Volume 25 <?page no="3"?> Medieval and Early Modern Authorship Edited by Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne <?page no="4"?> Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Publiziert mit Unterstützung der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. © 2011 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem und alterungsbeständigem Werkdruckpapier. Internet: http: / / www.narr.de E-Mail: info@narr.de Einbandgestaltung: Martin Heusser, Zürich Druck und Bindung: Laupp & Göbel, Nehren Printed in Germany ISSN 0940-0478 ISBN 978-3-8233-6667-6 <?page no="5"?> Table of Contents Introduction 11 Helen Cooper (Cambridge) Choosing Poetic Fathers: The English Problem 29 Robert R. Edwards (Pennsylvania State) Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal in Late-Medieval England 51 Lynn S. Meskill (Paris-Diderot) The Tangled Thread of Authorship: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall 75 Johann Gregory (Cardiff) The “author’s drift” in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: A Poetics of Reflection 93 Neil Forsyth (Lausanne) Authorship from Homer to Wordsworth via Milton 107 Stephen Hequembourg (Harvard) Marvell’s Pronouns and the Ethics of Representation 125 Patrick Cheney (Pennsylvania State) “The forms of things unknown”: English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 137 John Blakeley (Plymouth St Mark and St John) Exchanging “words for mony”: The Parnassus Plays and Literary Remuneration 161 Colin Burrow (Oxford) Fictions of Collaboration: Authors and Editors in the Sixteenth Century 175 <?page no="6"?> Emma Depledge (Geneva) Authorship and Alteration: Shakespeare on the Exclusion Crisis Stage and Page, 1678-1682 199 Julianna Bark (Geneva) Portraiture, Authorship, and the Authentication of Shakespeare 215 Rita Copeland (Pennsylvania) Producing the Lector 231 Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi (Siena) The Logic of Authorship in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde 251 Nicole Nyffenegger (Bern) Gestures of Authorship in Medieval English Historiography: The Case of Robert Mannyng of Brunne 265 Alice Spencer (Turin) “By Auctorite of Experyence”: The Role of Topography in Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints 277 Alastair Minnis (Yale) Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology: A Crisis of Medieval Authority? 293 Notes on Contributors 309 Index of Names 315 A Note from the General Editor 325 <?page no="7"?> General Editor’s Preface SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature) is a publication of SAUTE , the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English. Established in 1984, it first appeared every second year, was published annually from 1994 to 2008, and now appears three times every two years. Every second year, SPELL publishes a selection of papers given at the biennial symposia organized by SAUTE . Nonsymposium volumes are usually collections of papers given at other conferences organized by members of SAUTE , in particular conferences of SANAS , the Swiss Association for North American Studies and, more recently, of SAMEMES , the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. However, other proposals are also welcome. Decisions concerning topics and editors are made by the Annual General Meeting of SAUTE two years before the year of publication. Volumes of SPELL contain carefully selected and edited papers devoted to a topic of literary, linguistic and - broadly - cultural interest. All contributions are original and are subjected to external evaluation by means of a full peer review process. Contributions are usually by participants at the conferences mentioned, but volume editors are free to solicit further contributions. Papers published in SPELL are documented in the MLA International Bibliography. SPELL is published with the financial support of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. Information on all aspects of SPELL , including volumes planned for the future, is available from the General Editor, Prof. Lukas Erne, Département de langue et littérature anglaises, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genève, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland, e-mail: lukas.erne@unige.ch. Information about past volumes of SPELL and about SAUTE , in particular about how to become a member of the association, can be obtained from the SAUTE website at http: / / www.saute.ch. Lukas Erne <?page no="9"?> Acknowledgements This volume includes a selection of essays which originated as contributions to the 2010 conference of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies ( SAMEMES ) at the University of Geneva. We wish to thank all those who were involved in the organization of the conference and are grateful to the Board of SAMEMES , in particular Antoinina Bevan-Zlatar, Margaret Bridges, Indira Ghose, and Denis Renevey, for their support and guidance. The conference, at which more than sixty papers were presented on the topic of medieval and early modern authorship, was made possible by the financial support of the Swiss National Research Foundation, the Société Académique de Genève, and the Faculté des Lettres and the English Department of the University of Geneva. We thank the anonymous peer reviewers who assisted us in the selection process and helped improve the essays, and we are grateful to Margaret Bridges, Neil Forsyth, Anthony Mortimer, Paul Schubert, R. Allen Shoaf, and Richard Waswo, who have generously given of their time and expertise. Finally, cordial thanks to Keith Hewlett for assistance in the preparation of this volume for print, Martin Heusser for designing the cover, and Ioana Balgradean for help with the index. <?page no="11"?> Introduction Let us begin with an early early modern edition of a work by a late medieval author. In 1532, Thomas Berthelette, printer to the King, published John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Berthelette’s was not the first edition of Gower’s poem - William Caxton had issued it in 1483 - but, with the exception of Berthelette’s own, largely identical reprint of 1554, none was to follow until the early nineteenth century. Those who read the Confessio from the time of Sir Thomas Wyatt to that of the early Romantics chiefly read him as mediated by Berthelette. In preparing his edition, Berthelette took decisions which shaped the authorial construction of Gower. Caxton had not typographically distinguished between the different parts of Gower’s text, but Berthelette did: he printed the English text in blackletter, the Latin glosses in a smaller blackletter font, and the Latin verses in a Roman font. Since the Latin glosses were printed not in the margins but within the main columns, the resulting appearance of a text which is continually interrupted suggested that Gower was “a compiler and not a poet in the same way as, for example, Chaucer” (Echârd 117). What may have reinforced the impression that Berthelette’s edition is a compendium of stories gathered by Gower is the detailed table of contents, extending over ten pages, which precedes the Confessio. The view of Gower as compiler of a disjointed hodgepodge has little in common with that of modern scholarship. C. S. Lewis, for instance, held that “Gower everywhere shows a concern for form and unity which is rare at any time and which, in the fourteenth century in England, entitles him to all but the highest praise” (198-99). What provided an impression of compilation, in other words, was the Confessio’s bibliographic constitution in Berthelette’s edition more than Gower’s artistic design. In addition to suggesting that Gower was a compiler, Berthelette’s edition casts him in the role of commentator by means of the prominent Latin glosses before the stories, which guide the readers’ response to them Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 11-27. <?page no="12"?> 12 Introduction (Machan 156). For evidence of the influence of Berthelette’s construction of Gower as commentator, one may need to look no further than Pericles, the play which modern scholarship suggests Shakespeare wrote in co-authorship with George Wilkins (Vickers 291-332). The play dramatizes the story of Apollonius as told in Book VIII of the Confessio. Shakespeare and Wilkins’s indebtedness to Gower is such that they are believed to have worked with a copy of the Confessio open before them (Bullough 360). But Gower not only provided one of the chief sources for Pericles; he also functions as a character within it, “Gower” being the name of the Chorus figure who appears before each act and at the end of the play, summarizing and commenting on the action. Shakespeare and Wilkins, then, dramatized not only a tale told by Gower but also Berthelette’s bibliographic construction of Gower as commentator. In a well-known passage of his “Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences,” St Bonaventure distinguishes the auctor from the commentator, the compilator, and the scriptor. Whereas the words of the auctor form “the principal part” of a text with “those of others being annexed merely by way of confirmation,” the commentator chiefly writes down the words of other men and adds his own “merely to make clear the argument,” and the compilator simply “put[s] together material . . . not his own” (Minnis and Scott 229). Berthelette’s edition in some ways fashions Gower as a compilator and commentator more than as an auctor. The dedicatory epistle addressed to King Henry VIII is in keeping with Berthelette’s strategy of down-playing Gower’s authorial status. Berthelette affirms that “it was not moche greatter peyne to that excellent clerke the morall John Gower to compyle the same noble warke / than it was to me to prynt it / no man wyll beleue it / without conferring both the printis / the olde and myn to gether” (sig. aaii r ). In order to highlight his own agency, Berthelette belittles that of Gower, who was not an auctor but a “clerke” whose only merit was to “compyle” the Confessio. It seems entirely fitting that Berthelette also adds the epithet to Gower’s name which has done the greatest damage to his reputation through the centuries: “morall John Gower.” Berthelette’s address “To the Reader” praises the Confessio’s “furtheraunce of the lyfe to vertue” (sig. aaii v ) and its “manyfolde eloquent reasons / sharpe and quicke argumentes / and examples of great auctorite / perswadynge vnto vertue / not onely taken out of the poetes / oratours / history wryters / and philosophers / but also out of the holy scripture’ (sigs. aaii r-v ). Berthelette’s paratext was decisive, as Tim William Machan has shown, in establishing the “judgment of morality as Gower’s preeminent characteristic” (152). <?page no="13"?> Introduction 13 The passage of Berthelette’s dedicatory epistle from which the above words are excerpted deserves to be quoted more fully, since it illustrates that Berthelette’s understanding of Gower’s authorship was contested. Addressing King Henry VIII, Berthelette (sig. aaii r ) writes: I had printed this warke [i.e. the Confessio] / to deuyse with my selfe / whether I myght be so bolde to presente your hyghnesse with one of them / and so in your gracis name putte them forthe. your moste hygh and most princely maieste abasshed and cleane discouraged me to so to do / both bicause the present (as concernynge the value) was farre to symple / as me thought / and bycause it was none other wyse my acte / but as I toke some peyne to prynte it more correctly than it was before. And though I shulde saye / that it was not moche greatter peyne to that excellent clerke the morall John Gower to compyle the same noble warke / than it was to me to prynt it / no man wyll beleue it / without conferring both the printis / the olde and myn to gether. This little-noticed passage provides a fascinating glimpse of the monarch’s view of authorship. Berthelette wanted to dedicate the Confessio to Henry, but Henry was reluctant, and what accounts for his reluctance is his view of authorial agency. For Berthelette, Gower’s agency in compiling and his own agency in printing are similar - Gower’s “peyne” was “not moche greatter.” For Henry, however, the “acte” was basically Gower’s, not the printer’s, who did no more than improve an earlier printing. And the honour and prestige that are bestowed by a royal dedicatee should be reserved, in Henry’s opinion, to the author. The privileged position Henry VIII seems prepared to assign to the published author may seem surprising. When the Stationers’ Company was incorporated in 1557 - ten years after Henry’s death - to regulate the workings of the book trade, the right to reproduce texts came to inhere precisely not in authors but stationers. Once a text had reached the hands of a stationer, an author had little or no power over its dissemination. Many texts reached print unbeknownst to the author, and even more texts, in particular fictional texts, were published without an author’s name on the title page (North). What is often ignored, however, is that a Royal Proclamation of 1546, late in Henry VIII’s reign, required that “every book should bear the author’s and the printer’s name” (McKenzie 39). The attempt to make the author’s name an integral part of books seems to have been short-lived and superseded by the royal charter of incorporation of 1557. Nonetheless, late in the reign of King Henry VIII, it appeared for a short time that the book trade would be more author-centred than it subsequently became. Henry’s opinion as reported by Berthelette - according to which the author is the sole <?page no="14"?> 14 Introduction agent involved in book production worthy of the dignity of royal patronage - may well reflect the spirit of the 1546 Royal Proclamation which highlighted the authority and responsibility of authors. The bibliographic makeup of Berthelette’s Confessio and its reception history make of the edition a crucial document in the authorial construction of Gower. Chaucer - who, like Gower, had been edited by Caxton in the 1480s, and who had his works published by William Thynne in 1532 - kept being re-edited, notably by John Stowe in 1561, Thomas Speght in 1598 and 1602, John Urry (with others) in 1721, and Thomas Tyrwhitt in 1775. Gower’s Confessio, by contrast, continued to be read in Berthelette’s edition. As Chaucer was solidifying his position as the father of English poetry (see Cooper below, 29-50), the Chaucer-Gower pairing increasingly played in the latter’s disfavour, a development in which Berthelette’s edition may have played its part. Stressing Berthelette’s importance for the making of “Gower” must not blind us to the importance of Gower himself in this process. The initial paratext - address to the reader, table of contents, and dedicatory epistle - takes up the first fourteen pages of Berthelette’s edition, but then Gower is allowed to announce his authorial project in his own voice: “I wol go the myddell wey, | And wryte a boke bytwene the twey; | Somwhat of lust / and somwhat of lore” (Ai r ). Gower’s prologue and Latin commentary frame the love narratives with an apparatus which lend his writings authorial prestige and argue for its moral usefulness. Gower modelled the form of the Confessio on the commented versions of classical texts of his time, in particular Ovid, a form which thus comes with an ambitious authorial claim (Minnis “De Vulgari Auctoritate”). In addition to claiming the status of author by means of the formal constitution of his work, Gower enters the fiction of the poem as a literary persona (Amans identifies himself as “John Gower” in his reply to Venus at VIII.2322), and, as Robert R. Edwards helps us see below (59-60), he does so by explicitly equating the persona with the author: “fingens se auctor esse Amantem” (I.59 gloss). As Edwards shows, Gower was “the paradigmatic author in late-medieval England” (57). In the Confessio, he not only conspicuously fashioned himself as an author; he also fictionalized his own authorship. *** Bridging the medieval and the early modern - which our literary histories and institutional practices too often keep apart - Gower’s Confessio Amantis and its edition by Berthelette can serve to highlight an important aim of this collection. The medieval text and its early modern edi- <?page no="15"?> Introduction 15 tion also bring together several key issues which the following essays address, and the collection is loosely assembled around four of them, as reflected by the order of the contributions: authorial self-fashioning, the fictionalization of authorship, the posthumous construction of authorship, and the nexus of authorship and authority. Other thematic groupings might have been possible, and the collection has not been divided into formal parts, since they would suggest greater compartmentalization than it seems desirable to impose. Nonetheless, each of the following essays is related to others, and the aim of this part of the introduction is to make them enter into dialogue with each other - and with authorship studies more generally. Thanks to Harold Bloom, the subject of fatherhood has long been important to thinking about authorship. According to The Anxiety of Influence, the author’s Oedipal struggle with his poetic father to secure his own survival into posterity is of greatest relevance to the romantic period, though the second edition of Bloom’s study traces the dynamic back as far as Shakespeare. Helen Cooper’s essay articulates a model very different from Bloom’s which is of particular relevance to the medieval and early modern period, in which authorial filiation is not a source of anxiety but of self-fashioning. In this model, poetic sonship is a source of pride and ambition, something not to be overcome but vindicated. Rather than killing the poetic father so as not to be killed by him, the poet chooses his father and proclaims him as the source of his poetic life, giving him voice and authority, much as the muses or divine inspiration are said to do in other texts. This form of authorial selffashioning which functions through the invocation of poetic ancestry becomes possible once earlier writings have identifiable and identified authors, in other words, once “the authority of story [has made] the transition to the authority of the author” (34), a development in English literary history for which Cooper establishes the importance of the Ricardian age with Gower and, in particular, Chaucer. Cooper’s essay thus provides an early history of English poets placing themselves in an authorial genealogy, inheriting from their predecessors not only the authority of a tradition within which they can place themselves but also “the right to attach their own names to their poetry” (36) - the right, in other words, to be perceived as authors. Edwards’s essay complements Cooper’s by exploring how Gower and Chaucer fashioned themselves as authors. As Edwards shows, important work on medieval authorship has been done which focuses on pedagogy - the study of canonical authors in teaching - and exegesis, which allows us to distinguish the role of the author from other roles in textual production, such as those of the commentator and the compiler. His essay adds to this work by investigating how medieval authorship <?page no="16"?> 16 Introduction can inflect internally the meaning of aesthetic creation, as evidenced by the works of Chaucer and Gower. Edwards demonstrates that Gower had the “ambition to be seen as an author” and insisted “on the coherence of his canon” and “authorial project” (58-59); similarly, Edwards shows that “authorship is an issue internal to Chaucer’s writing throughout his career” and that he too “has a precise sense of his poetic canon” (63). Whereas La amon, around the turn of the thirteenth century, had considered himself a compiler, Chaucer and Gower clearly thought of themselves as authors. The invocation of poetic ancestors which Cooper investigates is of course not the same thing as their actual use as source texts. Chaucer, as Cooper points out, drew on many contemporary or near-contemporary writers, although he neglects to mention most of them, aligning himself instead with classical poets at the end of Troilus and Criseyde. As Lynn Meskill’s essay reveals, even Ben Jonson, although he filled the margins of the 1605 edition of Sejanus with references to the classical authorities on whom he drew, consciously fails to record other borrowings. Despite these omissions, the Sejanus quarto records Jonson’s indebtedness to Tacitus, Juvenal, and other classical authors so conspicuously that the 1605 quarto is a “typographic monument to authorship” (75). With Jonson, in other words, the material book becomes the locus in which Jonson fashions himself as author, and he does so by proudly placing himself within an authorial genealogy. It is precisely by rendering visible his debts to others that Jonson stages what Joseph Loewenstein has called “possessive authorship.” For Jonson, giving their due to others and staking a claim to his own clearly go hand in hand. As Meskill’s comparative study of the use of sources in Sejanus and Julius Caesar shows, the nature of Shakespeare’s debts to Plutarch is not unlike that of Jonson to his sources, but contrary to the 1605 Sejanus, editions of Julius Caesar render the playwright’s debts to Plutarch invisible. Shakespearean invocations of authorial ancestry, apart from Gower in the collaborative Pericles, tend to be rare and indirect. Shakespeare’s model of authorship, in other words, is radically different from Jonson’s and Spenser’s, to whose laureate authorship Shakespeare may have responded with a “counter-laureate authorship,” as Patrick Cheney has suggested (Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship). Not only Meskill’s but also Johann Gregory’s contribution to this volume build on Cheney’s argument, and Gregory, like Meskill, sees Shakespeare’s authorial self-fashioning in contrast to Jonson’s. He holds that Shakespeare’s thinking about authorship made him craft plays, like Troilus and Cressida, in which “the author’s drift” is precisely not stressed, in which “Shakespeare leaves the significance of his plays, and even the value of his own authorship, to reflect into the future” (103). This helps us rec- <?page no="17"?> Introduction 17 ognize a model of distinctly unpossessive authorship which may throw new light on the choice of titles like As You Like It and Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Whereas Shakespeare turned against Spenser’s model of laureate authorship, Milton built upon it. Spenser and Milton enlist themselves in the great epic tradition, Spenser fashioning himself as a modern-day Virgil whose generic career pattern he first imitated and then revised (Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight), Milton as a modern-day Homer: “he stages himself as blind narrator” in Paradise Lost and “explicitly invokes the parallel with Homer . . . and his desire for similar renown” (118). As Neil Forsyth, from whose essay these words are quoted, shows, Milton fashioned his public persona very carefully, “more so than any previous writer, even Spenser and Ben Jonson,” and “made an extraordinary effort” to keep control over his works (111-12). Milton’s writings return to himself so recurrently that a scholar could devote a whole monograph to Milton on Himself (Diekhoff), which, as Forsyth argues, shows that Milton not only succeeds Homer but also anticipates Wordsworth, who famously devoted The Prelude to the “Growth of a Poet’s Mind” - Wordsworth’s own mind, that is. While Forsyth places Milton’s notion of authorship on the trajectory that leads from Homer to Wordsworth, Stephen Hequembourg contrasts Milton with Marvell. As is well known, both served Cromwell’s Council of State as Latin secretary, and both were poets and controversialists, yet the authorial personae they construct in their political and religious pamphlets could hardly be more different. Hequembourg focuses on pronouns, arguing that Marvell’s “subtle formulations of authorship in the field of political and religious polemic” provide him with “an opportunity to elaborate an ethics of representation - to inquire who is able to speak for others, against others, or in the place of others” (126). He shows how Marvell, “unable and probably unwilling to adopt Milton’s monolithic ‘I,’ . . . finds himself caught in a network of rival pronouns” (126) - we, thou, you, he, and it, while “the authorial ‘I’ disappears almost entirely” (132). Given their very different use of pronouns, it seems fitting that while Milton’s writings keep returning to himself, Marvell continually escapes from himself, changing chameleonlike, to borrow the image from the subtitle of Nigel Smith’s recent biography. The essays by Edwards, Meskill, Gregory, and Hequembourg suggest that the authorship of those who traditionally head the medieval and early modern canon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, may be better understood if we are simultaneously aware of the authorship of their contemporaries: Chaucer and Gower; Shakespeare and Jonson; Milton and Marvell. Chaucer’s authorial project, as Edwards shows, interacts <?page no="18"?> 18 Introduction with that of his contemporary Gower and provides a counterpoint to it. Shakespeare’s authorial invisibility (Meskill) and the difficulty of locating his authorial drift (Gregory) are brought into focus by Jonson’s selfassertive authorial visibility, indeed monumentality. And Milton’s “strong single voice” and “monolithic ‘I’” (125-26) gains in distinctiveness, as Hequembourg shows, if considered alongside Marvell’s more uncertain, shifting, and searching authorial voice, gesturing towards a text that speaks “for and in place of its author” (126). Read side by side, the essays by Meskill and Hequembourg suggest that the authorial dynamic between Jonson and Shakespeare is not unlike that, a bit over half a century later, between Milton and Marvell. Jonson and Milton are two of the three “self-crowned laureates” to whom the late Richard Helgerson devotes the influential study of that title, so the similarities between their possessive authorial personae has not escaped critical attention. Yet the continuities between Shakespeare’s and Marvell’s self-effacing authorial projects have been less noticed. Shakespeare, the perfect ventriloquist, disappears behind his characters, infusing himself into all and none of them; Marvell disappears behind his pronouns with an ethics of authorship that leads to his self-effacement. The cases of Shakespeare and Marvell suggest that we would benefit from a fuller account than is currently available of forms of self-concealing authorship. The contributions introduced so far focus on individual medieval and early modern authors (Chaucer, Gower, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Marvell) who use various devices like paratexts and the material book, references to their own works or their biography, invocations of poetic fatherhood, or pronouns in order to fashion their own authorial persona. Another group of contributions - by Patrick Cheney, John Blakeley, and Colin Burrow - is less interested in such forms of authorial self-fashioning than in how texts comment on more general configurations of authorship of their time, and in how they do so by fictionalizing authorship. In their analyses of fictionalizations of models of authorship, all three essays, as we will see, respond to the work of the late Richard Helgerson. Patrick Cheney locates a hitherto neglected fictionalization of early modern authorship in the sublime, which shares “a commitment to the project of literary greatness” (141). His inventory of the early modern sublime includes, for instance, a list of tragedies - from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy to John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore - which “critics have independently identified as seeming to be about, finally, the making of a great tragedy” (150). The Longinian authorial sublime, Cheney argues, “better theorizes much early modern literature than does Aristotle, Horace, or Sidney” and played “a centralizing role in the advent of modern English authorship” (137). Cheney’s project, in other words, is <?page no="19"?> Introduction 19 to identify a form of authorship which is central to early modern literature but does not conform to the Helgersonian model. Specifically, Cheney’s essay amounts to a revision of Helgerson’s model of laureate authorship. For Helgerson, what serves the project of literary greatness is the authorship of the self-crowned laureate, whose poetry benefits the state and the church, the laureate poet serving as a spokesman for the nation and as a teacher. Cheney identifies in the sublime “a new standard of authorship, located not simply in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical or Christian goodness, but also in the eternizing greatness of the author’s literary work” (155-56). John Blakeley focuses not on laureate authorship but on Helgerson’s notion of the Elizabethan writer as prodigal (The Elizabethan Prodigals) by examining the dramatization of authorship in the so-called Parnassus trilogy of plays, produced anonymously at the University of Cambridge late in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Even though written in Cambridge, the plays constitute a kind of dramatization of London’s literary field of their day, featuring two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors (Richard Burbage and William Kemp), a stationer (John Danter), and extended references to numerous writers (including Shakespeare, Jonson, and Spenser). As Blakeley puts it, “the plays enact what could be described as a materialist analysis of the conditions of literary production” (172) and thus constitute an excellent source for how professional authorship was viewed at the time. According to Helgerson, Elizabethan writers identified with the prodigal son, their careers conforming to the narrative of the prodigal son (from rebellion and wantonness to guilt) except for the concluding restoration. In this Helgersonian model (as exemplified by George Gascoigne, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and Philip Sidney), the writer as prodigal thus ends by turning away from literature in disillusionment. What Blakeley finds in the Parnassus plays is something quite different, however, namely “literary pursuit [which] is figured not as rebellion, but as obedience,” with “no evident anxiety, prevarication, or other reservation about the goal of authorship” (166). Colin Burrow engages with Helgerson by revising and refining his classification of late-Elizabethan writers into amateur (e.g. Philip Sidney), professional (e.g. Robert Greene), and laureate (e.g. Edmund Spenser), suggesting that the three types of writers “were in fact much less distinct in their origins” (176) than Helgerson allowed. He argues that poetic authorship in the second half of the sixteenth century “was substantially defined by changing relationships” between “a range of agents who would today be described as ‘editors’ . . . and authors” (176). Burrow shows how the representation of authorship in the paratexts of books of poetry witnesses the gradual emergence of the individual author from “fictions of collaboration” (187). The essay thus charts the <?page no="20"?> 20 Introduction genealogy of a model of authorship, “laureate authorship,” which emerges, Burrow argues, not so much from a new kind of poet and poetry as from a new way of representing (or fictionalizing) poetic writing in paratexts, a representation which sees authorial identity and activity as independent of those friends, editors, and overseers who had been central to the prefatory rhetoric of volumes of poetry all the way back to Tottel’s miscellany and The Mirror for Magistrates. Where Helgerson saw the birth of the laureate author Burrow identifies the “absorption of the editor and overseer functions into the figure of the author” (195). Like Cheney’s argument about the fictionalization of literary greatness through the sublime and Blakeley’s examination of the fictionalization of authorship in Troilus and Cressida, Burrow’s essay thus revises and adds to Helgerson’s work on early modern authorship while paying tribute to the powerful influence it keeps exerting. An important corollary of Burrow’s argument about the absorption of the editor or “overseer” into the author figure is his demonstration that in the decades before this absorption took place, the author - like Thomas More, Wyatt, or Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey - was typically dead by the time his works appeared in print. As Burrow puts it, “a central assumption of the mid-sixteenth century literary scene, and one which persisted until the final decade of the century” is that “major poetic works are generally retrospective” (182). Berthelette’s 1532 and 1554 editions of Gower’s Confessio Amantis with which this introduction started are a case in point. The publication of poetic works after the death of the author is part of a broader cultural mechanism, the posthumous construction of authorship. Authors are not born but made, and the making of a canonical author does not stop at the writer’s death. For the most prominent medieval and early modern authors, this mechanism has attracted considerable scholarly attention. Seth Lerer has shown, for instance, how the fifteenth-century literary system decisively shaped the cultural status of Chaucer. Thomas Dabbs has argued that the nineteenth century made Christopher Marlowe, and Michael Dobson that the eighteenth century made Shakespeare, while Gary Taylor has examined how successive ages from the Restoration to the present have continually reinvented Shakespeare. The essays by Emma Depledge and Julianna Bark contribute to this analysis of the posthumous construction of authorship. They do so by adding to Dobson and Taylor’s work on Shakespeare, who may well have had the most complex afterlife of all authors in the canon. Depledge’s examination of Shakespeare alterations of the Exclusion Crisis (1678-1682) raises questions about the relation between adaptation and authorship. Like Burrow, Depledge considers paratext as a crucial location in which authorship is constructed, and, as in the books Burrow <?page no="21"?> Introduction 21 examines, the paratextual construction of authorship is far from stable. In Burrow’s essay, the significant changes are diachronic; in Depledge’s, they are synchronic and media-specific: the paratexts written for performance in the theatre (prologues and epilogues) stress Shakespeare’s authorship, whereas the paratexts written for print publication (dedications and prefaces) vindicate the adapters’ authorship. The prominence of “Shakespeare” in prologues and epilogues of this politically unstable period, Depledge argues, results from the strategy of claiming in a context of tight theatre censorship that politically sensitive, topical adaptations were no more than innocuous plays by a playwright long dead. As print censorship was lax during the same years following the lapse of the Licensing Act, publication in book form left the adapters free to reclaim the plays as their own. The plays Depledge examines thus are or are not authored by Shakespeare, depending on the kinds of paratext one consults, demonstrating “with exceptional clarity the contingency of authorship at a specific moment in history” (211). The contingencies which determine the posthumous construction of “Shakespeare” result, as Dobson, Taylor, and Depledge show, in changing images of the author. As Bark’s essay demonstrates, this mechanism also applies to literal images. She argues that debates over the authenticity or not of purported likenesses of Shakespeare can tell us more about how Shakespeare was authorially constructed at a certain time, by certain people, than about the credentials of the portraits’ provenance. The recent debate over the Cobbe portrait, championed by the Doyen of Shakespeare studies, Stanley Wells, general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, seems a case in point. Similarly, that the Chandos portrait is often considered the only extant life portrait of Shakespeare may have more to do, as Bark suggests, with that portrait’s ownership by the National Portrait Gallery than with evidence that would vouchsafe its authenticity. Jointly, the essays by Depledge and Bark demonstrate that authorship is shaped by posthumous representations in word and image, at historically specific moments like the Exclusion Crisis as well as across the centuries. While the posthumous construction of medieval and early modern authors continues to this day, that of ancient authors was ongoing in medieval and early modern England. Rita Copeland investigates the latter as reflected by medieval grammatical curricula and the lists of authors they include. What confers authorial prestige in these reading lists, as Copeland shows, are not “qualities inherent in the authors” but their capacity to serve “towards forming ideal readers” (246). In other words, “the ‘advanced authors’ of the classical canon are directed towards forming ideal readers, not imitative authors” (246). The reading lists <?page no="22"?> 22 Introduction Copeland examines have in common that they “decisively shift their attention away from whatever may be in the text and direct it to what is in the reader” (246-47). They range in time from no later than the middle of the twelfth century (Conrad of Hirsau’s Dialogus super auctores) to after 1450 (a collection of epitomes of classical and medieval works), leading Copeland to conclude that “there is much less of a difference between medieval and early humanist uses of ancient literary culture than we often assume” (246). Copeland’s essay speaks to the contingent construction of authors long dead. It also alerts us to the intimate relation between authorship and authority: what readers confer on authors is authority, and it is the bestowing of authority by readers that makes authors. The close relation is embedded in the words and was even more so in the medieval period. The auctor is he whose writings have authority. When Chaucer’s Geffrey, in The House of Fame, says that “Non other auctour alegge I” (314), the dominant meaning of “auctour” is what we now call “authority” (see OED author, n.4): his telling of Dido’s lament, he is claiming, rests on no other authority than his own dream. The close relation between authorship and authority is also addressed in the remaining contributions to this collection, by Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi, Nicole Nyffenegger, Alice Spencer, and Alastair Minnis. D’Agata D’Ottavi, like Hequembourg, focuses on pronouns. She does so to distinguish between what she argues are two different uses of “I” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, respectively designating the narrator and the invented author. The latter claims to be translating a “Latin - and therefore authoritative - text” by “the imaginary author Lollius” (253) and “engages in a constant comparison between his own work and that of the imaginary author,” thus becoming a “character in the vernacular story” (253) who is allowed to suggest that “his understanding of the events is different from that of his source” (258). By the end of the poem, D’Agata D’Ottavi argues, Chaucer’s invented authortranslator has “appropriated the imagined authority of the fictitious Latin source” (260). The imagined transfer of authority from past auctor to present author which D’Agata D’Ottavi finds in Troilus and Criseyde is central, Nyffenegger argues, to medieval historiography and, specifically, the chronicle of Robert Mannyng of Brunne (thought to have been completed in the 1330s). Examining the claims for authority made by the “writing I” (266), Nyffenegger recognizes in them the historiographer’s diachronic struggle for authority: “There are those authors before him . . . whose authority he sometimes undermines in order to establish his; there are those authors who will come after him . . . Naturally, he does not want them to undermine his authority in order to establish theirs” (266). As a <?page no="23"?> Introduction 23 result, she argues, historiography “becomes a dynamic of appropriation and control: the author wants as much of the authority from the auctores as he can get, and he wants to lose as little as possible of his own to future authors” (266-67). A specific strategy to suggest authorial control, according to Nyffenegger, is to represent the source as a physical book which, because of its physicality, can be handled and thus controlled. Nyffenegger suggests that such “gestures of authorship” (267) are present in medieval historiography generally and are deployed by Mannyng with particular skill. Whereas Mannyng acquires his authority by appropriating his predecessors’, Osbern Bokenham - Spencer argues - grounds his authority in topography. Bokenham’s mid-fifteenth-century lives of native saints in the recently discovered Abbotsford Legenda Aurea and his geographical treatise, the Mappula Angliae, see in Britain’s marginal place on the mappae mundi grounds for its “exceptionalism and exaltation” (280). Spencer argues that Bokenham uses the “topographical localisation of native saints in an attempt to locate his own authority” (289): “topography serves to locate . . . not only the saintly corpse, but also the literary authority of the hagiographical corpus” (277). By foregrounding the geographical origins of his native saints, Bokenham thus claims for himself a specifically English authorial identity. His project, Spencer argues, is in effect a re-evaluation of the medieval English canon, “claiming for his purportedly ‘plain’ vernacular the illustrious status which Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate implicitly asserted for their own aureate styles,” thus rooting “literary authority in linguistic authenticity” (282). In the concluding essay, Minnis cautions that if we want to arrive at an accurate understanding of late medieval concepts of the author, we must not separate secular and sacred literary theory. What partly occasioned the rise in the authority of poetic authorship, Minnis contends, is the way poetry’s relation to theology was perceived: poetry shared with theology and the Bible “certain styles and methods of literary procedure” (305), such as figurative, affective, and imaginative writing. This association of theology, queen of the sciences, with poetry was problematic since it was running the risk of demeaning theology, obliging “generation after generation of medieval theologians to defend the epistemological and moral credentials of their subject and the ‘scientific’ basis of its knowledge” (305). On the other hand, as Minnis shows, the relation of theology and poetry was beneficial to the latter and was “exploited to great effect by innovative literary theorists of trecento Italy, including Francis Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio” (303), resulting in a significant increase in the authority of poetic authorship. <?page no="24"?> 24 Introduction *** Although this introduction has organized the following essays around four topics, some essays contribute to several of them, and the divisions are far from water-tight. Two topics are examined in work on both medieval and early modern literature (authorial self-fashioning and the posthumous construction of authorship), whereas one has attracted more attention from those working on early modern (the fictionalization of authorship) and another more from those focusing on medieval texts (the authorship/ authority nexus). This distribution of thematic and period interests - even though it was not originally intended but has organically grown out of the work produced for this collection - may in itself make an important point about the continuities and differences in medieval and early modern authorship. Both deserve to be stressed: the continuities since the institutional iron curtain between the “medieval” and the “early modern” easily makes us lose sight of them; the differences because they may give us a better sense of historically specific configurations of authorship. Concerning the continuities, although one might think that the historicist thesis, aided by Michel Foucault, 1 about the post-medieval origins of the author may no longer need refutation (Burke, Vickers), it remains common to associate the “birth” or “emergence” of the English author with the early modern period (Dutton, Pask). Yet the English author was alive and well at least as early as Ricardian England. As this collection makes clear, Chaucer and Gower thought of themselves and each other as authors and were perceived as such by their contemporaries. Chaucer’s posthumous construction as author developed continuously in late medieval and early modern England (Lerer, Krier). Print culture did not start affecting English authorship until late in the fifteenth century, but it aided the production not only of early modern but also of medieval authors, as the example of Berthelette’s Gower edition illustrates, and as the study by Alexandra Gillespie has more fully demonstrated. Even English laureate authorship, whose beginnings used to be located with Spenser (Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates), has now been firmly pushed back as far as John Skelton (Griffiths; Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry 115-38) and John Lydgate (Meyer-Lee). In other words, our understanding of early English authorship remains incomplete unless we think of it in terms which are genuinely medieval- 1 “There was a time when the texts we call ‘literary’ (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author . . . A reversal occurred in the seventeenth or eighteenth century” (Foucault 149). <?page no="25"?> Introduction 25 and-early-modern and recognize the various continuities from the times of Chaucer and Lydgate to those of Shakespeare and Milton. At the same time, there is no denying that the configurations of authorship in medieval and early modern England underwent considerable change. What changed, most obviously, are the material conditions in which writers worked and had their texts disseminated. For professional authors like Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe to emerge, for instance, a flourishing commercial theatre and book trade were necessary. As Blakeley writes, it is in the Elizabethan period “that for the first time it becomes possible to earn a full-time living as a writer” (162) in the marketplace. Spenser and others after him used print in ways which decisively shaped their perception as authors. Not only the material conditions but also the theory of authorship changed. Whereas the medieval author was usually considered a secondary efficient cause, subordinate to the primary efficient cause, God (Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship 94-103), the humanist poetics of Italians like Cristoforo Landino and Julius Caesar Scaliger and, in their wake, Philip Sidney and George Puttenham came to conceive of the poet as an ex-nihilo creator by analogy to God (Mack). We may recognize here the result of long-term, largescale changes brought about by humanism and the reformation, by secularization and what Barthes called the “prestige of the individual” (49). Yet such master-keys to historical causation, as we are rightly warned below, must not blind us to the local contingencies with which authorship is always bound up: Burrow’s diachronic account of poetic authorship in the latter half of the sixteenth century takes its course not as “a simple consequence of large-scale historical changes, but partly because of a sequence of accidents” (190). Any attempt to reduce the history of medieval and early modern authorship to a single overarching narrative is thus bound to fail. What we need instead are local, detailed case studies, which is what this collection aims to supply. Lukas Erne <?page no="26"?> 26 Introduction References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Second edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. VI. London: Routledge, 1966. Burke, Sean. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Second edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Third edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cheney, Patrick. Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. . Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. . Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Dabbs, Thomas. Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991. Diekhoff, John. Milton on Himself. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Dutton, Richard, “The Birth of the Author.” Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England. Ed. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 153-78. Echârd, Sian. A Companion to Gower. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author? ” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 141-60. Gillespie, Alexandra. Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1473-1557. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. London: Thomas Berthelette, 1532. Griffiths, Jane. John Skelton and Poetry Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Helgerson, Richard. The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1976. . Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1983. Krier, Theresa M., ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. <?page no="27"?> Introduction 27 Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Loewenstein, Joseph. Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Machan, Tim William. “Thomas Berthelette and Gower’s Confessio.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 143-66. Mack, Michael. Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005. McKenzie, D. F. “Stationers’ Company Liber A: An Apologia”. The Stationers’ Company and the Book Trade 1550-1990. Ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1997. 35-63. Meyer-Lee, Robert J. Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Minnis, A. J. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. London: Scolar Press, 1984. . “De Vulgari Auctoritate: Chaucer, Gower and Men of Great Authority.” Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. R. F. Yeager. Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991. 36-74. and A. B. Scott. Medieval and Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100-c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. North, Marcy L. The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor- Stuart England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pask, Kevin. The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Smith, Nigel. Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. London: Hogarth Press, 1989. Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, gen. eds. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 [1986]. <?page no="29"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers: The English Problem Helen Cooper Poetry is self-consciously created within existing traditions; and many poets choose to invoke a specific poetic forebear to create the kind of reader receptivity they want, whether or not the invocation is strictly accurate. In the English tradition, the choice of an authoritative father, whether God or the classical poets, could further find itself at odds with the use of the mother tongue; and the anonymity of much Middle English poetry also at first prevented the establishment of a poetic genealogy. Chaucer passed on to his successors the right to name themselves, and he is also the first poet in English to name his poetic forebears - though the ones he chooses are not his actual sources, but the giants of the Classics. Many later writers down to Dryden were happy to place themselves within this new genealogy that incorporated Chaucer himself, though the dominance of humanist education and the increasing inaccessibility of Chaucer’s vernacular rendered such a line of descent increasingly problematic. In the last century, only James Joyce, in Ulysses, seems to have carried through the idea of Chaucer’s parenthood with conviction, and that is done silently. The paradox of the title is entirely intentional. Your father is one relationship you cannot choose: having a father is as much a precondition of your existence as your existence is a precondition of your ability to choose. When it comes to poetic fatherhood, however, a poet can indeed choose whom he will nominate as his father, whether or not the descent to which he lays claim is genetically true. Naming a forebear may well be less a matter of strict accuracy than a statement of poetic purpose, of the way a poet wants to present himself and how he wants his readers to understand him. Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 29-50. <?page no="30"?> 30 Helen Cooper It has long been recognized that poetry constitutes a tradition which is passed down by a process of learning or imitation or adaptation from model to copy, master to disciple, symbolic father to son. The process of poets actually placing themselves in such a line nonetheless has a rather fitful history, and especially so in English. The earliest surviving poetry invoked, not the shade or influence of an earlier poet, but the gods, or more literal forebears in the shape of one’s ancestors or the great heroes of the past: “O Gilgamesh, lord of Kullab, great is thy praise” is the opening of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. The Greeks famously associated poetry with divine inspiration, personified as the Muses. A more explicit genealogy of poetics occasionally emerges as poetry becomes a matter of written composition, as Lucretius refers to Epicurus as his father (De rerum naturae III.9), but such direct citation remains rare. Cicero’s description of Herodotus as the father of history has nothing personal about it (De legibus I.5), and Horace, who names a large number of earlier poets, cites almost all of them for their inadequacy as models. Virgil does pay homage to his forebears, but more indirectly. His reference to the sicelides musae, Sicilian Muses, in his Eclogues (iv.1) is sufficient to recall Theocritus; and in the Aeneid, although Homer is never named, the imitation of topics (the opening citations of Troy and the wrath of Juno to match the Iliad’s wrath of Achilles), along with the invocation of the gods, locates him firmly within the epic tradition. The idea of divine inspiration, that the poet was a mouthpiece for God or the gods to speak through, remained something of a constant for religious poetry in a Christian age as well. Many religious poets looked to the Bible, the Word of God, as the source for their own words; others claimed or prayed for more direct divine inspiration, even when their style and rhetoric has more evident earthly sources. George Herbert may reject “nightingales or spring” in favour of writing directly about his experience of God (“Jordan I” 200), but that amounts to an agenda for himself and his readers rather than a general rejection of any contemporary rhetorical influence, the allusion to love-lyric serving to divert attention from his deeper engagement with the fashion for more “metaphysical” styles of writing. The humility of stance characteristic of much religious poetry when the writer pleads for divine help in writing also rules out any claims about more literal poetic forebears, since those most commonly imply emulation or earthly ambition. The most famous early English example of God operating as the immediate source of poetry is the story of the cowherd Caedmon recorded in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Caedmon, famously, was unable to sing, and when the harp came around in the mead-hall he crept out to the cowshed to escape. “In due time he stretched himself out and went to sleep,” Bede tells us, “whereupon he <?page no="31"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 31 dreamt that someone stood by him, saluted him and called him by name: ‘Caedmon,’ he said, ‘sing me something’” (iv.24). Caedmon insists that he cannot; but his dream visitor - by implication, an angel - insists, and Caedmon responds by singing an account of the Creation paraphrased from the Book of Genesis. After he has woken, he repeats the song to the abbess Hild and the monks of Whitby, and “it seemed clear to all of them that the Lord had granted him heavenly grace.” The story is summed up by Bede in terms of God’s special favour to the poet: “For he did not learn the art of poetry from men nor through a man, but he received the gift of song freely by the grace of God. Hence he could never compose any foolish or trivial poem.” Very clearly, Caedmon does not choose himself a poetic father: the divine father chooses him, and in doing so by implication provides an origin for the whole tradition of Old English Christian poetry. Yet the poem may well not be what it seems. Old English poems on Biblical material that could have guided Caedmon may have pre-existed him, though none survives. It is also possible that the famous Old English version of the hymn, which was first recorded as part of a vernacular translation of the History composed some decades later, was derived from Bede’s Latin rather than representing Caedmon’s original. Bede reports the song in Latin prose, with a note about the need to translate sense for sense rather than word for word; in his version, the work thus becomes part of the linguistic tradition of the Church rather than of vernacular poetry. The scholarly importance assigned to it may thus be a retrospective invention of a genealogical root for vernacular religious poetry, not the genuine article (Frantzen 120, 134-59). Bede’s account sets up an equivocal relationship between the mother tongue and the male language of authority and learning that recurs frequently over the centuries; and two further features of the story invite discussion. One is that the nature of the inspiration Caedmon receives explicitly excludes secular material, the “foolish or trivial” - friuoli et superuacui poematis in Bede’s Latin, leasunge ne idles leoþes, lies and idle talk, in the Old English translation; secular poetry would have to look elsewhere for its inspiration. Second, Caedmon is first named in the passage by the angel, in effect by God: the Father here, Bede insists, chooses his son. It is, however, one of only two names that we have for Old English poets (the other being Cynewulf), and the rest of the poetic corpus is anonymous. <?page no="32"?> 32 Helen Cooper The concept of the materna lingua, the mother tongue, 1 is one that provides an interesting counterbalance to the patrilineal model of poetic fathers, or to Bede’s relocation of Caedmon’s hymn within the authoritative male language of the Church. English surnames, in common with those of most of Europe, record fatherhood, not motherhood; but the gendered imagery that stresses poetic fatherhood is at odds with the very language in which the poetry is written. The choice of language is the matrix, the womb, for the actual words written by all the poets discussed in this article. For most of them, writing in the mother tongue was the default position rather than an active choice (Chaucer, who may well have grown up bilingual in Anglo-French and English, is the only exception), just as one’s mother is a given of one’s existence. They may have chosen whom to name as their fathers, but their matrilineal inheritance of language, for all that it rarely invites explicit comment, is what actually constitutes their poetry. Medieval theories of conception commonly represented the mother as providing the matter for the foetus, the father its form: poetic conception followed suit, only with the important proviso that the shaping, the fathering, lay in the power of the poet, the child. If secular poetry, “foolish or trivial” in Bede’s eyes, stems from something other than the divine grace that he insists inspired Caedmon, it has to have other sources. There was no such absolute division between sacred and secular for early heroic poetry. Greek heroes were, technically speaking, men whose exceptionality enabled them to become gods, and who were revered as such; Gilgamesh likewise crosses the boundary between mortal and immortal, though the point of the epic is that he is unique in doing so. Secular poets within the Christian tradition, by contrast, could not easily cite God as their inspiration. They had to locate the sources of their poetry elsewhere, and the famous poets of the past offered a comparable way of lifting their poetry above the commonplace. There are of course likely to have been a host of other reasons too as to why the naming of human poetic forebears should have become a poetic topos - the increasing importance of written records, the greater self-consciousness of poets in an age of formal education, and so on; but whatever combination of causes was in play, there 1 The term itself first appears in Latin in the thirteenth century, in English around 1400, to create a clear contrast with the distinctively male-associated sermo patrius of Latin (Bonfiglio 63-121; Haugen). Bede’s phrase for Caedmon’s language is “sua, id est Anglorum, lingua.” Thomas Usk, in his Testament of Love of 1385, a work long ascribed to Chaucer, uses the phrase “our dames tonge” (Wogan-Browne et al. 30.29; and see Watson ibid 331-45, and Butterfield 339-44). <?page no="33"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 33 was a change in practice, both with regard to recording the names of the poets themselves, and to their own attitude to naming their forebears. The two do of course go together: it is impossible to name one’s forebears if their names are unknown. Even when most poetry was anonymous, however, it was possible to place one’s composition in a poetic genealogy by invoking poetic tradition. “Hwaet! we have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes” is how Beowulf opens: a line that makes the poem’s ancestry literal, in its insistence that the function of such poetry is to maintain the fame of one’s forebears. The line of memory is more important than any individual poetic practitioners; it is not the glory of the poets that concerns the composer of Beowulf, but the glory of his subject. In the transmission from hearing of the Spear-Danes to speaking a new song about them, the poet is invoking a poetic tradition just as strongly as did later writers who cited Virgil or Ovid. Even when it was not so directly concerned with ancestral stories, much medieval secular literature - especially narrative fiction, romances - was insistent about placing itself in a tradition authorized by its longevity, in ways that stress a comparable indebtedness of the new poem to those written earlier. Breton lais, which define themselves by their claim of such a relationship, are a well known example. Many romances begin with some variation on the idea that their protagonists were as good as, or better than, a list of other named romance heroes known to the audience. It was sufficiently common for Chaucer to parody it in the later stages of Sir Thopas: Men speken of romances of prys, Of Horn child and of Ypotys, Of Beves and sir Gy, Of sir Lybeux and Pleyndamour - But sir Thopas, he bereth the flour Of roial chivalry! (Canterbury Tales VII.897-902) This is a process of stories begetting other stories rather than poets begetting other poets. Even as great a poet as the Gawain-poet - a pseudoname invented in the modern age to disguise the anonymity that current criticism finds so hard to deal with - makes such a comparable appeal to tradition in his insistence that the tale of Gawain he is about to tell is not original, but was put into poetic form long ago: <?page no="34"?> 34 Helen Cooper I schal telle hit astit, as I in toun herde, With tonge; As hit is stad and stoken In stori stif and stronge, With lel letteres loken, In londe so has been longe. (Sir Gawain 31-6) Such a claim was sufficiently characteristic of medieval poetry for Shakespeare (or his collaborator) to appeal to it in the Prologue to Pericles, spoken by John Gower: it is “a song that old was sung,” one that hath been sung at festivals, On ember-eves and holy-ales, And lords and ladies in their lives Have read it for restoratives. The purchase is to make men glorious, Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius. (5-10) “The older, the better”: it is its antiquity that confers value on the story, and the object of retelling it is “to make men glorious,” to preserve the fame of those who lived long before. The Prologue combines two ways of invoking poetic ancestry: through the value ascribed to a venerable story, which, it is correctly suggested here, goes back far beyond any individual named author; and the authority conferred by a famous poetic predecessor. Gower’s version of the story in the Confessio amantis was the only one of the pre-Elizabethan retellings to carry an author’s name. For a new author to make his choice of forebear explicit, there had to be a tradition of named poets. The Prologue to Pericles identifies a moment when the authority of story makes the transition to the authority of the author. In order for that to happen, the names of earlier poets had to be known, and they are only intermittently recorded for Old and Early Middle English literature. There are the two known Old English poets, and a handful of English ones down to the mid-fourteenth century - Orm, La amon, Thomas of Hales - but few in total, and none of them given to leasunge ne idles leoþes. Continental poets writing in French or German, by contrast, were much more likely to record their names, or to have them recorded, and the same holds for many Anglo-Norman writers: men such as the Jerseyman Wace, or the Thomas of Britain who wrote the most influential version of the Tristan story, or Hue de Rotelande (Rhuddlan, in the Welsh marches), author of Ipomedon and Protheselaus. Furthermore, even when we do have the name of a Middle English poet, we still tend to treat his work as anonymous. We invariably attach the French Lanval to the name of Marie de France, but very rarely Sir <?page no="35"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 35 Launfal to Thomas Chester. It is as if Middle English poets before the age of Gower and Chaucer carry so little authority as not to be worth mentioning: a phenomenon indeed confirmed by the lack of contemporary citation. It is the stories, not the authors, that were known. The new status carried by the named poets of the Ricardian age is evident again in the only other statement of source in the whole Shakespearean corpus, in the Prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen. 2 The play, it declares, has a noble breeder, and a pure, A learned, and a poet never went More famous yet twixt Po and silver Trent. Chaucer, of all admired, the story gives: There constant to eternity it lives. (10-14) The lines may well be by John Fletcher, co-author of the play, rather than Shakespeare himself; but there is no reason to question that he agreed with the sentiments, and evidently the audience was expected to agree too - this is an advertisement, without any of the traces of apologia that colour the Prologue to Pericles. The lines make a big claim. The phrasing insists that Chaucer was as great a poet as anyone from Petrarch to the contemporary poets of the English Midlands, including Shakespeare himself; and that claim is very firmly attached to Chaucer’s name. Although Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate became the established triumvirate of great pre-Elizabethan English poets, Chaucer was regularly singled out as the great precursor. Poets of the succeeding generations identified him as the only poetic model that mattered (Watson in Wogan-Browne et al. 345-52). To Thomas Hoccleve, who knew him, he was the father - the first time the word had been used in English for a poetic predecessor, but here carrying the immediacy of the love and respect felt by a literal son: O maister deere and fadir reuerent Mi maister Chaucer flour of eloquence... Alasse my fadir from the worlde is goo My worthi maister Chaucer hym I mene. (Brewer I no. 7) 2 This excludes works named within the plays’ plots, such as the mention of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Titus Andronicus. <?page no="36"?> 36 Helen Cooper John Lydgate, who did not have such a personal acquaintance, refers to him repeatedly as “my maister Chaucer,” the man who was the first to “enlumyne” English poetry and who was deserving of the poetic laurel (Brewer I no. 4). John Shirley, who copied a good many of Chaucer’s poems in the mid-fifteenth century, adds an interesting descriptor to his account of Chaucer’s reformation of the language: he was the “laureal and moste famous poete þat euer was to-fore him as in þemvellisshing of oure rude moders englisshe tonge” (Brewer I no. 9b). The mother tongue here is dismissed as “rude,” insufficiently formed, matter awaiting the imposition of form, embellishment, from the father. By the sixteenth century, that Chaucer was the father of English poetry had become the standard epithet; and that carried with it an insistence that, as with biological fatherhood, later poetry would not have existed, or existed in the form it did, without him as its founding ancestor. Literal paternity makes itself most evidently traceable through the inheritance of a name; and although later poets did not literally adopt the name of a poetic forebear, that that forebear should have a name seems a necessary condition of declaring whose son you are. So although later poets do not inherit Chaucer’s name as such, they do inherit the right to attach their own names to their poetry: to announce themselves as authors within this new English tradition of named poets, and so to use their poetry to memorialize not just the heroes they write about or the gods who inspire them, nor even their poetic models, but themselves. The eagerness of fifteenth-century poets to claim Chaucer as their father may seem odd in a post-Freudian age. Harold Bloom’s great work on the anxiety of influence famously insisted that the rivalry of son with father carried through to the poetic world, so that anxiety rather than homage becomes the keynote of a poetic genealogy. A.C. Spearing has indeed argued that fifteenth-century poets, for all their praise of Chaucer, display just such an anxiety, though the matter is more complex in practice (92-110). In The Siege of Thebes, for instance, Lydgate describes himself as joining the Canterbury pilgrims, but Chaucer is missing from among them; the link with the Tales is none the less so firmly spelled out that the absence seems likely to be due not to suppression but to the rhetorical awkwardness of including him. Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn of 1863, which he had provisionally entitled The Sudbury Tales, names almost every medieval poetic tradition except the Chaucerian, including the Italian, Norse, and a list of romance heroes from Eglamour to Bevis of Hampton, but it does not need to cite Chaucer to make its parenthood plain. Whatever the motives for naming or not naming him - the substitution of unmistakable family resemblance, rhetorical strategy, Freudian anxiety - poets did not simply accept their place in the English <?page no="37"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 37 poetic tradition with any of the inevitability with which they had to accept their literal genetic inheritance. They could, and did, choose whom to invoke as their poetic fathers. They can, so to speak, select their own poetic genes, and they do so, like Hoccleve, out of a sense of conscious pride, both to boost their own standing (however humble the form of words they choose may be) and proclaim it to the world, and also to invite a certain kind of reader reception, a definition of tradition such as had been invoked by naming precursor heroes of romance. The “sons of Ben” may have been to an extent Jonson’s own favourites, but they formed a sibling group primarily because they themselves wanted to be adopted into it. Ben Jonson himself had his own idea of who had fathered his poetry; and for all his love for Chaucer (which was both deep and influential), Horace was his primary favoured model. That choice is typical of the problem faced by English poets. Chaucer remained unquestioned as the father of English poetry, the wellhead, the fountain, the spring; but the form of English in which he had written had none of the stability or authority of Latin, and moreover it became steadily less accessible with the passing of time. His use of his mother tongue began to undermine his authority as father. As the dominance of humanist education insisted that the Classics (primarily the Latin classics) were the pinnacle of poetic achievement, anything in English was downgraded to the second-rate by definition, and especially so if it predated what was perceived as the great age of humanist enlightenment. Everyone outside Britain, furthermore, knew nothing about literature in English, and cared less; whereas to choose the classical poets as your fathers was to place yourself in a universally recognized tradition. Chaucer himself had made the same choice. At the end of Troilus and Criseyde he placed himself in the line of the classical poets, inviting the work to “Kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace” (V.1791-2). The line is formulated as homage, but it also serves to locate him in the long genealogy of epic poetry, as he implicitly attaches himself to the line as sixth of six - as Dante had also done when he describes encountering the great pagan poets on the outskirts of Hell. For both Dante and Chaucer, the choice complicated things twice over, as it skips over both their own English or Italian models and their contemporary European models too (though Dante, unlike Chaucer, makes some mention of those later in the Divina commedia). He was fully aware of the existence of other poetry in English, and some of its stylistic practices can be traced in his early poetry. It is most on display, however, when he parodies it in Sir Thopas - a parody that may or may not be affectionate (critical views differ), but which is certainly devastatingly accurate in a way that shows a deep familiarity with <?page no="38"?> 38 Helen Cooper what is being parodied. His actual forebears, however, the earlier writers on whom he drew most, were overwhelmingly contemporary or nearcontemporary French and Italian poets: poets such as Machaut and Froissart and Oton de Graunson, who were read, or, in the case of the latter two, were living, at the English court. They themselves were writing in the tradition of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, the authors of the Roman de la Rose which was a key precursor text for Chaucer too. Later in his life, Boccaccio became his principal source, supplemented by some Petrarch, and with Dante as a major influence on his whole conception of what poetry could do. Not the least interesting thing about that list, however, is that it is a list of names, such as is impossible to give for any English influences on Chaucer. Those were not the poets, however, that Chaucer chose to name in his poetry. He probably knew the names of all the French and Italian writers he used, and he had a personal acquaintance with some of them; yet he very rarely cites any continental vernacular poets as his sources. The only French poet he so names is Graunson, from whom he borrowed for his Complaint of Venus. He tells us he translated the Romance of the Rose, Fragment A of the surviving Middle English fragments probably being his, and he cites it by title twice later for rhetorical purposes (Book of the Duchess 334, Tales IV.2032); but when he actually uses it as a source, for the Physician’s Tale, he substitutes the Romance’s citation of its own source, the classical Livy. Italian poets fare equally badly. His one mention of Petrarch, at the start of the Clerk’s Tale, is to his Latin prose, and he ascribes the sonnet he adapted as Troilus’s first song to the invented Lollius (Troilus I.393-420). Dante gets several mentions, but most of those focus on Chaucer’s doubts about the content of his work: the unorthodox second-guessing of God’s judgements, and the fictional insistence on the absolute truth of his next-world journeys (cf. Legend 1- 9). Chaucer’s overt references to the Divina commedia, as opposed to his silent borrowings, are therefore distinctly sceptical, as when the devil of the Friar’s Tale declares that Dante deserves a chair in Hell studies (Tales III.1517-20), or when his retelling of the story of Dante’s damned traitor Ugolino gives pride of place to the fact that he was a victim of mere rumour (VII.2461). Notoriously, he never names Boccaccio at all, though the Decameron was almost certainly the inspiration behind the story-collection of the Canterbury Tales, and he was the immediate source for the Knight’s Tale and Troilus. Chaucer seems to have read well beyond the Filostrato in preparation for writing Troilus, but although he cites the supposed eyewitnesses Dares and Dictys and the fictional Lollius, his more recent vernacular sources all disappear from sight. His choice of the classical poets to name as his forebears at the end of the poem is in <?page no="39"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 39 keeping with that; 3 and he was the first English-language poet to make such a claim. In taking that step, Chaucer set himself up as a poet in that recognized authoritative line of great poetry. For all that it was unprecedented in English, he goes some way to preparing the reader for it. Writing a narrative about Troy declares a potential debt to the Classics, though he, like most of his readers, primarily encountered the story in more accessible medieval rewritings. The great sweep of Latinate syntax in the very first verse of the poem, with the sentence running over five of the seven lines of the rhyme royal stanza and the verb held back until the last of those five, also sounds a note that is unparalleled in earlier English poetry. It is in keeping with that new note that the “auctor” Chaucer names within the body of the poem is the pseudo-classical Lollius. His name is given just twice: once as the source for the song that Troilus sings in total secrecy and which is in any case translated from Petrarch (I.381); the other in a passage of pure invention (V.1653). It is a name that sounds plausible as a classical source, though it could hardly have cut much ice with those of his readers familiar with the surviving corpus of Latin literature. The declaration of the poets Chaucer actually wants to claim as his line of poetic forebears is held back until the end of the work, separated off from any references to sources for the narrative. The lines at the end of the Troilus are unusually explicit in Chaucer’s poetry in declaring their allegiance, but the idea is much more pervasive. He kept recurring to those classical antecedents throughout his career, though often so obliquely that they are easy to overlook. The practice starts as far back as the Book of the Duchess. Within the poem’s dream, the emperor Octavian rides hunting; and for all that John of Gaunt doubles as the bereaved husband, it is Octavian, “this kyng,” who returns at the end to a castle identified by a rebus, a riddle, as Lancaster and Richmond, Gaunt’s own titles (Cooper, “Chaucerian Poetics” 40-46). It can scarcely be accidental that this figure carries the same name as the emperor who patronized Virgil. Chaucer may be dropping a hint to Gaunt about patronage, or perhaps acknowledging patronage received; but he also appears to be making a quiet bid that he might himself take on the role of Virgil. A comparable claim occurs in his later dream poem, the House of Fame, which takes the intertwining of historical and literary fame as its subject. Here, the dreamer encounters a series of classical poets arguing with each other; and the sixth of the six poets of Troy to be 3 For a profound study of Chaucer’s relationship with Virgil, Ovid, Statius, Dante and the Roman de la Rose in Troilus, see Wetherbee (though my argument diverges from his); for the detail and extent of his classical borrowings, see Windeatt 36-50. <?page no="40"?> 40 Helen Cooper cited (1464-72) is named as “English Gaufride” - Gaufride being derived from the Latin form for Geoffrey, Galfridus. The name is usually glossed as referring to Geoffrey of Monmouth, or possibly to Geoffrey of Vinsauf, sometimes named in Latin as “Galfridus anglicus.” There are however two problems with those suggestions. First, is that neither of those Geoffreys wrote about Troy as such; Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote about what happened well after its fall, and although some works of Geoffrey of Vinsauf may well have been lost, there is little evidence to suggest that they included anything on Troy. Second, all of Chaucer’s twenty-four other uses of “English” refer to the language, whereas the other Geoffreys wrote in Latin. The only English Gaufride to have written the story of Troy in English was Chaucer himself, in Troilus and Criseyde. Although the House of Fame has customarily been taken to have been the earlier poem, there is strong evidence that it might in fact have been written later (Cooper, “Four Last Things”); and this kind of slippery self-reference (the name preceding Gaufride is Lollius) would be in line with the resistance to authority that is the subject of the poem, and to Chaucer’s self-deprecation elsewhere. By contrast, a more orthodox sense of himself as a poet in the classical poetic line such as appears in the Troilus is conveyed by the use of a quotation from Statius as an epigraph to the Knight’s Tale, which appears at the root of the manuscript tradition and so seems likely to go back to Chaucer himself. Ovid too figured high on Chaucer’s reading list. He based the Legend of Good Women on the Heroides, and cites him as its source on a number of occasions. His works also reveal a generous debt to the Metamorphoses, for its stories rather than the commentary tradition it had accreted, though he may have used a French version alongside or instead of the original Latin. His silence about his more extensive French and Italian models is made all the more marked by such contrasts, and it is what he claimed, rather than what he did, that is at issue. In citing the great classical authors, he was making a poetic declaration, not writing scholarly footnotes; and that declaration is about his choice of forebears - of fathers. Such a choice of genealogy may seem surprising in Chaucer’s case. He was profoundly sceptical of authority, his own included - or rather, he did not see why any poet’s version of the famous events of the past should be any more reliable than any other’s (House of Fame 311-14, 375- 82). His most explicit comments on Virgil, the master-poet of the Western tradition, are challenges to his authority. In pointing out in the House of Fame that Virgil is making up his account of Dido, that Ovid tells it differently, and that there is no possible authoritative recoverable fact behind them, he turns the Aeneid into a key example of an unreliable, unauthoritative, poem; and although he starts his Legend of Dido by invoking “glorye and honour” on Virgil’s name, he keeps querying his <?page no="41"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 41 version, and ends by recommending Ovid’s instead. His scepticism was so overt that Gavin Douglas, translating the Aeneid around 1500, felt the need to excuse Chaucer’s attitude to Virgil on the grounds that he was too much “womanis frend” (Brewer I no. 20). That refusal to accept the authority of even such writers as Virgil and Dante, coupled with his own famous reluctance to claim authority for himself, may be what made earlier criticism of Chaucer look straight past the higher claims he makes to be writing within the classical tradition. Victorian literalism tended to replace the top civil servant, diplomat and intellectual with his own selfparody as an innocent (Trigg). Yet in his own way, he was making the same choice of poetic fathers as so many humanist and later poets: looking beyond and above the contemporary vernacular poets, in any language, to the Classics. It was those ambitions - achieved ambitions, to produce an English poetry that could stand comparison with the Classics - that enabled him to be so highly regarded by readers in the three hundred years after his death, precisely because they were prepared to accept him as in the line of descent from Ovid and Virgil, or even to serve as a substitute for them. Lydgate explicitly acknowledges his firsthand debt to Chaucer rather than “Virgyle . . . Omer . . . Dares Frygius . . . Ovyde” in the Epilogue to the Fall of Princes (Brewer I no. 4g). Caxton commissioned an epitaph for him from the Italian humanist Stephen Surigo, which compares the role played by his maternis versibus in reforming the language’s uncouthness to Virgil’s embellishment of Latin (Brewer I no. 15). The final lines of the epitaph, which were also inscribed round the edge of the tomb erected for him in 1556, insisted that he was the fama poesis maternae, the glory of poetry in his mother tongue; but even they memorialize the paradox that they are written in the nobler language of Latin. It had to wait for Dryden, in the Preface to his Fables of 1700, for anyone to make a serious argument that Chaucer should be ranked as high or higher than the Classics, as a better poet in many respects than Ovid, and with the Knight’s Tale being “of the Epique kind, and perhaps not much inferiour to the Ilias or the Aeneis” (44, 30-3). The printing history of Chaucer’s works demonstrates the same conviction that he was England’s equivalent to the great Classics. The first printed complete works, of 1532, was famously named just that, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, on the model of the Opera reserved for those; it is not matched until the seventeenth century, and only rarely then. The preface to this edition noted Chaucer’s equivalence in English to the most famous classical poets; it also gave the English language high praise for its descent from Greek and Latin, as if to override ideas of a less authoritative mother tongue. It also accorded a care to the production of its text comparable to that given to the Classics, including the <?page no="42"?> 42 Helen Cooper collation of different manuscripts; “collation” in this sense indeed is given its first usage in this editorial sense here (Blodgett 47). The edition was reprinted four times down to 1561; a new edition appeared in 1598 and was further revised just four years later. All appeared in expensive folio format, both the cost and the number of the editions bespeaking a substantial buying public eager to possess the works of Chaucer. In the 1598 and 1602 editions, Chaucer’s part in the begetting of English poetry was given a further boost by the inclusion of a portrait page drawn by the great cartographer of England John Speed. Here, he is turned into something close to being the literal father of the English nation, by the addition of the heading “The Progeny of Geoffrey Chaucer,” and lines of descent down each side of the page showing, on the left, the royal houses of Lancaster and Tudor, and on the right, the dukes of Suffolk. One has to look quite hard to see that it is not in fact Chaucer at the root of both lines, but Payne Roet, his father-in-law and also the father of Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt’s mistress, third wife and ancestress of the Tudors. The four-figure number of sixteenthand early seventeenth-century references and allusions to the whole range of Chaucer’s works, by almost all the major writers of the period and even more minor ones (Spurgeon; Boswell and Holton), demonstrates that people did not just possess copies, but read them too; and they could expect those allusions to be picked up in turn by their own readers. Many of those who commented explicitly on his poetry compared him to the poets who had become established as the named forefathers of the classical tradition, as the English Homer, for Greek, or Ennius, for Latin; but he was also often the English Virgil, not just an ancestor to revere, but a continuing model of what poetry ought to be. The most extensive homage along those lines was that paid to him by Edmund Spenser, who in the Shepheardes Calender set out to recreate great English poetry that could stand comparison with contemporary European and classical literature. The eclogue is a Virgilian form, and starting one’s poetic career with the form promises an epic to come, as both the commentator E.K. and one of Spenser’s shepherds point out; but it is none the less Chaucer that Spenser invokes as his main predecessor. The way he does so conflates his classical and English poetic forebears, as the Tityrus whom the Calender declares to be its guiding spirit is not Virgil, who chose the name for himself in his own Eclogues, but Chaucer (February 91, June 81-8). In the Faerie Queene too, for all its Ariostan and Virgilian influences, it is Chaucer whom Spenser picks out by name in order to pay homage (IV.ii.32). He insists, indeed, not just that Chaucer is his forebear, but that his poetic genes, to use a modern analogy, are alive in him: <?page no="43"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 43 through infusion sweete Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me suruiue, I follow here the footing of thy feete. (IV.ii.34) Their relationship was paraphrased by Dryden, who in his Preface to his Fables was the first person to see English poets in a genealogical succession rather than just a historical sequence, as that Spenser “was begotten by [Chaucer] Two Hundred years after his Decease” (25). The major studies of Spenser’s classical connections have however never been matched for his Chaucerianism, which has elicited no more than a handful of articles. It is as if criticism could still not quite believe that any early modern poet could be serious in claiming English fatherhood, for all the recognition of the period’s imperative search for native origins. Typical is Richard Helgerson, whose otherwise excellent Self-Crowned Laureates starts with Spenser; but although Chaucer was the earliest English poet by far to have been associated with the laurel, an association made repeatedly over the hundred and fifty years before Spenser, Helgerson dismisses him in one sentence as “too remote” to matter (68). To critics of the early modern, perhaps; but not to Spenser, or to the Shakespeare of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida and The Two Noble Kinsmen (Donaldson). The assumption that one should “of English Poets of our owne Nation, esteeme Sir Geoffrey Chaucer the father” (Henry Peacham, Brewer I no. 56), and indeed have him on your bookshelf as part of the cultural literacy of a gentleman, was on the wane by the fourth decade of the seventeenth century. Milton, himself widely read in Chaucer, could still assume that an allusion to the Squire’s Tale (to “Call up him who left half-told / The story of Cambuskan bold,” Il Penseroso 109-10) would be picked up by his readers; and the one proper name he cites in his summary of the English poetic tradition in his Latin Mansus is “Tityrus” (line 34), referring, as in Spenser’s usage, to Chaucer. Dryden described Milton as “the poetical Son of Spencer” and says that he had acknowledged as much himself (25), but the late Milton preferred to cite the Classics and the Holy Spirit. After the Restoration, enthusiasm for Chaucer was confined to small groups of admirers, and even poets no longer read him as a matter of course. Dryden records that Philip Sidney, the third earl of Leicester, tried to persuade Cowley to read Chaucer (and no one with any poetic ambitions sixty years before would have dreamed of not reading him), but Cowley remained steadfastly unimpressed: he “had no taste of him,” and “being perhaps shocked with his old style, never examined into the depth of his good sense” (Dryden 32). Dryden himself, by contrast, firmly recognized Chaucer as his father, noting in the Preface to his Fables that “as he is the Father of English poetry, so I hold <?page no="44"?> 44 Helen Cooper him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer, or the Romans Virgil” (33), as well as believing him to be of comparable poetic brilliance to them, and better than Ovid (30-33). The tribute is carried through from the Preface to the Fables to its dedicatory poem to the Duchess of Ormond, which opens with a panegyric to “the Bard who first adorn’d our Native Tongue,” the equal of Homer and over whom Virgil can claim only a “doubtful Palm,” and especially when it comes to the poetry of love: “He match’d their Beauties, where they most excell; / Of Love sung better, and of Arms as well.” Dryden’s enthusiasm for Chaucer, like Spenser’s, has received little attention from modern scholars, even though the importance of the Restoration poet’s concern with literary lineage and authority has become something of an industry. That lineage, however, is represented as almost entirely classical; and Chaucer, not being classical, has largely disappeared from the account. 4 Dryden did however help to bring him back to wider attention in the decades after the Fables appeared. The 1602 edition had been given an exact reprint in 1684, but the first new edition since 1602, by John Urry, appeared in 1721. He was held in high esteem too by Pope (Brewer I no. 67), who was given a copy of the 1598 edition when he was thirteen and seems to have been enthralled by it. He started his poetic career with reworkings of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (omitted by Dryden from the Fables on grounds of indecency, in favour of her Tale), the Merchant’s Tale, and the House of Fame, here upgraded to a temple. Its father Chaucer, however, does not get a mention in its gallery of authors, who are all classical: a suppression paralleling Chaucer’s own avoidance of the names of his actual continental models in favour of his elected classical forebears. Pope ended his career too with Chaucer. When he was told, six weeks before his death, that his dog, whom he had consigned to the earl of Orrery for care, had died, he responded with a parody of a couplet from the Knight’s Tale: “Ah Bounce! ah gentle Beast! why wouldst thou die, / When thou had’st Meat enough, and Orrery? ” (Pope 837). 5 That it was Chaucer who came into his mind when he was dying is a measure of both love and respect for him. The Age of Enlightenment’s taste for indelicacy gave the Tales a popular boost through the appearance of dozens of rewritings of vari- 4 Of the mentions of Chaucer in an otherwise strong volume on “literary transmission and authority” in Dryden, for instance, only three, totalling 24 lines, actually engage with him, and then only as an element in arguments focused elsewhere (Miner and Brady 32, 79-81, 111). 5 He misquoted Tales I.2835-6 as “Ah Arcite! Gentle Knight! Why would’st thou die, / When thou had’st gold enough, and Emilye? ” <?page no="45"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 45 ous of them (Bowden), though the corollary, if Samuel Johnson’s few and dismissive remarks on him are anything to go by, was a sharp drop in his more highbrow reputation. It took the Romantics to see more in him. To Wordsworth, he was the “great Precursor”; and although the context there (the “Ecclesiastical Sonnet” on Edward VI, indebted to the long ascription of various Lollard works to Chaucer) was as much Protestant as poetic, the Wordsworth household were not above delighting in the Miller’s Tale as well (Brewer I no. 88). Keats produced a modernized version of the Flower and the Leaf, which was still accepted as Chaucer’s - as was “La belle dame sans merci,” of which he borrowed the title. In 1841, a collection of translations of Chaucer appeared by various authors including Wordsworth, Leigh-Hunt, Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning), and others, with a preface that attacks the ignorance or denigration of the “father of English poetry” resulting from his choice of his mother tongue. “Although he is one of the great poets for all time,” the editor, R.H. Horne, complained, “his poems are comparatively unknown to the world... Had Chaucer’s poems been written in Greek or Hebrew, they would have been a thousand times better known” (Brewer II no. 2). Critics who double as creative writers, as Dryden was, have often been the quickest to recognize Chaucer’s position as founding father. C.S. Lewis, in a particularly curmudgeonly moment, claimed that “perhaps none of our early poets has so little claim to be called the father of English poetry as the Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales” (163), but he none the less suggested that the origin of the lyric voice in English poetry lay in the line “Singest with vois memorial in the shade” (201, quoting Anelida 18). Jorge Luis Borges identified the point of transition from allegory to the novel in “the smylere with the knyf under the cloke” (157, citing Tales I.1999). Recent writers who use the formulation The X’s Tale as a title need never have read any Chaucer; but one of the greatest of the modernists does, I believe, engage with him at a much more profound and extended level, and that is James Joyce. He not only referred to Chaucer as “the father of English literature,” as many people did without much thinking about it, but he put that fatherhood into practice: for he was rereading Chaucer between his first attempts at composing what became Ulysses, when it was still largely a conventional novel, and the rewriting that turned it into what it is in its final, very different version. In its last redaction, it consists of a series of chapters each written in its own genre, style, register and form, and with its own implied speaker - eighteen in Ulysses, against Chaucer’s twenty-four. Joyce turned it, in fact, into something that has its only precedent in the Canterbury Tales. That too has a highly naturalistic frame such as made earlier generations of critics seek out real dates for the pilgrimage and real-life <?page no="46"?> 46 Helen Cooper models for the pilgrims with the same intensity that Joyce constructed Leopold Bloom’s Dublin. Within that frame, both works become a kind of book of books, a summa of everything written (Cooper, “Joyce’s Other Father”). Joyce himself owned a copy of the 1915 reprint of Skeat’s one-volume edition of Chaucer’s Complete Works, and when he did not have access to it he borrowed a copy off a friend. As with Shakespeare and Dryden, it is the influence of the Classics, and especially Homer, that has been emphasized in Joyce criticism, and not without reason. The title itself proclaims its genealogy, in the carrying forward of the name from parent work to its offspring; and so do the chapter headings that supply modern critics with their means of navigating around the book, even though, having been used in his draft and in Joyce’s own letters, they were removed from the text as printed. To his first readers, however, with nothing but the main title to go on, the further similarities to Homer remained largely invisible, and it took T.S. Eliot to draw attention to them; and once that consciousness was there, the work took an instant large step towards respectability and acceptance. There were not, so far as I know, any early readers who proposed the Canterbury Tales as the work’s inspiration instead, but the choice would in many ways have been a much more obvious one. Hence Umberto Eco’s description of the medievalism of Ulysses is also an exact description of the Tales, for the way “the ‘dramatic’ technique eliminates the continuous presence of the author and substitutes for his point of view that of the characters and events themselves” (37-8); and that the whole “operation . . . is performed in language, with language and on language (on things seen through language)” (34). He notes too Joyce’s own description of the work as a “summa,” “a sort of encyclopaedia” (33). All of those are elements well to the fore in the Canterbury Tales. Joyce himself insisted on the need to reject classicism in favour of the greater “emotional fecundity” of the medieval (Power 95). In its relation to both Homer and Chaucer, Ulysses embraces both. It brings those two traditions, of the classical and the medieval, back together, as they had been in Chaucer himself, to produce one of the very greatest of modern works in English. It is a work, moreover, in which Stephen, the figure who had represented Joyce in the earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is looking for a father: a search that in literary terms too Joyce writes into his book. Once again, however, fatherhood as a metaphor for Chaucer’s relationship to the work may be compromised, or enriched, by a concomitant sense of the feminine. The work carries Chaucer’s literary genes, but his name has been deleted, as a mother’s name is deleted. The one place where criticism has been open to the suggestion of Chaucerian influence is where the work ends up, in the great monologue of Molly Bloom: a figure who is generally accepted as <?page no="47"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 47 Joyce’s counterpart to the Wife of Bath. Both characters share an easy addiction to the mother tongue, and a ready sexuality that seems to promise progeny. For Joyce, at least, it may be that Chaucer as mother takes his place alongside Chaucer as father. <?page no="48"?> 48 Helen Cooper References Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Blodgett, James E. “William Thynne.” Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition. Ed. Paul G. Ruggiers. Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1984. 35-52. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. Second edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Bonfiglio, Thomas Paul. Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010. Borges, Jorge Luis. Other Inquisitions 1937-52. Trans. Ruth L. Simmons. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. Boswell, Jackson Campbell, and Sylvia Wallace Holton. Chaucer’s Fame in England: STC Chauceriana, 1475-1640. New York: Modern Language Association of America. 2004. Bowden, Betsy, ed. Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991. Brewer, Derek, ed. Chaucer: The Critical Heritage. 2 vols. London, Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Butterfield, Ardis. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. General ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Cooper, Helen. “Chaucerian Poetics.” New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry. Ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003. 31-50. . “The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour.” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 39-66. . “Joyce’s Other Father: The Case for Chaucer.” Medieval Joyce. Ed. Lucia Boldrini. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002. 143-63. Donaldson, E. Talbot. The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Dryden, John. The Works of John Dryden VII: Poems 1697-1700. Ed. Vinton A. Dearing. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000. Eco, Umberto.The Middle Ages of James Joyce: The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. Trans. Ellen Esrock. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989. Frantzen, Allen J. Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990. <?page no="49"?> Choosing Poetic Fathers 49 Haugen, Einar. “The Mother Tongue.” The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman’s 65th Birthday. Ed. Robert L. Cooper and Bernard Spolsky. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991. 75-84. Helgerson, Richard. Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983. Herbert, George. The English Poems of George Herbert. Ed. Helen Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936 and reprints. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Complete Poetical Works of Longfellow. Ed. Horace E. Scudder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893 and reprints. Milton, John. The Complete Shorter Poems. Ed. John Carey. Second edition. London: Longman, 1996. Miner, Earl and Jennifer Brady, eds. Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and other Writers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Butt. New Haven and Yale: Yale University Press, 1963. Power, Arthur. Conversations with James Joyce. Ed. Clive Hart. Dublin: Millington Press, 1974. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon. Second edition revised by Norman Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Spearing, A.C. Medieval into Renaissance in English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912 and reprints. Spurgeon, Caroline F.E. Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (1357-1900). 3 vols. London: Chaucer Society, 1914-25. Trigg, Stephanie. Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Wetherbee, Winthrop, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. Windeatt, Barry. The Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. <?page no="50"?> 50 Helen Cooper Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans, eds. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280-1520. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. <?page no="51"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal in Late-Medieval England Robert R. Edwards Modern scholarship has focused on the historical foundations of medieval authorship in exegesis and pedagogy. These two sources show how texts and authors were framed externally within a dynamic literary culture in the high and late Middle Ages. Authorship functioned internally as well, as a condition of literary meaning that complements the conditions of intelligibility within Latin and vernacular literary systems. To understand the internal dynamic of authorship, we need to supplement exegesis and pedagogy with an understanding of imitation and resistance. Imitation traditionally forms character and style from canonical models, and it provides a means to compose equivalents to canonical models by reproducing, rewriting, and reimagining them. At the same time, it generates an impossible demand for authorship - an original copy that remains subordinate to its source. For this reason, resistance emerges as the necessary correlate of imitation. In late-medieval England, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, poets recognized as authors by their contemporaries and by each other, demonstrate the productive reciprocity of imitation and resistance. Gower builds an edifice of authorship around his works and poetic career yet writes himself out of his most ambitious literary project at the end of the Confessio Amantis and then refuses his own dismissal in a sequence of minor works. Chaucer punctuates his repeated gestures toward authorship with equally insistent denials and omissions. These occasions for refusing authorship are by no means identical, but they point toward an alternative history of authorship that recognizes its contingency and continual renegotiation. Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 51-73. <?page no="52"?> 52 Robert R. Edwards Medieval authorship emerged as a field of inquiry some three decades ago, grounded in exegesis and pedagogy and concerned with the influence of Latin traditions on European vernaculars. Exegesis gave a working taxonomy of authorial roles and functions within medieval textual production (scribe, commentator, compiler, and author). It also furnished a conceptual framework, the idea of the author as a secondary efficient cause, an instrument within aesthetic creation, in comparison and relation to a divine Author (Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship 94- 103). Pedagogy emphasized the informing influence of curriculum and teaching, which established the conditions for writing through the study of canonical authors (Copeland 37-86). Within pedagogy, the possibilities of imaginative expression and the tasks of ordinary writing were already radically shaped by authors and the institution of authorship. In addition, the traditions of school commentary commonly located meaning outside language in the domain of ethics, to which canonical texts were subordinated. Exegesis and pedagogy operated in their own disciplinary and historical contexts from late Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, as other contributions in this volume demonstrate. It would be an error to minimize the complexities within those traditions. Exegesis and pedagogy take a distinct historical configuration, however, as they move from pan-European Latin academic culture to the vernacular. In modern accounts of authorship, the vernacular is the ground on which medieval literary theory makes compelling claims to critical attention, for it is there that the institutional conventions of authorship become visible as an influence exerted on a national literature within a narrative of cultural translation and identity. The disciplinary history of medieval authorship falls outside the scope of my discussion. I want instead to revisit some of the foundational investments of the topic. For late-medieval English literature, I shall argue, the way we have constructed authorship has done much to explain the external framing of texts and writers within a dynamic literary culture. But how does authorship function internally, not as a condition of writing but as a part of its meaning? To address that question, I want to propose a second set of terms - imitation and refusal - to complement exegesis and pedagogy as sources for describing medieval authorship. Authorship, in the account I propose, functions dialectically through imitation and refusal. Medieval writers adapted the systems and techniques of exegesis and pedagogy, and engaged the canonical works whose schemes were originally designed to explain, stabilize, and regulate as models of discourse and forms of cultural authority. Their adaptations, formal and substantive, encompass two major facets of imitation: the formation of character and style from established models and <?page no="53"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 53 the practice of composing equivalents to canonical works. Situated within grammar and rhetoric, these two facets overlap significantly - the poet imitating a masterwork necessarily stands in relation to the master who confers his auctoritas by serving as the locus to which responsibility for the work can be traced. As a practice, imitation functions as invention by reproducing, revising, and reimagining canonical sources. At the same time, it tacitly makes an impossible demand that serves as a boundary condition of invention: imitation aspires to produce an original copy that rivals yet remains subordinate to its models. For this reason, refusal is a corollary rather than a denial or cancellation of authorship, and it differs from the classical recusatio, the stylized rejection of a poetic topic or patron. As I use the term, refusal is a literary strategy that relocates authorship within a new set of terms, as a possibility strategically denied in favor of other possibilities of invention. Refusal thus repositions authors and their works with respect to literary canons, institutions, and tradition. As a gesture of difference, it also points toward the stakes of authorship in the domains of society, politics, and culture. John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, poets who recognized authorship in each other as “moral Gower” (Troilus and Criseyde 5.1856) and Venus’s “owne clerk” (Confessio Amantis 8.2954*) and who were recognized as authors in a European literary context (Jenkins, Moreno), allow us to map some of the formulations of authorship in late-medieval England. I The foundational concerns with exegesis, pedagogy, and the vernacular have allowed scholars to contextualize medieval authorship and to place textual production in specific historical moments, with often significant afterlives in literary culture. The current body of work has added important nuances and qualifications. We recognize, for instance, that “authorship” in the singular is a rubric of convenience, a shorthand, to designate “authorships” in the plural. We know that such “authorships” were negotiated and thereby determined within complex social networks of tradition, patronage, gender, and reception, including translation and other forms of textual reconfiguration (Burrow 30). The role of compiler, shared by religious and secular writers, involves critical judgment and discrimination as well as a gathering of sources (Paulmier-Foucart 147-50). Even “the vernacular” is a term now open to critical rethinking. It represents not just a demotic language but a position within a hierarchy of knowledge and cultural prestige and social power. On this view, French has a large claim to be a “classical” language in England and elsewhere in Europe, serving as it does as a medium to transmit the <?page no="54"?> 54 Robert R. Edwards works of authors. Alternatively, we might regard medieval Latin, following Alastair Minnis’s recent suggestion (Translations of Authority 11), as a vernacular or at least as a second language native to no one but required by literate communities for professional communication as well as literary composition. Within the vernacular, we can document the rise of literary canons organized by authors as well as poetic forms from the twelfth century onwards, and we can trace the independence of the vernacular from classical sources in the late Middle Ages (Cambridge History 422-71). In addition, textual studies have brought into consideration the roles of material production, layout, and visual representation within authorship. The bibliographical code applied to late-medieval texts frames authorship as significantly as do prologues, marginal glosses, and other apparatus. The material text remains an important link between manuscript culture and early printed books. These qualifications - and others - would clarify but do not, I think, drastically change the formulation of authorship that emerges from the foundational sources in exegesis and pedagogy and from the interest in tracing those sources forward into European vernaculars. The double grounding in commentary implies that authorship depends on reading as both a guided discipline and a realm of ingenuity and unrehearsed discovery. Reading, in turn, depends on institutions (schools, circles, established protocols for exchange and distribution) which mediate between texts and audiences, including those who may be primarily auditors. Further, as promulgated by reading and the institutions of literacy, authorship is retrospective and even retroactive. If early modern authorship generates a triumphal narrative of self-fashioning and poetic ambition that looks forward to a writer’s assertion of his or her place within an emerging tradition, usually a national tradition, medieval authorship plots a somewhat different route to a similar destination: to be an author is to be regarded as such, to be situated within a textual succession imbued with cultural prestige - in other words, to realize the prospect of securing a place in a past. 1 For late-medieval writers, authorship operates within a logic that requires something like a middle verb, such as Eustache Deschamps expresses when he numbers Geoffrey Chaucer, translator of the Roman de la rose, among “ceuls qui font pour eulx auctorisier” (“those who compose in order to create authority for themselves”). 2 1 Renaissance literary studies offer differing teleologies for authorship: subjectivity in the case of Greenblatt, tradition for Greene, literary careers for Helgerson and Cheney, and monarchy and power for Montrose. 2 Deschamps’s phrase “ceuls qui font pour eulx auctorisier” has a reflexive sense (Jenkins 275) that has generated considerable commentary. Toynbee translates the phrase as <?page no="55"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 55 As a critical practice, the study of medieval authorship draws not only on the theory and content but - equally important - on the explanatory power of its historical sources. The appeal of authorship as an interpretive tool stems from the promise that we might discover or adapt a language of criticism for medieval texts from the critical idiom and hermeneutic categories of their own period. The conventions of medieval authorship thereby warrant interpretation by providing “a literary role and a literary form” available to medieval vernacular writers and recoverable by modern readers and critics (Minnis, Medieval Theory 191). At the same time, they privilege a certain kind of knowledge about texts. Medieval authorship has as its main explanatory task the mapping of a literary system onto vernacular works. 3 To be sure, no Middle English author rivals Dante’s use of the formal apparatus of authorial commentary and textual divisions in the Vita nuova, his “more mature” (“più virilmente si trattasse”) analyses of canzoni in the Convivio (1.1.16), the “introductory” discussion of the “Letter to Can Grande della Scala” offered “sub lectoris officio” (13.13) or the self-reflexive passages of the Commedia. But in the oddly discontinuous history of post-Conquest literature, English writers consciously appropriate the frameworks and expository forms of commentary. These appropriations are complex exchanges between learned traditions and vernacular practice, and they demonstrate, particularly in writers like Langland, a resistance as well as subordination to academic theory (Middleton, Hanna). By most accounts, an engagement with authorial conventions is fairly extensive in England after the mid-fourteenth century (Minnis, Cambridge History 423). But there is evidence that writers incorporated the apparatus of commentary in earlier texts. The Ormulum, the most novel and eccentric of early Middle English texts (c. 1150-80), it has been argued (Mancho), incorporates the academic prologue adapted from Aristotle’s four causes, while fashioning its literary form as a commentary in which the author adds his words to God’s words in order to fill and “those who make [i.e. are ‘makers,’ poets] in order to be considered authorities [i.e. to get a reputation]” or alternatively “‘in order to authorise them’ - i.e., you, Chaucer, have asked for ‘plants’ for them in order thereby to give them reputation, such a request from you being in itself a title to fame. The interpretation given above, however, seems the simpler” (432). Wimsatt translates, “those who write for posterity” (Chaucer and the Poems of “Ch” 82). Butterfield renders the phrase, “those who create authority for themselves” (145). Toynbee 432 notes that “ceuls qui font” is translated literally by Chaucer in the “Complaint of Venus” and applied to the French poet Oton de Granson, “flour of hem that make in Fraunce” (line 82). 3 Dante’s “Letter to Can Grande” analyzes the Commedia under the terms of a double form - forma tractatus and forma tractandi (9.26-27); see Hollander 29 for the influence of Dante’s language on Guido da Pisa and Boccaccio. <?page no="56"?> 56 Robert R. Edwards clarify them. La amon (fl. 1200) describes his practice as a compiler, setting his sources before him, choosing the truer words, and making three books - the Old English translation of Bede, a Latin copy of Bede’s Historia, and Wace’s Roman de Brut - into one. His overwhelming reliance on Wace only highlights the claim to be a compiler as a bid for authorship. The author of Cursor Mundi (c. 1300) presents his universal history as a translation undertaken on behalf of a nation: “For þe loue of Inglis lede, / Inglis lede of Ingland” (lines 234-5). The prologue shared by Sir Orfeo (c. 1300) and “Lay le Freine” catalogues the materia and the mode of presentation for the Breton lay - all this preserved, we are told, in writing for a reading audience and confirmed by the authority of “clerkes” (line 2). Middle English religious, devotional, didactic, and educational works drew extensively on sources shared with literary and imaginative works. Indeed, the expansion of “literature” as a term to encompass a broad field of textual production is one tenet of medieval authorship studies (Wogan-Browne 3-4). In the religious sphere, Osbern Bokenham’s account of the “what” and “why” of his Legendys of Hooly Wummen employs the academic prologue as purposefully as does Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love in the realm of moral philosophy (Mitchell 57). For writers like Richard Rolle and Reginald Pecock, the protocols of authorship may have offered some measure of defense or ideological cover against imputations of heresy (Wogan-Brown 246, 99). Besides an external framing, however, authorship also provides an internal signature; it functions as part of the formal order of texts, hence a part of their symbolic meaning. For religious and didactic works, particularly those translated from Latin sources and composed under various forms of patronage, introductory frames go a long way toward conveying their imaginative scope. Robert Mannyng claims his authorship under the twin sanctions of translation and patronage for the purpose of salvation: “For lewed men y vndyr toke / On englyssh tonge to make Þis boke” to divert them from the “talys & rymys” (Hanglyng Synn lines 44-46) of games, feasts, and taverns that could otherwise lead them to sin and folly. But it is in works of literary ambition that we find authorship staged in some of its most intriguing and evocative forms. Gower and Chaucer represent important examples of what we might call “the fiction of authorship.” Authorship reveals itself in the shifting ratios of imitation and refusal that surround Gower’s work in framing devices and paratexts and that permeate Chaucer’s as an internal signature. <?page no="57"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 57 II John Gower is arguably the paradigmatic author in late-medieval England. The formal conventions of authorship are fully mobilized to support and sustain this role. All Gower’s major works and many others besides are marked by the expository device of rubrics, which signal the divisions of his materia and foreground the conceptual effort that has gone into organizing them - that is, to treating his matter as the commentaries describe the modus tractatus. The Confessio Amantis employs two prologues to situate Gower’s poem, one in the introductory portion to the work which takes previous authors and books as the topic of its exordium and the other at the beginning of Book I, which seems to announce a shift in matter from social commentary to love. Besides rubrics and marginal glosses, introductory Latin verses punctuate the divisions of his subject matter to show its structural order and articulation. In recent years, Gower’s modern interpreters have emphasized that the textual apparatus serves to interrogate rather than impose the authority of commentary, just as ethics designates in Gower a domain of moral reflection and not merely a program of overt didacticism (Echard 19- 20). Gower draws on authors and discursive forms in both classical and vernacular canons for his poems - dreams visions, penitentials, encyclopedic compilations, chronicle history and didactic works, Latin and vernacular epic, French romances and lyrics. Ovid is a major source for the exemplary narratives of the Confessio Amantis and for the language and phrasing of the Vox Clamantis, which at times resembles an Ovidian cento with lines resituated with no concern for the original context (Yeager 48-62). Gower shares a dozen tales with Chaucer in a poetic rivalry that finally confounds any effort to define lines of influence. Moreover, Gower’s poetic career reflects not just an awareness of authorial conventions and borrowings but a sustained and continually renewed performance of authorship. Gower presents himself as the author of a unified corpus held together by a consistent thematic program derived from the ethical framing of poetry in the commentary traditions. His corpus lays claim to the literary terrain of late-medieval England, ranging over the three principal languages of composition - Latin, French, and Middle English. The colophon “Quia unusquisque,” presumably written by Gower though appearing in various positions among manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis and Vox Clamantis, brings his works and poetic languages together in a virtuoso reckoning of authorship. The piece credits Gower with having produced three books “for the purpose of bringing instruction to the attention of others” (“doctrine causa compositos ad aliorum <?page no="58"?> 58 Robert R. Edwards noticiam”), and describes the French Mirour de l’omme, Latin Vox Clamantis, and Middle English Confessio Amantis in their order of composition. Gower borrows here from the general framework of commentary tradition to report a standardized Latin title for each work (the Mirour is the Speculum Meditantis) and to specify the material of the works, the divisions of the material, the mode of treatment, and the utility. Gower’s description of his corpus in “Quia unusquisque” is highly selective in its inclusions and emphases (Minor Latin Works 71). Accordingly, the Mirour is a poem on virtues and vices and social estates, though it clearly evolved in the process of composition to include other material, notably a life of the Virgin. The Vox is described in the colophon from the retrospect of Richard II’s fall but omits mention of the allegorical dream vision of the Rising of 1381 that Gower later appended as the first book of the poem. The Confessio Amantis is cast first as a poem of princely instruction but then one mostly about love and the foolish passions of lovers, along the lines of school commentaries on Ovid’s elegiac poems. The aim of Gower’s colophon, however, is not to give a full descriptive account but to insist on the coherence of his canon, hence his authorial project. Gower is an ethical poet addressing the moral, social, and political order and instructing both princes and lovers in self-governance. The critical importance lies not just in the themes of Gower’s authorship but in the systemization. Gower frames a reading of his corpus through the analytical and descriptive categories that confer the literary dignity of authorship. He makes his work an object of commentary, a virtual requirement of authorship. The Latin poem “Eneidos Bucolis,” which follows Gower’s colophon in five manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis, directly applies these conventions to Gower. The poem is credited to “ a certain Philosopher” (“quidam Philosophus”) writing on the imagined occasion of Gower’s completing three books. It is located, in effect, at the fictional moment of his consolidating his poetic canon, an event, as we shall see, that Gower refuses. G. C. Macaulay surmised that the philosopher might be Ralph Strode, the co-dedicatee with “moral Gower” of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (Complete Works 4: 419); alternatively, Robert F. Yeager has suggested that Gower himself might have penned these lines of commendation and commemoration as part of a campaign of authorial selfpresentation (Minor Latin Works 83-6). The poet, whether friend or convenient fiction, makes the dramatic move of equating Gower’s three little books (libelli) with the three books (libri) that won Vergil honor over other poets and secured him praise as an author in the schools. The poem does not work out specific correspondences between Gower’s poems and Vergil’s corpus. Nor does it suggest that there is a program of writing in the compositional sequence of Gower’s poems <?page no="59"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 59 that would match the progress through pastoral, georgic, and epic that late-classical commentators imagined as a literary cursus honorum, a model of an authorial career. Simply put, Gower’s corpus matches up with Vergil’s oeuvre because each writer has composed three major works. The poem’s authorial ambitions lie in exploiting the contrasts that this numerical correspondence secures. Thus Rome praises Vergil, but England is the beneficiary of Gower’s turn to serious topics. Vergil writes in one tongue to have his work appreciated by Italians, whereas Gower writes in three in order to achieve a “scola lata,” a wider learning among men. Vergil astounds Roman ears with vanities, while Gower’s writing glows for Christians and secures him praise in heaven. These comparisons do not suggest the equivalence of the two poets through formal emulation; they propose instead that Gower surpasses Vergil because he is a national and Christian poet. The philosopher’s poem is concerned as much with translatio - the relocation of ascribed cultural values - as with praise and commendation. It sets out an elegant logical proportion that highlights telling differences in scale: Vergil is to a city (Rome) and a region (Italy) as Gower is to a nation (England) and a spiritual community (Christendom). As an author, Gower has the equivalent works to imitate Vergil’s corpus, and as an imitator - belated yet rivalrous - he surpasses Vergil by having salvation history on his side. The quatrain “Quem cinxere,” written again by a “certain philosopher,” celebrates the completion of the Confessio Amantis in similar authorial terms. Gower’s finished poem, articulated in its structural divisions, has a counterpart in the English nation filled with praise that sings (in a reminiscence of Vergil) Gower’s poetry in its different regions: “Per loca discreta canit Anglia laude repleta” (“filled with praise / England, throughout many regions, recites your joyous poetry”). Gower enacts three authorial roles here as “Carminis Athleta satirus . . . sive Poeta” (“Master of verse, satirist - or poet”). Macaulay takes “satirus Poeta” together so that Gower is a competitive performer or skilled champion of verse and a satiric poet. Whatever the construction, the encomiastic demand is for full praise with the same transcendence that marks Gower’s historical and spiritual advantage over Vergil: “Sit laus completa quo gloria stat sine meta” (“May praise be full where glory stand without end”). Gower’s ambition to be seen as an author stands out clearly, then, in his paratexts and appropriations of conventions from the traditions of commentary. Gower claims a position as a moralist and wise man, prophet and “public writer.” He moves between and among the authorial designations of scriptor (Complete Works 4: 313), compositor (Complete Works 4: 3) and even orator (Complete Works 4: 14). In probably the most <?page no="60"?> 60 Robert R. Edwards overt example, Gower explains that Amans, his protagonist in the Confessio Amantis, is a literary persona adopted by the author. The relevant phrasing occurs in his gloss near the beginning of Book I of the Confessio: “fingens se auctor esse Amantem” (I.59 gloss). What proves remarkable about the passage is not that Gower assumes a persona, much less the persona of a lover as narrator, as in the Roman de la rose, but that his gloss takes it for granted that being an auctor is the poet’s uncontroversial identity. Authorship is the norm against which he assumes the fictitious role of Venus’s largely unsuccessful and finally superfluous and superannuated follower. 4 Gower’s agility in overplaying the conventional role of lover while quietly claiming in the margin to be an auctor demonstrates some of the working principles of medieval authorship. Authorship is a concept always under negotiation for late-medieval English writers. It is a contingency within writing, not an external condition to be achieved and held once and for all. In this particular instance, the elegantly smuggled claim to be an auctor stands out by contrast with the role Gower assumed in the Vox Clamantis. At the beginning of the Vox, explaining his authorial intent, Gower is the compositor, “compiler,” of a horrific dream of rebellious peasants transformed to monsters (Complete Works 4: 3). He confirms the role at the end, while claiming that the authorizing source of his poem is a spirit that infused his verses while he was dreaming: “Hos ego compegi versos, quos fuderat in me / Spiritus in sompnis” (“I have compiled these verses, which a spirit uttered within me during my sleep” [7.1443-4]). From this, he goes on to make an apparent disavowal of authorship: “Hec set vt auctor ego non scripsi metra libello” (“But I, as an author, have not set down these lines in a book” [7.1445]). He is instead passing along what he has heard as something to be read (“Que tamen audiui trado legenda tibi”). And what he has heard are the voices of the people (“voces plebis” [7.1448]). As a prophetic writer, he has invoked the authority that proverbially stands next to God’s: “Quod scripsi plebis vox est” (“What I have set down is the voice of the people” [7.1469]). 5 The compiler, who gathers from other sources but presumably adds nothing of his own, thus writes himself into his own text as the instrumental means, the efficient cause, of an authority far beyond any powers he can invoke on his own. 4 Minnis, “Authors in Love,” reads Gower’s person in the context of medieval tradition. Meecham-Jones sees the passage as a formal device that places Gower both inside and outside his work. 5 Gower returns to this trope in the Confessio Amantis, appealing to “The comun vois” (Pro 125). <?page no="61"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 61 The contingency of authorship in Gower is apparent throughout the intricate narrative framing of the Confessio Amantis. An authorial Gower speaks in the Prologue, first in Latin and then in English. His initial topos is poetic modesty, but his underlying gesture is Ovidian and ironic: “minimus ipse minora canam” (“I, least of all, sing things all the lesser” [Pro 2]). The turn toward less lofty subjects (minora) is Ovid’s selfinaugurating claim at the opening of the Amores. If Gower follows his turn from a higher topic (epic for Ovid, social commentary for Gower), he does not follow the reduction in scale, producing instead an encyclopedic work holding to “the middel weie” (Pro 17) between lust and lure while shifting its final cause from being a book for “king Richardes sake” (Pro 24*) to being one for “Engelondes sake” (Pro 24) in later recensions. The role of imitation is crucial within this figuration of authorship. Gower states that books are the remains of authors, a means of recovering their embodied teaching (Pro 1-3). Imitation provides access to this pedagogy for moderns who “wryte of newe som matiere, / Essampled of these olde wyse” (Pro 6-7). As happens so often in Gower and Chaucer, simple language conveys enormous subtlety - in this case, the impossible demand at the heart of imitation. To write “of newe som matiere” is to write “new, for the first time” and to write received materials “anew, afresh, again” ( MED , s.v. neue [n.]). Such writing is by definition poetic imitation; it is “Essampled” in the dual sense of setting a precedent or exemplifying ( MED , s.v. exaumplen[b], citing this passage). In other words, it is constrained in its contents (as example) and in its mode of presentation (as precedent). The sources for imitation likewise divide for Gower between authors and the works that stand for them in time: “these olde wyse” refers to “these wise men of olde” and to old books. 6 The authorial Gower of the Prologue adopts a persona in Amans who recounts the dream vision and suffers Venus’s dismissal. But he also has a double in Genius, who serves as the focal point for narrative imitation. Genius enacts this authorial role by continually marking his exempla as stories appropriated from elsewhere, from a broad canon of uncontroversial wisdom. His authorizing gesture is typically to present them as a form of quotation: the illustrative “tales” Genius recounts for Amans are drawn from “cronique” or poets or “bokes”; some are “a tale in poesie” (4.1039). His formula for introducing narrative is “I finde” or “I finde write” (4.2324, 4.2927). Genius thus absorbs the be- 6 Macaulay, Complete Works 2: 457, cites the “Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz” 15.1.4: “Pour essampler les autres du present”; Peck glosses, “wise [men/ books].” <?page no="62"?> 62 Robert R. Edwards latedness of imitation as a strategy of authorship, and he takes on the work of translation as one dimension of authorship. The translated and invented stories that Genius offers are notable for their narrative fidelity to their sources. The Ovidian tales, in particular, tend to present the complete stories in the Metamorphoses and other poems. The readings Genius makes and the marginal glosses that accompany the narratives indicate, however, that Genius’s authorship, like the meaning of his tales, is open and contested rather than settled. The fidelity of narrative imitation and the authorial relocations of exemplarity and moralization exist in a tension that reflects the nature of the literary. Furthermore, the contingency of authorship becomes visible within the dream frame, as Amans resists the commentary Genius brings to his exempla. For example, in the discussion of arms and love, a central concern of medieval vernacular literatures and chivalric culture, Amans challenges Genius’s link between continual martial prowess and a lover’s desire: “be londe and ek be Schipe / He mot travaile for worschipe” (4.1627-8). Amans’s counter example to this armed erotic vigilance is Achilles, who sets aside his arms for Polyxene: “A man of armes mai him reste / Somtime in hope for the beste” (4. 1703-4). Here Amans swerves from narrative fidelity to omit the conclusion of the story: in the medieval master narrative of Troy, Achilles dies by ambush and his son Pyrrhus wreaks terrible vengeance on Polyxene for his father’s treacherous death. In doing so, Amans reveals, at one level, his limited perspective as a penitent and thus his need for Genius’s instruction on sloth; at another, he confirms a corollary of authorial rewriting as imitation - namely, the expectation that readers will recognize the lacunae and silences. Imitation that goes undetected misses its mark, which is to be recognized as a form of secondary creation (Greene 28- 53). Gower’s strategies of imitation are simultaneously overt and sophisticated gestures toward the textual conventions of authorship. His elaborately staged abandonment of authorship at the end of the Confessio Amantis - a refusal generated inside the fiction of his text but moving into authorial performance - is no less complex than his framing and introductory strategies. Venus dismisses John Gower from her court with the injunction to pray for peace and directs him, “go ther vertu moral duelleth, / Wher ben thi bokes, as men telleth, / Whiche of long time thou hast write” (8.2925-7). Released from love and implicitly separated from the persona of Amans, Gower is returned to his literary canon and to the moral and social topics he ostensibly abandoned in Book I of the Confessio. Even in the differing Ricardian and Lancastrian versions of the poem, addressed respectively to the king and to the nation, a sense of closure seems evident in the passage. Moving through <?page no="63"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 63 his literary cursus, Gower has reached, in Venus’s injunction to prayer, a Christian equivalent to the final stage of a pagan career, which is philosophical retirement. 7 Gower’s refusal to accept these terms and the closure he has so carefully devised is expressed by performing the conventions of authorship. Such performance is in one sense a repetition. The Latin poem “Quicquid homo scribat,” extant in three versions and following Gower’s Chronica Tripertita, balances an authorial recusal (excusacio) with the undiminished will to write: “Ultra posse nichil, quamvis michi velle remansit” (“I can do nothing beyond what is possible, though my will has remained” [Minor Latin Works 46-7]). At the end of the Confessio, Gower imitates his own tripartite canon in the service of this refusal. He composes a corresponding sequence of minor works ranging again over three languages - the English poem “In Praise of Peace,” the French “Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz” and the “Cinkante Balades,” and a group of Latin poems, including the “laureate” pieces praising Henry IV. In his last poems, he has positioned the canonical Gower as the auctor to emulate through the answering corpus of minor works. III Chaucer’s gestures of authorship provide a counterpoint to the norms of authorship that Gower represents in late-medieval England. Like Gower as well as Machaut, Deschamps, and Christine de Pisan, Chaucer has a precise sense of his poetic canon. The summaries made in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the headlink to the Man of Law’s Tale, and the Retraction at the end of the Canterbury Tales are structured accounts of a literary corpus and not a mere listing of works. The Legend highlights Chaucer’s translation of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde, his narratives in praise of love, “other holynesse,” (F422), and lyric compositions. A similar canon appears in the Retraction, which invokes the Pauline commonplace of the commentary tradition that all that is written is written for our doctrine (Romans 15: 4). The Retraction divides works between translations and narratives of worldly vanities, secular lyrics, and the translations of Boethius and religious texts. Within the dramatic frame of the Canterbury Tales, the Man of Law accuses Chaucer of exercising a monopoly on tales, particularly Ovidian materials, of the 7 The source for a fourth phase in a poetic career is the life of Vergil attributed to Suetonius (“De poetis”) and included in Donatus: “ut reliqua vita tantum philosophiae vacaret” (Suetonius 2: 476). <?page no="64"?> 64 Robert R. Edwards kind that appears in the Legend, where courtly poets have used up all the good words of poetic sentement. Unlike Gower’s paratexts, however, Chaucer’s poetic reckonings are made under fictional pressure. The Legend moots the question, in Cupid’s accusation and Alceste’s defense, of Chaucer’s heresy and apostasy against love, the informing topic of courtly literary discourse. The Retraction is written as a formal apologia, whatever its relation to the ending of the Canterbury Tales. The Man of Law contrasts the Ovidian Chaucer of complaint with the wider range of topics available to him; he has in mind specifically the tales of incest, the stories of Canacee and Apollonius of Tyr, which Gower presents in the Confessio Amantis as complicating studies of the doctrine of natural love. As the three poetic catalogues suggest, authorship is an issue internal to Chaucer’s writing throughout his career, and it operates repeatedly through imitation. We have probably lost any French lyrics that Chaucer wrote, if they are not the poems in fixed forms ascribed to “Ch.” But we have Chaucer’s narrative inauguration at the beginning of the Book of the Duchess, in which he imitates and rewrites Jean Froissart’s exordium on melancholy before moving on to adapt the form of Machaut’s lyriconarrative dits amoureux. The dream visions, I have argued elsewhere, are a sophisticated meditation on poetry and poetics, and authorship figures prominently as both a position to sustain writing and a critique of what writing can convey outside its own order of knowledge. The Legend promotes a “world of autours” (G 308) in the longest extant sample of Chaucer revision, and this world explicitly coordinates pagan and Christian narratives in a single, stabilized “matere” (G 309) centered on virtuous women. The Canterbury Tales frames its narrative project not just through the metaphor of pilgrimage but also through the conceit of imitation. To “telle a tale after a man” (GP I.731), as the pilgrim-narrator proposes to do, implies a two-fold imitation. As in pedagogy, it requires the re-creation of character and style through the imitation of a speaker’s language. As in commentary, it locates a juridical authority, by which imitated speakers are the authors who bear responsibility for their creations, even perverse responsibility: “The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this. / So was the Reve eek and othere mo” (I.3183-4). The advice of the Manciple’s dame, pointing the moral of his tale of Phoebus and the crow, fully ventriloquizes this sense of authorship as exposure and liability for the source of speech: “be noon auctour newe / Of tidynges, wheither they been false or trewe” (IX.359-60). The Tales embody authorship in fictional characters situated in a richly imagined social world, a temporary, consensual community analogous in its artifice to those operating in the contemporary historical domain of social performance. Behind this strategy lies an even more radi- <?page no="65"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 65 cal experiment with imitation. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer had effectively reached one limit of authorial fiction by claiming Lollius as an invented auctor. Lollius is named as author in passages that bracket the poem’s action with Troilus’s infatuation with Criseyde (1.394) and his incontrovertible discovery of her betrayal (5.1653), he is designated as the narrator’s Latin source rather than the courtly model of “sentement” (2.13-14), and he is evoked continually in the poem as “myn auctour.” Lollius serves practically as a screen figure to obscure Boccaccio, Chaucer’s immediate literary source, but his function reaches beyond disguising vernacular imitation. Winthrop Wetherbee argues that Lollius “fragments” classical tradition by emphasizing “only the tragic or destructive aspects of mythic history” (25). John Fleming sees him as an instrument of Chaucer’s “deep classicism” and “antique authority” (xiii), a “pseudoantique original” that allows a Christian perspective on pagan love (192). Barry Windeatt contends that Lollius shows the extent to which Chaucer dramatizes or fictionalizes his sources (37) by standing in the last position in “successive fabrications of authority” (44) within the medieval Troy story. Unlike his textual predecessors, however, Lollius underwrites an imitation of authorship itself. A citation without a referent, he makes possible the fictional reproduction of classical authority, as he does as one of the textual pillars bearing up the Troy story in the House of Fame (line 1468). For Chaucerian imitation, he is a source drawn from and signifying the very condition of textuality. Refusal, the complement of imitation, figures even more prominently for Chaucer’s authorship than it does for Gower’s normalized practice. The deferrals and incompleteness of the dream visions reveal those poems as works that frustrate the conventions of narrative closure in order to create a poetic copy never fully measured against their generic models in Machaut and never fully contextualized in a social framework of authorial performance and patronage. The Canterbury Tales stage literal authorial refusal in the interruptions of the Host to end “Sir Thopas” and of the Knight to end the Monk’s tragedies, works that represent vernacular and classical canons respectively. Two notable moments suggest that Chaucer’s vernacular authorship defines itself most clearly by refusal when it comes up against classical authority. In the House of Fame, Chaucer brings authorship, imitation, and refusal together in a remarkable gesture. Rehearsing his progress through the “sondry stages” (line 122) of the visual images in Venus’s glass temple, the poem’s dreamer-narrator comes to the episode in the Aeneid in which Vergil’s hero’s proves himself a “traytour” (line 267) to love if not to empire and destiny by abandoning Dido. Dido begins an extended complaint whose source, we are told, lies in the singularity of the narrator’s dream. The narrator asserts, “Non other auctour alegge I” <?page no="66"?> 66 Robert R. Edwards (line 314). Auctour, as the Manciple reminds us, has a primary sense of someone to whom responsibility can be traced and a further sense, especially pertinent here, of a maker or creator of a work. 8 The complaint that the dreamer-narrator reports is a vastly overdetermined instance of imitation. The narrator produces a counterpart to Vergil’s canonical text by exploiting its imaginative possibilities, tacit as well as overt. Chaucer’s poem recasts what Dido says internally in the Aeneid (4.534-52) - what she formulates within herself (“secum”) and ponders in her heart (“corde”) - as a formal, public utterance conveyed in a recognized medieval genre, a lover’s complaint. The narrator refuses Vergil’s authority not just by claiming Dido’s words as his own but, more important, by renegotiating how his account stands in relation to its classical model. His refusal is at base a lyric recontextualization of his source. It requires, moreover, a second and competing act of imitation, which is the turn to Ovid’s Heroides as a poetic model to situate Vergil’s heroic narrative rhetorically within the imagined anguish of its female victim. Chaucer thereby creates an original copy from an authorial persona, not an auctor. The inventional quality becomes apparent at the end of the episode, in the aporia of the poet’s citing sources that he does not elaborate. Though the trope is one common signature of Chaucer’s authorship, it serves in this case to delineate the singularity of his imitation. Those who would know “alle the wordes that she seyde” are directed to the sources: “Rede Virgile in Eneydos / Or the Epistle of Ovyde” (378-9). Vergil and Ovid record, however, what Dido says later in the Aeneid, as she curses the Trojans and prepares to die. Invoking no other authority but the narrator’s dream, Chaucer exploits the radical possibility of an authorship grounded in fiction. Near the end of Troilus and Criseyde, in a stanza of preemptive closure (one of several at the end of the poem), Chaucer writes a justly famous envoi that returns to the question of vernacular fiction and classical authority. The narrator-poet seemingly positions his book within the epic tradition represented by the classical authors: But litel book, no makyng thow n’envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. (5.1789-92) 8 Minnis, Oxford Guides 247, summarizes the scholarship and stresses the primary legal sense of responsibility over the literary sense of a creator. MED , s.v. auctour, distinguishes the maker (1a) from the source (2a) but notes the overlap between the senses in literary usage (2b). <?page no="67"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 67 Chaucer’s envoi removes the poem from one kind of imitation at the same time that it directs it toward another. If “makyng” signifies the act of writing or composing, which Chaucer typically claims as his sphere of artistry, this passage marks the abandonment of technical rivalry and thus a turn away from one major resource for imitation, the emulation of style. If it refers to love poems, as it subsequently does in the Legend of Good Women, which addresses “Ye lovers that kan make of sentement” (F 69), Chaucer removes the Troilus from the practice of the courtly amateur and that of the professional writing for a patron. In either case, he dramatically raises the stakes of authorship here. Chaucer locates his book wholly within a poetics of imitation. Its subjugation to “poesye” shifts the focus of authorship from artisanal execution to a broader effort of conception. With that shift come, as Wetherbee points out, “a concern with universal values and a recognition of the authority of poetic tradition as a repository of these values” (226). Chaucer’s allusions in the passage chart a genealogy of authorship. Editors note that the roster of poets roughly duplicates the list cited at the end of Boccaccio’s Filocolo, though the order of citation differs. Boccaccio, addressing his work as its author (“tuo autore” [5.97]), makes his lady the destination of the book’s journey, the authorizing power to which the book is subject, and he makes Dante an object of reverence placed beyond emulation. He imagines, however, precisely the literary context that Chaucer seeks to escape by removing his book from the practices of courtly imitation and subjecting it instead to “poesye.” It is Dante, Boccaccio’s own authorial source, who provides the richer and more telling context of authorship. Scholarship has generally minimized the overlap between Dante’s list of poets and Chaucer’s, but the correspondences repay consideration as a vital intertext (Schless 143, Windeatt 155, 306). In canto 4 of the Inferno, Dante encounters the “bella scola” comprising Homer, Ovid, Horace, and Lucan, who welcome Vergil’s return to their company with him. Their welcome is a figural preface to Dante’s induction as the sixth member of the company, which also completes a translatio from Greek to Latin to vernacular poets. 9 Commentators from the fourteenth century onwards have defended Dante’s bold inclusion of himself among the great poets of Antiquity. Albert Ascoli rightly observes that Dante claims a place here as a poet, not an author (68). Yet 9 In his commentary, Pietro Alighieri notes that Dante’s inclusion in the group depends on his elevation as a poet. In De vulgari eloquentia 2.6.7, Dante lists Vergil, Ovid, and Statius as examples of the supreme level of poetic construction. Vita nuova 25.9, in a discussion of apostrophe, mentions the same classical poets as Inferno 4, adding Dante and Guido Cavalcanti as moderns. <?page no="68"?> 68 Robert R. Edwards commentary confirms the larger bid for authorship, for an auctor is a writer who generates commentary about his work, and Dante had already classified himself as the “poet of rectitude” in his survey of the great topics of the illustrious vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia 2.2.9) and directly applied the machinery of exegesis to his canzoni in the Convivio. Less overt but perhaps more daring is the suggestion that follows from Dante’s numbering himself among the great poets of Antiquity. As the greetings for Vergil make clear, the poets are shades. Vergil is greeted as “l’altissimo poeta” (4.80), but it is his shade that returns from the mission that Beatrice has given him: “l’ombra sua torna” (4.81). Those who greet him are “grand’ ombre” (4.83). From the earliest commentators onwards, “ombra” has been glossed as “anima” (Guido da Pisa, Francesco da Buti). Dante, meanwhile, is not a shade but a substance, an embodied soul, as other characters in the Commedia remark, and he will realize the Vergilian project within Christian history. Just as Statius takes over for Vergil near the end of the Purgatorio, Dante completes the historical trajectory of ancient poetry and gives it substance. As Ascoli reminds us, Dante both levels and elevates the status of poets within the “bella scola” so that he remains “at once last and least and last and best” (313). Chaucer evokes this scene in an act of imitation and invention based on rewriting his intertext from the Commedia. He changes the personnel of the “bella scola” by replacing Horace with Statius in order to present a catalogue of epic poets. 10 He reveals Dante’s textual source in Statius for the theme of literary deference. Statius ends the Thebaid with an envoi directing the poem not to rival the Aeneid but to follow it at a distance and honor its footsteps: “nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, / sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora” [12.816-17]). The trope of following is itself an echo of the Aeneid (2.711) in Aeneas’s instruction that Creusa follow in his footsteps as they leave Troy. 11 It became a commonplace in medieval poetics for composing by reinventing the silences of earlier texts, as in Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Documentum: “ne sequamur vestigia verborum” (“let us not trace the footsteps of the words” [Faral 309]). Chaucer writes the key elements of the passage back into his stanza, capturing the ambivalence of imitation in shifts of tone. He directs his poem not to emulate courtly writing rather than the unreachable model of Vergilian epic. He follows epic at a distance by situating a 10 In De vulgari eloquentia 2.6.7, Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius comprise the models of the highest achievement in poetic construction. 11 Dominik points out that the Vergilian intertext shifts the relation of original and imitation from master and epigone to the cultural model of husband and wife (517). It also suggests that some measure of loss resides within authorial deference. <?page no="69"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 69 love story in the temporal and compositional interim before Trojan history realizes a catastrophic fate already set in motion. He makes the Statian rite of poetic deference concrete and even comic by directing his book to kiss the steps where the epic poets leave their vestigia, their footprints and their traces. The object of this deference is understood as literary space - the locus of imitation and invention within which the epic poets develop their materia. Indeed, the variant reading of Chaucer’s text - arguably the authorial reading - directs the book to the steps “where as thow seest space / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace” (Troilus & Criseyde 556). “Space” is the durior lectio: it directly translates Italian “spaziare” (to range) and so describes exactly the actions of Dante and the rest of the “bella scola” as they move through a landscape in Limbo populated by literary and philosophical topics. 12 Chaucer’s stanza thus places his poem in close relation to the literary tradition Dante joins as a poet, but it asserts a separation and distance, which is the domain of Chaucer’s own authorship - subordinate but defiant in its difference. IV Authorship, as the examples of Gower and Chaucer suggest, is a powerful but complicated tool for understanding literary culture in latemedieval England. Its stabilizing conventions and external forms come under pressure as vernacular writers at once imitate the auctores and refuse their authority. The fictions of authorship elaborated in vernacular works offer, in effect, a set of hermeneutic corrections for using medieval literary theory to explain medieval works. Authorship functions within them through contrast and difference. It is the structure of a relation to a past that cannot be realized. It is as well a negotiation whose aim is to appropriate a measure of cultural power from the vexed and impossible project of literary emulation. The genius of the trope of authorship lies in the exploitation of belatedness and subordination, for it is the contingency of writing that grants late-medieval poets the possibility of their work. 12 Singleton suggests that the castle the poets enter is probably best understood as the Castle of Fame (2: 64). <?page no="70"?> 70 Robert R. Edwards References Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Ed. 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Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. <?page no="71"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 71 Edwards, Robert R. The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in the Early Narratives. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1989. Faral, Édmond. Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle. Paris: Champion, 1924. Fleming, John. Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s “Troilus.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Francesco da Buti. Commento di Francesco da Buti sopra La Divina Commedia di Dante Allighieri. Ed. Crescentino Giannini. Pisa: Fratelli Nistri, 1858-62. http: / / dante.dartmouth.edu/ Gower, John. Complete Works of John Gower. Ed. G. C. Macaulay. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899-1902. . Confessio Amantis. Ed. Russell Peck. 3 vols. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000-6. . The Major Latin Works of John Gower. Trans. Eric W. Stockton. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. . The Minor Latin Works. Ed. and trans. Robert F. Yeager. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. 2005. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Greene, Thomas. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Guido da Pisa. Guido da Pisa’s Expositiones et Glose super Comediam Dantis, or Commentary on Dante’s Inferno. Ed. Vincenzo Cioffari. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1974. http: / / dante.dartmouth.edu/ Hanna III, Ralph. “Langland’s Ymaginitif: Images and the Limits of Poetry.” Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image. Ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 81-94. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. . Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hollander, Robert. Dante’s Epistle to Can Grande. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Jenkins, T. Atkinson. “Deschamps’ Ballade to Chaucer.” MLN 33 (1918): 268-78. Mancho, Guzmán. “Is Orumulum’s Introduction an Instance of an Aristotelian Prologue? ” Neophilologus 88 (2004): 477-92. Mannyng, Robert. Handlyng Synne. Ed. Idelle Sullens. Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983. <?page no="72"?> 72 Robert R. Edwards Meecham-Jones, Simon. “Prologue: The Poet as Subject: Literary Self- Consciousness in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts. Ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. 14-30. Middleton, Anne. “Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman.” The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield. Ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982. 91-122. Minnis, Alastair J. “Authors in Love: The Exegesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets.” The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen. Ed. Charlotte Cook Morse, Penelope Reed Doob, and Marjorie Curry Woods. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, 1992. 161-89. and Ian Johnson, eds. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 2: The Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. . Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. London: Scolar Press, 1984. . Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. , with V. J. 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Ed. and trans. J. H. Mozley, rev. G. P. Goold. 2 vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989. Suetonius. “Vita Virgili.” Suetonius. Ed. John C. Rolfe. 2 vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1914. 2: 464-83. <?page no="73"?> Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal 73 Toynbee, Paget. “Correspondence: The Ballade Addressed by Eustache Deschamps to Geoffrey Chaucer.” The Academy no. 1019 (14 November 1891): 432-3. Vergil. Aeneid. Vergil. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold. 2 vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999. Wetherbee, Winthrop. Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on “Troilus and Criseyde.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Windeatt, Barry. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Yeager, Robert F. John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1990. <?page no="75"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall Lynn S. Meskill Studies of authorial indebtedness to source texts can shed light on the nature of original authorship. The 1605 Quarto of Jonson’s Sejanus, which makes visible in marginal glosses its debt to its Roman sources, provides an ideal control for Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch in Julius Caesar. The striking difference between Jonson’s typographic monument to authorship and the invisibility of Shakespeare’s debt to Plutarch (effectively occluded in modern editions) seems at the outset to prevent any fruitful comparisons between the two texts. Yet both texts imitate and transform their chosen Greek and Roman sources from the first act to the last. What we find is that Shakespeare’s method approaches that of Jonson much more closely than we would expect, given the traditional oppositions between the two authors. Shakespeare diligently patches together scenes, sections and phrases using an astonishing variety of references from the three major Lives regarding Julius Caesar. Jonson’s play, built out of a tissue of references and citations from Tacitus and other Roman writers, is the visible image of the same silent and invisible practice in which Shakespeare himself was engaged in creating his play. Reading Shakespeare and several of his contemporaries is pleasure enough, perhaps all the pleasure possible for most. But if we wish to consummate and refine this pleasure by understanding it, to distil the last drop of it, to press and press the essence of each author, to apply the exact measurement of our own sensations, then we must compare; and we cannot compare without parcelling the threads of authorship and influence. (Eliot 135) Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 75-91. <?page no="76"?> 76 Lynn S. Meskill T. S. Eliot’s metaphors to describe how the critic can discover the originality of a particular author are homely ones: to find the “essence” of an author one presses and extracts; to distinguish one author from the other, the critic must disentangle different coloured threads. Despite the somewhat disturbing aspects of these metaphors - the extraction of an authorial essence implies the destruction of the fruit, the picking apart of authorial threads implies the unravelling of the textual fabric - Eliot’s model for critical appreciation is still valid today. The critical task of “parcelling the threads of authorship” goes on, and to a greater extent than ever. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s challenge to the notion of the transcendental author, Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie, among others, critiqued the scholarly neglect of non-authorial textual determinants. As a result, over the course of the last twenty years, the study of Renaissance drama has involved a much closer examination of the role of co-authors, translators, theatre companies, actors, printers, copy editors, and booksellers in the production of texts. An authentic, original text produced by a single, isolated author is no longer considered an adequate description of most early modern dramatic texts. Unlike the study of some material practices which call into question the image of a single, isolated author, studies of an author’s sources do not appear to pose the same type of challenge to the principle of authorial unity. Not, at least, in anywhere near so striking a manner as the challenge posed to the integrity of the Shakespearean text by the differences between Folio and Q1 Hamlet, or the possible existence of a second hand in the writing of any number of (canonical) plays in the period. The reasons for this are immediately evident. A source text is older, previous. The copy editors, actors, printers, in other words, the collaborators of Renaissance texts are contemporaneous with the author. As living, independent as well as interdependent beings pursuing their own interests and desires they are necessarily outside the control of the author. Their interventions, therefore, seem at first glance to pose a more serious challenge to the principle of authorial unity in that they are unexpected, accidental, or imposed upon the author. Yet a study of an author’s use of sources and the nature and extent of authorial indebtedness necessarily calls into question, though in a different way, the nature of original authorship. A study of sources reveals much of an author’s working methods, style and originality. By focussing on these plays’ respective treatment of sources (i.e. the sites where heterogeneous material gets appropriated and made their own) one can get a better sense of their “essence.” It is for this reason that Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall can serve as a useful control for Julius Caesar, a play with which it shares a number of elements. Julius Caesar and Sejanus were performed within a few years of <?page no="77"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship 77 each other. The same actors played in both plays, and Shakespeare himself is listed in Jonson’s 1616 Folio as having acted in Sejanus. There is ample evidence that Jonson had the extremely popular Julius Caesar in mind in writing Sejanus. Both authors, as I will suggest, were inspired by the complex and multivalent figure of Julius Caesar. Finally, and for my immediate purposes, both plays represent a significant indebtedness to their source texts. We are not confronted in either of these plays with fleeting inter-textual moments of varying degrees and frequencies. We are dealing with two texts that follow, rearrange, transform, imitate and translate (in its multiple meanings) their chosen Greek and Roman sources. What we find is that Shakespeare’s method approaches that of Jonson much more closely than we might expect, given the traditional oppositions between the two authors. Shakespeare is not only inspired by Thomas North’s Plutarch, but he has pieces and fragments of it at his fingertips, patching together scenes, sections and phrases using an astonishing range of references from the three major Lives regarding Julius Caesar. Jonson’s play, built out of a tissue of references and citations from Tacitus and other Roman writers, is the visible image of the same silent and invisible practice in which Shakespeare himself was engaged in creating his play. Richard Dutton has described the 1605 Quarto of Jonson’s Sejanus as providing us with a unique example of the relationship between an author and his literary sources: 1 Ben Jonson’s Sejanus is of special interest for a study of how an author uses literary sources. It is, in one sense, scarcely original at all, being a meticulously reconstructed history based chiefly on Tacitus but incorporating contributions also from Dio Cassius, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, and Plutarch. There are also incidental borrowings from the plays of Seneca, the poems of Virgil and Claudian, and the satires of Juvenal and Persius, so that the whole constitutes what Hazlitt once described as “an admirable piece of ancient mosaic.” (181) Dutton characterizes Jonson’s first Roman tragedy as “meticulously reconstructed history” and describes it as “scarcely original” - an “ancient mosaic” (181) rather than an authentic creative work. The author of Sejanus is, essentially, an erudite and extremely able bricoleur. By contrast, according to most scholars, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has one main 1 My discussion centers on the 1605 Quarto, the first published version of Sejanus, His Fall, complete with marginalia and paratextual matter. The play was published in the 1616 Folio (and in succeeding folios) without the original marginal glosses. There are many theories (political, bibliographical, authorial), but no certainties as to why Sejanus lost its marginalia in the Folio, while Jonson’s masques retained theirs. <?page no="78"?> 78 Lynn S. Meskill source, North’s translation of Jacques Amyot’s translation of Plutarch, in particular The Life of Julius Caesar, The Life of Marcus Brutus and The Life of Marcus Antonius. Jonson, according to his prefatory remarks and marginal citations (verified by Jonson’s editors such as Philip J. Ayers), appears to use in order of frequency of citations: Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Suetonius and Seneca. Jonson mentions many additional books in his glosses, and the printed page becomes completely full in the authorial attempt to project the image of a scrupulously faithful and authoritative reconstruction of a scene of Roman sacrifice (figure 1). In his prefatory remarks “To the Readers” he defends his borrowings from antiquity and the astonishing display of his numerous debts to Latin authors: “I [. . .] have onely done it to shew my integrity in the Story” (sig. 2v). If we consider the state of Shakespeare’s desk, we imagine one large folio volume of Plutarch in North’s translation from 1579 and perhaps Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Arthur Golding’s translation. By contrast, Jonson’s desk appears piled high with books. Jonson also admits to having patched up the holes left gaping by the removal of sections originally written by a collaborator: Lastly I would informe you, that this Booke, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the publike Stage, wherein a second Pen had good share: in place of which I have rather chosen, to put weaker (and no doubt less pleasing) of mine own, than to defraud so happy a Genius of his right, by my loathed usurpation. (sig. ¶2v) It seems clear that for Jonson, the parts by the unnamed collaborator (whose identity has never been established) represent a threat to Jonson’s authorship in a way that his ancient sources did not. In fact, the integrity of the author is pointedly reinforced by the citations from ancient authors, whereas the collaborator’s foreign body must be cut out from the text under the guise of not “defrauding” or “usurping” him (figure 2). Turning to Julius Caesar, it may be safely stated that no reader has described the play as “being a meticulously reconstructed history based chiefly on Plutarch” and “scarcely original.” Yet Shakespeare relies on his sources as heavily as Jonson. E. A. J. Honigmann’s comments in his essay “Shakespeare’s Plutarch” are useful to recall: <?page no="79"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship 79 Figure 1: Facing pages from Jonson’s Sejanus (1605). (By permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin). <?page no="80"?> 80 Lynn S. Meskill Figure 2: “ACTUS PRIMUS” of Jonson’s Sejanus (1605). (By permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin). <?page no="81"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship 81 Especially with books known to have been in Shakespeare’s hands, the extraordinary reluctance in some quarters to admit that he read more than the minimum can now be stigmatized as an unworthy survival of the “Child of Nature” tradition. Industry and curiosity led him further into his books than his editors were sometimes prepared to follow. (32) Another reason why Shakespeare’s “industry” does not lead to a kind of dramatized history is his source: while Jonson chose Tacitus, Shakespeare chose Plutarch. In his address “To the Reader,” North describes Plutarch as a writer of “stories”: “an Author [who] hath written the profitablest storie of all Authors.” North goes on to praise Plutarch for having chosen to tell history as a story: All other learning is [. . .] fitter for Vniversities than for cities, [. . .] more commendable in the students them selues, than profitable vnto others. Whereas stories are fit for euery place, reache to all persons, serue for all tymes, teache the liuing, reuiue the dead, so farre excelling all other bookes, as it is better to see learning in noble mens liues, than to reade it in Philosophers writings.” (North sig. *iii) The difference in Jonson and Shakespeare’s choice of main source, the difference between Tacitus and Plutarch, goes a long way to explaining why Julius Caesar, while it draws heavily and in a complex and “industrious” manner on its sources, is not perceived as “historical reconstruction,” whereas Jonson’s Sejanus is. Not the least of the barriers effectively preventing us from comparing Jonson and Shakespeare’s relationship to their sources is their playbooks’ visual effects on the page. Ian Donaldson describes the 1605 Quarto of Sejanus as a book of immense typographical elaboration, painstakingly Romanized in appearance, with speeches set out in the manner of classical inscriptions, learned annotations erected like doric columns alongside the heavily architectural slabs of dramatic text, surmounted by monumental running heads.” (100) (figure 3). There is no mistaking Jonson’s desire for form to imitate function: his text (in word and image) aims to recreate a historically true Rome. At the same time, this typographic setting serves to Romanize and authorize his own inventions and additions to the historical record: soliloquies by Sejanus, commentaries by minor historical figures such as Arruntius, and dialogues and imagined scenes between historical and imagined characters such as Livia and her physician. The display of his sources in the margins and the use of superscriptions which interrupt the <?page no="82"?> 82 Lynn S. Meskill Figure 3: Page of Jonson’s Sejanus (1605). (By permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin). <?page no="83"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship 83 flow of the text and invite the reader to turn to the margins to confront an ancient “Auctour” have been described by Evelyn Tribble - I think rightly - as “iconographic” (134): an iconographic rendering of Rome, but also an iconographic rendering of authorial “scrupulousness.” 2 It is no accident that Sejanus has enjoyed a kind of critical renaissance in recent scholarship interested in historical bibliography in its widest sense. Annabel Patterson, Evelyn Tribble, and Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, just to name a few, have all paid particular attention, for the purposes of different arguments, to the 1605 Quarto: the censorship of the play; Jonson’s marginal notes informing the reader of the precise volume and page number of the books in which he found the work of his numerous Roman sources; the inclusion, specially punctuated with inverted commas to isolate them as such, of sententiae and maxims (suppressed, like so many other aspects of the Quarto in the Folio); the commendatory and prefatory verses (which Patterson notes are regularly omitted in modern editions designed for students or “banished” by Herford and Simpson to another volume [Patterson 43]); and the preface to the Reader in which Jonson refers constantly to himself in the first person as writer, publisher, and translator. If we look at the 1605 Quarto we find the very visible imprint of its author. By contrast, the imprint of the author is not available to us in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Shakespeare did not furnish the reader of his play with marginalia indicating the sources he used and where he found them. There is no prefatory material, no commendatory poems (if we except those preceding the 1623 Folio as a whole), nothing visually or typographically comparable to the spectacular body of paratextual and marginal matter we find in the 1605 Quarto of Sejanus. We arrive, then, at the (slightly paradoxical) conclusion that the text in which the authorial hand is clearly visible, the text in which the author refers to himself and his labour, giving the reader a glimpse into his reading and writing practices, appears less authorial and authoritative than the work in which the authorial hand is invisible. In Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, Patrick Cheney refers to “the mystery of Shakespearean authorship” (11) and Shakespeare’s “absent” authorship (15). Shakespeare’s absent authorship as workmanship appears most absent in contrast to Jonson’s (labouring) “Author,” referred to as the “deserving Author” in a commendatory poem, signed “Cygnus,” to Sejanus in the 1605 Quarto and 2 Jonson has Sejanus mock the superstitious rituals of a “scrupulous priest,” punctiliously performing the rites of divination, rites which will in turn predict Sejanus’ own downfall. I would argue that this priestly scrupulosity well describes the ritual and superstitious (with relation to his own reader and his own prophetic interests) manipulations of the author. <?page no="84"?> 84 Lynn S. Meskill implicit everywhere in that text (sig. A2). At the same time, Shakespeare’s absent authorship, in its very absence, leaves precisely those borrowed threads completely perplexed and forever entangled with and within his own individual creation. The Jonsonian text displaying its sources is perceived as more indebted and so less original and imaginative. The ultimate irony, then, is that Shakespeare, in appearing infinitely less derivative, seems more of an author than Jonson, who, because of his constant references to himself as author, places into relief all those elements which are extra-authorial. Yet, the differences due to sources and formats should not prevent us from observing certain comparable habits of reading and writing between Shakespeare and Jonson. Honigmann describes Shakespeare’s “writing-habits” in Julius Caesar in a manner compatible with our traditional image of Jonson: In the composition of Julius Caesar he demonstrated his exceptional genius for sifting sources, poring over and rearranging three major lives, drawing on others occasionally, and perhaps on Appian’s Civil Wars, a feat impossible without infinite patience and skill and a tireless memory. The same man, it should never be forgotten, must have set to work on the other plays with much the same writing-habits. (32) There is, in this description of Shakespeare, some of the bookishness and labour that is often used to describe Jonson’s method. According to Martin Spevack, in the introduction to his edition of Julius Casear, there exists “more than a hundred years of almost microscopic comparison” of North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (8). Yet, Shakespeare’s line-by-line and scene-by-scene indebtedness and rearrangement of various lives of Plutarch and others remain occluded in recent editions of the play. And the way a text looks on the page affects the way we interpret it. If we possessed an edition of Julius Caesar that referred to the relevant passages from Plutarch, using superscriptions and side notes in the manner of Jonson, the labour that went into the composition of Julius Casear would be clearly visible to the reader. What we have instead are editions of the play with Plutarch (in large, undigested chunks) “banished,” to use Patterson’s term (43), to the Appendices or, and, more strangely, North’s Plutarch, renamed Shakespeare’s Plutarch, with footnotes referring to fragments from Shakespearean plays, which use in some way a particular passage of Plutarch. Our attempts to return, in modern, readable and easily searchable editions, to North’s Plutarch, North’s preface and North’s translation of Amyot’s preface to the reader as Shakespeare might have seen them are baffled <?page no="85"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship 85 by such editorial anachronisms conceived and promulgated with the best editorial intentions. Jonson and Shakespeare share more than has usually been reckoned by critics who have been deprived of the scholarly editions that would have made the latter’s borrowings and methods more clearly apparent. The two authors share a meticulous attention to their sources. Jonson used certain authors to create a basic outline and chronology, others for lively anecdotes concerning the historical characters, others for Roman atmosphere and cultural facts, and still others for filling in descriptive scenes. For example, Act 5 opens with Sejanus soliloquizing for twentythree lines. This soliloquy is ostensibly Jonson’s invention. As Ayers remarks, Jonson’s only marginal notes are to Tacitus and Dio who testify to Sejanus’ historical arrogance and hence his description of himself in line 4 as “Great, and high” (208). Yet, the lack of other marginal citations is deceptive. In lines 7-9 Jonson lifts a passage from Seneca’s Thyestes, and Ayers notes that lines 17-21 are taken from Book 3 of Lucan’s Civil Wars (209). Neither author is acknowledged in the margin. Jonson, in effect, inserts the words of Atreus from Thyestes and those of Julius Caesar from the Pharsalia into the mouth of Sejanus. Atreus has reached the height of power in the speech used by Jonson: “Now I hold the kingdom’s glories, now my father’s throne” (Seneca l. 887). The classical model is a monster willing to stop at nothing in order to reach the height of power; in the continuation of the speech Jonson gives to Sejanus, Atreus makes the decision to pile murder on murder, even to committing the act against all nature and serving the father a dish of his sons: “I shall go on, and fill the father with the death of his sons. Lest shame should present any obstacle, daylight has withdrawn: go on while heaven is empty” (Seneca ll. 890-892). Sejanus’ “arrogance,” attested to by Tacitus (116), is taken to a mythical level in his conflation with Atreus in Act 5 of Sejanus. Jonson’s use of Lucan has an even more astonishing effect. Sejanus governed Rome with Tiberius in Capri and was, in effect, Caesar. Yet, in Jonson’s version he wonders: “Is there not something more than to be Caesar? / Must we rest there? ” (Ayers 5.13-14) The achievement of his ambition brings with it the dissatisfaction of simply standing still. He wishes for obstacles to fight against: Caligula, Would thou stoodst stiff, and many, in our way! Winds lose their strength when they do empty fly, Unmet of woods or buildings; great fires die That want their matter to withstand them. (Ayers 5.15-19) <?page no="86"?> 86 Lynn S. Meskill The image of wind or fire that loses strength if unopposed is used by Julius Caesar in Book III of Lucan’s Civil Wars. Caesar is shown to be bloodthirsty, vengeful and ready utterly to destroy the Greeks in his path: Rejoice, my soldiers! By favour of destiny war is offered you in the course of your march. As a gale, unless it meets with thick-timbered forests, loses strength and is scattered through empty space, and as a great fire sinks when there is nothing in its way - so the absence of a foe is destructive to me” (3.360-65). These uncited borrowings, recognizable to certain readers without the aid of notes, form a rich and allusive subtext for the play and allow the poet to deepen his characterization of Sejanus. At the same time, these surreptitiously lifted texts acquire a different status from those cited, openly and publicly. They become Jonson’s own. By paying his debts to Tacitus and Dio so ostensibly, he can steal away with a bit of Seneca or Lucan unnoticed, or noticed only by those who would compliment him and themselves on their erudition and wit, one of the ironies being, of course, that Sejanus, who is only a Caesar in Tiberius’ absence, is effectively Caesar in speaking as Julius Caesar. While Jonson used his classical sources to ensure the historical verisimilitude of his Roman play, he used them as well to create character and emotion. In the case of Julius Caesar, we can also see how the emotional register is achieved if we study Shakespeare’s meticulousness and industry in his reading of Plutarch. As T. J. B. Spencer points out, “in Shakespeare’s time the Lives were confined to large and cumbrous folios. There were no convenient selections [. . .] no handy editions of the complete work, such as [. . .] pocket editions” (13). The Life of Antonius appears toward the end of the volume, an unwieldy distance from The Life of Caesar or that of Brutus. Yet, it is clear that Shakespeare was constantly going back and forth between different Lives, like Jonson between various authors, in order to get confirmation of a certain detail or another version of the same detail. I will discuss four lines from Julius Caesar to illustrate the fairly arduous and painstaking process of selection that may have gone into the creation of a particular moment. 3 In his funeral oration, Antony makes a pointed reference to the “mantle” Caesar wore the day he was assassinated. He displays the mantle, gaping with the holes made by the daggers of Caesar’s murderers, and says: 3 In the following discussion, all act, scene and lines numbers will refer to the Riverside edition (Shakespeare). <?page no="87"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship 87 You all do know this mantle: I remember The first time ever Caesar put it on; ’Twas on a summer evening, in his tent, That day he overcame the Nervii. (3.2.170-73) Spencer places these four lines from Julius Caesar in his Shakespeare’s Plutarch with the Life of Julius Caesar, in the section describing Caesar’s watershed victory over the Nervii, a “barbarous people [. . .] from over the Rhine” (Spencer 43). By putting this part of Antony’s speech as a footnote in this particular section of The Life of Julius Caesar, Spencer, as editor, implies that it finds its source in the reference to the “Nervii.” Yet this section of Plutarch gives no clues as to the origins of the other parts of the four lines in the passage. There is, for instance, no clear reference as to the time of year, nor any mention of Caesar putting on a mantle after defeating the Nervii. There is, however, a reference to Caesar’s bloody “gown” in The Life of Brutus at the moment of Antony’s oration, and a reference to Caesar’s bloody “garments” at the same moment in The Life of Antonius. It would appear that Shakespeare conceived the idea of taking the bloody “gown” in the Brutus and imagined it to be the same as a gown he donned in recognition of his wars and victories. Theobald was fairly nonplussed by the way Shakespeare associated the robe in which Caesar died with his victory over the Nervii: The circumstances with regard to Caesar’s mantle seems to me an invention of the poet; and perhaps, not with the greatest propriety. The Nervii were conquered in the second year of his Gaulish expedition, seventeen [. . .] years before his assassination; and it is hardly to be thought that Caesar preserved any one robe [. . .] so long. (Furness 177) Horace Howard Furness responds: Is this not hypercriticism? Plutarch, Appian and Dion Cassius mention that fact of Caesar’s rent robe being exhibited by Antony; and acting on this, Shakespeare but gives a more realistic touch to the incident by naming the particular mantle. (my emphasis, 178) It is doubtful that one can describe Shakespeare’s poetic choice as a “realistic touch” (if Theobald is right about anything, it is that Shakespeare’s use of the mantle is not “realistic”). Yet, these editors’ argument concerning the “mantle” points to the importance of Shakespeare’s choice to link the victory over the Nervii with the robe in Antony’s hands during the funeral oration. The same mantle would have served metonymically to embody the juxtaposition of past (glory) and present (abasement). It is thus an object charged with meaning. <?page no="88"?> 88 Lynn S. Meskill Yet, if we look a bit further, we may find that this authorial “touch” may also have had its source in Plutarch. Caesar wears what North calls “his triumphing robe” (Plutarch 974) at the feast of the Lupercalia described by Plutarch in the pages preceding the assassination of Caesar, the same feast with which Shakespeare begins his play. In other words, Shakespeare has not invented a robe for Caesar to put on after the defeat of the Nervii; rather, he filled in a gap opened up by the Plutarchan text. If Caesar was apparelled in “his triumphing robe” at the feast of the Lupercalia in The Life of Marcus Antonius, North’s Plutarch inevitably opens up the question as to which triumph he received it for. Furthermore, the use of the possessive adjective “his” implies that the Romans knew Caesar’s “triumphing robe” when they saw it, for it is clear that Caesar wears the robe expressly for the Lupercalia where he is visible to all. This knowledge (attested to by North) is inserted into Antony’s speech, quoted above: “You all do know this mantle” (3.2.170). The association with “triumphing” encouraged Shakespeare to find a specific triumph, the Nervii. Of the four lines from Antony’s speech we have discussed, Shakespeare’s invention was placing the victory over the Nervii in the summer as opposed to the winter of 57 B.C. and Antony’s “I remember.” In parcelling out the threads, we are able to identify Antony’s “I remember” as, in Eliot’s terms, the “essence” (135) of the author, separate from his source. The “I remember,” in other words, is not in Plutarch because Antony was not with Caesar. The time of year and the time of day, “’Twas on a summer evening” (3.2.172), are descriptive details which reinforce Antony’s act of remembrance. The mantle becomes whole again. We might think that here, having untangled the threads, we find the core of that part of the text that is least founded, directly or indirectly, upon Plutarch. Yet, even at the moment when he moves away from the assiduous and careful collecting, collating and piecing together of details to form a new narrative based on the hints gathered from Plutarch, Shakespeare is still in Plutarch when he writes “I remember.” The writer remembers because he is a reader of Plutarch. He remembers Caesar as Antony does and as Brutus does through Plutarch. The paradox of the study of sources finds its apogee here. One is most oneself in tandem with one’s source. Herford and Simpson express this paradox writing about Jonson’s Sejanus: “Closely as Sejanus is modelled upon history, none of Jonson’s dramas is more Jonsonian in conception and execution” (2: 16). In Shakespeare’s “I remember” we see the writer speaking in his “own” voice through Antony while referring us to the source of this remembrance: his Plutarch. <?page no="89"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship 89 Evelyn B. Tribble has illuminated the authorial, authoritative and authorizing work that takes place in the margins of Renaissance texts and has shown us that it is the implicit dialogue between a writer and his or her sources that is represented by the concrete visual and typographical image. She cites Lawrence Lipking who suggests that the footnote might no longer be adequate for the needs of a post-structuralist interrogation of the univocality of the text (162). For Lipking, it is the marginal gloss that “rises to rough equality with the text” (640), whereas the footnote (or even worse, the endnote or worse, the Appendix) silently implies the mastery and authority of the text. It is clear that Ben Jonson chose to present his play, Sejanus, visually and typographically in the company of the authors whom he claims to have used as sources, whereas Shakespeare made no such choice. Yet, I have argued that the visual dialogue between the margins and the text, which represented for Jonson the textual dialogue with his sources, conveys a similarly intimate conversation to the one in which Shakespeare was engaged with his source. <?page no="90"?> 90 Lynn S. Meskill References Ayers, Philip, ed. Ben Jonson: Sejanus, His Fall. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Cheney, Patrick. Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Donaldson, Ian. “‘Misconstruing Everything’: Julius Caesar and Sejanus.” Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes. Ed. Grace Ioppolo. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 88-107. Dutton, Richard A. “The Sources, Text, and Readers of Sejanus: Jonson’s ‘Integrity in the Story.’” Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 181-98. Eliot, T. S. Elizabethan Dramatists. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Furness, Horace Howard, ed. William Shakespeare: The Tragedie of Julius Caesar. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1913. Herford, C. H., and Percy Simpson, eds. The Works of Ben Jonson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52. Honigmann, E. A. J. “Shakespeare’s Plutarch.” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 25-33. Jonson, Ben. Sejanus, His Fall. London: Thomas Thorpe, 1605. Lesser, Zachary, and Peter Stallybrass. “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 371-420. Lipking, Lawrence. “The Marginal Gloss.” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 609- 55. Lucan. The Civil Wars. Trans. J. D. Duff. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1928. McGann, Jerome. Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. North, Thomas, trans. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, Compared Together by that Grave Learned Philosopher and Historiographer Plutarke of Chaeronea. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1579. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Arthur Golding. London: William Seres, 1567. Patterson, Annabel. “Censorship and Interpretation.” Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. Eds. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. New York: Routledge, 1991. 40- 48. Seneca. Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules on Oeta, Octavia. Ed. and trans. John G. Fitch. Cambridge, MassachusettsHarvard University Press, 2004. <?page no="91"?> The Tangled Thread of Authorship 91 Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974. Spencer, T. J. B., ed. Shakespeare’s Plutarch. London: Penguin Books, 1964. Spevack, Marvin, ed. William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Tacitus, Cornelius. The Annales of Cornelius Tacitus. The description of Germanie. Trans. Richard Grenewey. London: Bonham and John Norton, 1598. Tribble, Evelyn B. Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. <?page no="93"?> The “author’s drift” in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: A Poetics of Reflection Johann Gregory This essay focuses on the role of the author in Troilus and Cressida as a stage-play that is highly sensitive to the role of the book in shaping expectations of its theatre audience. The argument takes from Lukas Erne the notion that when Shakespeare wrote many of his plays, he was aware that they were making their way into print, but aims to qualify the idea of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist who arranges his work for publication by considering the ways in which Troilus and Cressida as a stage-play is already literary to begin with. Focusing on the scene in which Achilles and Ulysses discuss an author and his book, it explores the poetics of reflection that seems to be at work between characters, authors, and audiences, the page and the stage. Emphasising ways in which Shakespeare responds to Jonson’s construction of an author, the essay questions the distinction between Shakespeare as the author of strictly theatrical or literary texts by considering how the book can be performative and the theatre literary. ’Tis not the wholesome sharp morality Or modest anger of a satiric spirit That hurts or wounds the body of a state, But the sinister application Of the malicious ignorant and base Interpreter, who will distort and strain The general scope and purpose of an author To his particular and private spleen. - Virgil, in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (5.3.132-39) Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 93-106. <?page no="94"?> 94 Johann Gregory While Hamlet looks at a book, Polonius asks “What is the matter, my lord? ” (2.2.193). “Between who? ” (2.2.194), responds Hamlet, as he changes Polonius’s matter as content of the book to matter as subject of a quarrel. “What’s the matter? ” is a question asked by characters in Troilus and Cressida a total of ten times. 1 The matter in Troilus and Cressida includes the Matter of Troy, the “quarrel” (Prologue 9) between Trojans and Greeks, but it can also be read as referring to the so-called Poets’ War in late Elizabethan England. In Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, James P. Bednarz maps Shakespeare’s creative strategies in relation to Jonson’s: The Poets’ War - the most important theatrical controversy of the late Elizabethan stage - commenced when Jonson, the younger playwright, became “Jonson,” the poet, by resisting Shakespeare’s influence through the invention of a new critical drama that he called “comical satire.” The war continued with added momentum when Shakespeare, in response, molded his comedies to accommodate Jonson’s satiric perspective while eschewing its self-confident didacticism. And the battle ended only after Shakespeare, having been stung by Jonson’s attack on the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in Poetaster, “purged” his rival in the guise of Ajax in Troilus and Cressida. (1) In Bednarz’s reading, the matter of Troilus and Cressida was “molded” to respond to Jonson’s satire - a response that will be considered in this essay. Another kind of matter in the history of Troilus and Cressida is the reams of previously published Troy literature, including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the first book printed in English, the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, translated and printed by William Caxton about 1473- 74. However, although the story of Troy was often revered in Shakespeare’s time, that of Troilus and Cressida had, for some, become a bit of a joke. For example, Petruchio in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew names his spaniel “Troilus” (4.1.131), while in Twelfth Night Feste “would play Lord Pandarus” (3.1.45) to beg that another coin be added to the one he has already been given. For Shakespeare, then, the matter of Troilus and Cressida was even more layered than it had been for Chaucer, who had his own “auctour[s]” to think about. Unlike Chaucer, who never saw his writing reach print, Shakespeare was aware from early in 1 The question “What’s the matter? ” occurs at 2.1.49, 51, 53, and 4.2.43, 45, 58, 77, 80, 82, 86. The words “matter” or “matters” occur twenty-five times in this play, more often than in any other Shakespeare plays except Hamlet and Othello. Quotations from Troilus and Cressida are taken from the New Cambridge edition (ed. Dawson) unless otherwise stated. All other quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from the Norton Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al.). <?page no="95"?> The “Author’s Drift” 95 his career that his plays existed as printed matter. “Once a thing is put in writing,” says Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, “the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place” (158). Shakespeare’s compositions were enacted on stage and read on the printed page, and he probably thought about how his writing reflected his own authorship. 2 The notion that Shakespeare was concerned about his plays reaching print has been explored by Lukas Erne: When Shakespeare’s sonnets were published, the majority of the plays Shakespeare had written up to that date were available in print. Consequently, [. . .] He could not help knowing that his plays were being read and reread, printed and reprinted, excerpted and anthologized as he was writing more plays. (25) The studies in Shakespeare’s Book (Meek, Rickard and Wilson) similarly contend that Shakespeare wrote plays with an awareness of their future publication, and that “the representation of writing, reading and print [is included] within his works themselves” (13). By using printing metaphors and well-known books such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare creates literary landscapes for the stage, even before the plays are published in print. It is this notion of a literary landscape on the stage that this essay seeks to explore. More specifically, this essay focuses on the role of the author in Troilus and Cressida as a stage-play. Troilus and Cressida seems to be highly sensitive to the role of the book in shaping expectations of its theatre audience. Jeff Dolven and Sean Keilen explain that “Shakespeare returns again and again to scenes where a character is perusing a letter or turning a page or brandishing or just talking about a book” (15). By considering one such scene in Troilus and Cressida, this essay aims to qualify the idea of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist who arranges his work for publication by considering the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays as staged are already literary to begin with. Troilus and Cressida produces characters that read each other and discuss ideas from books. This essay argues that it is Shakespeare’s awareness of stage and page that produces a rather self-conscious reflection on the author’s drift, an awareness that is sensitive to the propensity for an author’s reputation to drift. An “author” is mentioned three times in Troilus and Cressida. The Prologue states: 2 It is certainly not surprising that when Richard Dutton looked for “The Birth of the Author” he turned to the first publication of this play (1609) which in its epistle positions audiences and the author. This epistle only exists in the second state of the publication (see Gregory 193-95). <?page no="96"?> 96 Johann Gregory And hither am I come, A prologue armed, but not in confidence Of author’s pen or actor’s voice, but suited In like conditions as our argument (Prologue 22-25) Later, Troilus promises Cressida: True swains in love shall in the world to come Approve their truth by Troilus: when their rhymes, Full of protest, of oath and big compare, Want similes, truth tired with iteration [. . .] As truth’s authentic author to be cited, “As true as Troilus” shall crown up the verse And sanctify the numbers. (3.2.153-56, 161-63) Finally, when Ulysses reads a book written by “A strange fellow” (3.3.95), he explains the “author’s drift” (3.3.113) to Achilles. 3 In each case, the author remains elusive - mentioned, only to be hidden. As the Prologue speaks without “confidence / Of author’s pen”, the author appears in the negative, only represented by a metonymic pen. In Troilus’s speech the author occurs as someone to be cited in a “world to come,” part of Troilus’s imagination, his rhetoric and rhyme. But in a play where Troilus asks “what’s aught but as ’tis valued? ” (2.2.52), “truth’s authentic author” is unsurprisingly hard to locate. 4 Both the “author’s pen” in the Prologue and Troilus’s “authentic author” can be read as stand-ins for Shakespeare, offering “fictions of authorship” (Cheney 147). The Prologue in Troilus and Cressida, however, speaks without the author or the voice of the actors, plainly telling the audience to “Like, or find fault, do as your pleasures are, / Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war” (Prologue 30-31). Troilus and Cressida thus creates a tension between the importance of an author, however distant, and the power of an audience’s view, described (appropriately for this play) in terms of pleasure and war. The war mentioned in the Prologue can be read as the Trojan War, but it can also be seen as an allusion to the Poets’ War. Although the armed Prologue only exists in Shakespeare’s first folio, it is usually taken 3 Although it is not actually stated that Ulysses holds a book (rather than a scroll for example), it is just the kind of anachronism employed in Shakespearean drama. See, for example, the scene in Julius Caesar where Brutus keeps a “book” (4.2.303) “in the pocket of [his] gown” (4.2.304) with the “leaf turned down” (4.2.324). 4 But what is an “authentic author”? In George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, Nestor fights with “his new-drawn authentic sword” (Book VIII, l. 74). This instance of “authentic,” according to the O.E.D., means “Belonging to himself, own, proper.” <?page no="97"?> The “Author’s Drift” 97 to refer to Ben Jonson’s Poetaster which was performed in 1601, probably just before Troilus and Cressida, and published the year after. In Jonson’s play an armed Prologue enters to scare off the monster, Envy, and protect the author. Jonson’s monster comes to “damn the Author” (Induction 46) and to “tear / His work and him” (Induction 52-53). The Prologue then enters with a “well erected confidence” (Induction 74) saying: If any muse why I salute the stage An armèd Prologue, know, ’tis a dangerous age, Wherein who writes had need present his scenes Forty-fold proof (Induction 66-69) Shakespeare’s use of an armed Prologue signals his recognition of this “dangerous age” while alluding to Jonson’s construction of his own authorship in the induction to Poetaster. David Bevington suggests that Shakespeare’s Prologue “introduces a play that will not choose the Jonsonian path of authorial self-assertion and certitude. Shakespeare’s play chooses instead to explore disillusionment and multiple perspectives in an experimental way that implicitly criticises Jonson’s more dogmatic approach” (10). However, as well as promising a play of “multiple perspective,” the reference to Poetaster and the author’s bodyguard promises a play that will engage with the Poets’ War and satire. This so-called “War of the Theatres” was highly sensitive to the part the author had to play in the production of the play’s meaning for audiences and “participates in the definition of the emergent category of ‘literature’” (Gieskes 77). This can be seen, especially, in Jonson’s Prologue’s reference to the author as a “writer,” and Shakespeare’s Prologue’s reference to the “author’s pen.” Satirical verses or epigrams were forbidden to be printed by the Bishops’ Ban of 1599. According to Oscar James Campbell, “Jonson and Marston immediately sought to write plays that would serve as effective substitutes for these banished satires” (vii). In this reading, the comical satires are thus a conscious theatrical substitute for poetic verse meant to be read. The armed Prologue, opening Shakespeare’s play in medias res, therefore seems to mark an intention to be more literary and to raise the issue of authorship. 5 The Prologue speaks without confidence of the author’s pen, in contrast to Jonson’s Prologue who speaks for the author, and Jonson’s play that contains a range of classical poets as characters such as Ovid, Horace and Virgil. When Troilus and Cressida 5 Bevington explains that “Horace’s Ars Poetica, 146-8 (LCL, 462-63), commends the rule especially suited to a play on the Trojan war” (355). <?page no="98"?> 98 Johann Gregory is read in response to Ben Jonson and the Poets’ War the issue of authorship is particularly pressing. In his essay, “What is an author? ”, Foucault wondered “at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes” (281). In a seminal passage of Troilus and Cressida which has been largely ignored by critics, Shakespeare stages classical heroes who discuss an author. In the middle of the play, Ulysses arranges for the Greek heroes to walk by Achilles’ tent “strangely” (3.3.71), thus performing Achilles’ fall from grace and loss of reputation. Achilles asks: “What are you reading? ” (3.3.95). Ulysses answers: A strange fellow here Writes me that man, how dearly ever parted, How much in having, or without or in, Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection - As when his virtues shining upon others Heat them, and they retort that heat again To the givers. (3.3.95-102) It is not clear whether Ulysses paraphrases or quotes directly from the book he is reading. Critics have searched in vain for a direct source. 6 Ulysses suggests that a man only knows himself by reflection; this notion displays not only ways of reading people, but also ways of seeing or reading actors on stage and, obviously, ways of reading a book and its author. Achilles responds: This is not strange, Ulysses: The beauty that is borne here in the face The bearer knows not, but commends itself To other’s eyes; nor doth the eye itself, That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, Not going from itself, but eye to eye opposed, Salutes each other with each other’s form, For speculation turns not to itself Till it hath travelled and is mirrored there Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all. (3.3.102-11) Achilles says that this idea is nothing new; it “is not strange.” As Bevington notes (365), the idea is “familiar” from Shakespeare’s own Julius Caesar, written just a few years before Troilus and Cressida: “Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face? ” (1.2.53), Cassius asks. Brutus replies: 6 For possible sources, see Bevington (365). <?page no="99"?> The “Author’s Drift” 99 “No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things” (1.2.54-55). Cassius and several letters act as mirrors telling Brutus to “see [him]self” (2.1.46) as a restorer of the Republic. So for those who had seen Julius Caesar performed, there is the possibility that the “strange fellow” (3.3.95) was Shakespeare. Ulysses responds that he is not so much interested in the idea, which is “familiar,” as in “the author’s drift.” In his “circumstance,” the author, according to Ulysses, shows that unless a man communicates his qualities to others and they are reflected back to him, it is as if he did not have them. The obvious meaning of “circumstance” in the following passage is argument; however, it could also be read in its more modern sense, as situation. In this reading, the author of a book is in a similar situation to the hypothetical man who is not “lord of anything, [. . .] Till he communicate his parts to others”: I do not strain at the position - It is familiar - but at the author’s drift, Who in his circumstance expressly proves That no man is the lord of anything, Though in and of him there be much consisting, Till he communicate his parts to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught Till he behold them formed in the applause Where they’re extended, who like an arch, reverb’rate The voice again, or like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat. I was much rapt in this, And apprehended here immediately The unknown Ajax. (3.3.112-25) What is striking about the argument is that it includes the theatrical metaphor of “applause” as appreciation which invites an audience to see the man as an actor or, possibly, as an author who is applauded. Sceptics of the notion that a playwright might be linked with applause must bear in mind two such occasions that can only be considered briefly here. In the oft quoted induction to Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the Scrivener brings on stage “Articles of Agreement indented between the spectators or hearers at the Hope on the Bankside in the country of Surrey on the one party; and the author of Bartholomew Fair in the said place and country on the other party” (Induction 58-61). Since they have paid already, the spectators are asked to “add the other part of suffrage, [their] hands” (Induction 137-38) to seal the deal before the play begins. Closer to the time when Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida was <?page no="100"?> 100 Johann Gregory was probably first performed is an even more significant instance of an applauded author. Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix is likely to have reached the stage between Poetaster and Troilus and Cressida and was published in 1602. 7 In the Epilogue, Captain Tucca says: “Are you aduiz’d what you doe when you hisse? you blowe away Horaces reuenge: but if you set your hands and Seales to this, Horace will write against it, and you may haue more sport” (sig. M2v-M3r). What Tucca suggests is that by hissing at the play they will cool Horace’s heated annoyance at Dekker’s riposte. Horace has of course long been identified as a satiric portrait of Jonson. 8 Tucca goes on to claim that if the audience puts its seal to the performance by applauding it, Jonson will be impelled to write another play in response which will, like a series of revenge killings, continue the War of the Theatres. In Tucca’s view, the play becomes more important because the audience applauds it, just as the man in Ulysses’ book becomes “formed” by being applauded. Whether a theatre audience would recognise the author of Ulysses’ book as a possible playwright is difficult to ascertain. Although the author is described as “A strange fellow,” having a book in the theatre, as Tiffany Stern argues, was not a strange occurrence. Bearing this in mind adds a new dimension to the scene between Ulysses and Achilles. Rather than being something in which Greek philosophers (like the play’s anachronistic Aristotle) engage, the thoughtful exchange can be seen as a comment on the practices of reading within or related to the theatre. In an essay entitled “Watching as Reading,” Tiffany Stern argues that “printed books [. . .] were regularly read in the playhouse and, indeed were also sold there” (137). She imagines “canny members of the audience” (138) who would arrive early for a performance and bring a book with them, probably reading it aloud. “Written texts - in performance - filled the playhouse, and ‘literature’ [. . .] regularly intruded into the theatrical space before the play began” (138). If Stern imagines the off-stage reading as a miniature performance, rather like the gents who sat on stage in Blackfriars, then, in his staging of Ulysses, Shakespeare provides an analogous situation. 9 Not only is Ulysses being played by an 7 Thomas Dekker refers to a “Poetomachia” (sig. A3v), the Poets’ War, in his preface to the first publication of Satiromastix. James P. Bednarz provides a “Chronological Appendix” for the Poets’ War (265-76). 8 Bednarz explains that “Satiromastix contains such a thorough caricature of Jonson that it continues to shape all biographical accounts of his early career [. . .]. A stage direction at the beginning of act 2, scene 2, for instance, informs us that Horace enters in ‘his true attire’ - that is, the clothing that Jonson actually wore” (216). The reference to Horace’s Ars Poetica in the Troilus and Cressida Prologue could, therefore, be seen as a nudge towards Jonson’s artistry, along with the armed Prologue. 9 For audience members sitting on stage, see Gurr (19 and 280-81). <?page no="101"?> The “Author’s Drift” 101 actor and therefore performing a reading, but Ulysses the character is also using the book reading for his own Machiavellian ends, rather like Hamlet who uses the book to perform a kind of “madness” (Hamlet 2.2.203) to Polonius. The reading that Stern describes just off-stage as performative is mimicked by Ulysses on stage. Stern suggests that these “Book-owners would hope, by reciting and analyzing the texts in their hands, to draw attention to themselves, highlight their choice of literature and broadcast their talents” (138). Ulysses goes armed with a book to put on a “well erected confidence” (Poetaster Induction 74) when he persuades Achilles of his lost reputation. However, the scene demonstrates that it is Achilles who confirms Ulysses’ reputation for wisdom, in this case by giving his words credence. Reputation is built not only on the work, what Achilles has done on the battlefield, how an actor performs, or what an author has written, but also on how the performance was appreciated. Patrick Cheney suggests that in “passages such as [. . .] Ulysses’ speech on the ‘author’s drift,’ we can see the author at work, crafting his text out of the texts of other authors, reading those authors and rewriting them through pressures from his own literary environment” (15). If we do “see” the author at work it is only through a certain amount of reconstruction, however. In this, Shakespeare differs from Ben Jonson’s “Apologetical Dialogue” which James P. Bednarz argues was added to Poetaster after Troilus and Cressida was first performed (274). “Instead of disappearing behind his works as Shakespeare does,” James D. Mardock explains, Jonson “constantly points to himself as their creator and origin” (7). In Jonson’s Poetaster Epilogue, apparently performed only once, the author (likely played by Jonson himself) is discovered in his study. 10 He explains to two critics (and the audience) that the abuse he has suffered would be enough to “damn his long-watched labours to the fire [. . .] / Were not his own free merit a more crown / Unto his travails than their reeling claps” (“Apologetical Dialogue” ll. 198, 201-02), claps here perhaps holding the sense of both strike and applause. Jonson believes in his own worth, asserting that he is, as Ulysses’ author would say, not troubled to “behold [his own quality] formed in th’applause.” It seems likely that the dialogue between Achilles and Ulysses conceives of reputation not only as the status of classical warriors but also in terms of the standing of authors. Ulysses notes how, as he thought on the book, he “was much rapt in this, / And apprehended here immediately / The unknown Ajax” (3.3.123-25). Bednarz has argued that, even though the craze to find allusions to Elizabethan celebrities in Troilus and Cressida has led to some far-fetched identifications, it seems probable 10 For Jonson appearing himself on stage, see Cain (261) and Bednarz (274-75). <?page no="102"?> 102 Johann Gregory that Ajax is in some way a representation of Jonson (32-45). 11 What is important for this argument is that, although the representation of authorship is associated with theatrical applause, the book is seen as integral to authorship - even in the theatre - whether in the dialogue between Achilles and Ulysses, or in Jonson’s “Apologetical Dialogue” of Poetaster where the poet-playwright refers to his plays as “books” (l.71). The book is often part of the fiction of authorship within the plays of Jonson and Shakespeare, even if, in the case of Troilus and Cressida, the play was not actually published as a book until around eight years after it was first performed. Lynn S. Meskill demonstrates how in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster “the act of writing [is] defined immediately in terms of specularity” (98), and that this is partly because “underneath the ‘War of the Theatres’ is a battle within the poetic imagination between the act of creation and the necessity to submit and expose this creation to the eye and the ear of the reader” (100). Shakespeare’s creation of the man in Ulysses’ book responds to Jonson’s concern with authorial “specularity” in Poetaster by using the theatre to create a poetics of reflection between author, audience and book. Shakespeare puts Ulysses and his book on the stage with some assurance that one day this scene will be reflected on again when published in print. Troilus and Cressida provides a perfect example of what Julie Stone Peters describes as the Theatre of the Book: If the performance of the book was central to the arts of the Renaissance [. . .] the process of inscribing performance was equally central to Renaissance self-reflection on its media of expression. As the paradigmatic medium for the union of text and performance, theatre could, in this context, become a locus for the broader discussions of the relation between letters and speech, live presence and inscriptions on the page. (106) When Ulysses sees Cressida in the Greek camp he exclaims: Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, [. . .] O these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give a coasting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader. (4.5.54-55, 58-61) 11 Bednarz pays particular attention to the second scene of the play involving Cressida and her servant Alexander. The servant provides a long Jonsonian character sketch of Ajax “where Shakespeare seems to mimic the exorbitant praise Jonson lavished on himself as Criticus in Cynthia’s Revels” (35). <?page no="103"?> The “Author’s Drift” 103 Ulysses describes a performing book or rather a Facebook. Charlotte Scott notices that when “Hector berates Achilles, ‘O, like a book of sport thou’lt read me o’er’ the book is explored, like the body, for traces of the artless heart and the honest soul” (9). The Matter of Troy thus consists of actors and books that perform. Although Shakespeare may not have agreed completely with the “neuer writer[’s]” (sig. ¶2r) construction of the author in the epistle when it was finally printed in the quarto, the poetics of reflection at work in this play paved the way for a performative writing that could almost be described as theatrical in its positioning of author, actors and audience. Unlike Jonson, whose play apparently tells the audience what the author thinks, Shakespeare’s drift can be harder to locate, but as regards authorship we might begin by thinking about the “strange fellow” in Ulysses’ book who prefers to be warmed by an audience rather than his own “free merit.” As Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann stress, “the dialogical relationship between the media [of stage and page] doubled a poetics of ‘reflection’ and interaction relating to the production of character in the plays” (179). This poetics of reflection also sowed the seed for the construction of the author on the stage of the page. Unlike Jonson who was always willing to characterise himself as an author, Shakespeare, as Ian Donaldson points out, refers to the author in his plays directly “only on two occasions in the entire canon, and then with an air of mild self-depreciation” (322). 12 This is not to suggest that Shakespeare did not think about authorship - his poems and the construction of authors in his plays suggest that he did. Rather, by not stressing the author’s drift or intention, Shakespeare takes a peculiar kind of responsibility for the significance of his play and what it promised. Shakespeare can be hailed an inventive author who created multiple meanings, but, at the same time, Shakespeare leaves the significance of his plays, and even the value of his own authorship, to reflect into the future. The fact that the letter “a” of the “author’s drift” morphs from a small “a” in the quarto (sig. G1v) to a capital “A” in the first folio (sig. ¶y1r) perhaps reflects the growing authority ascribed to the author just a few years 12 The Chorus of Henry V explains in a sonnet epilogue that “Thus far with rough and all-unable pen / Our bending author hath pursued the story” (Epilogue 1-2). Here, in a rare occasion, the Chorus imagines the author bent over his desk writing, or with bended knee, or rather ducking out of sight. The other occurrence is when the Epilogue of 2 Henry IV reports that the “humble author will continue the story with Sir John in it” (Epilogue 22-24), but even here the Epilogue is not party to what the author thinks, saying that “for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat - unless already a be killed with your hard opinions” (Epilogue 25-26). In the end Sir John does not appear in Henry V, despite the apparent promise. <?page no="104"?> 104 Johann Gregory after Shakespeare’s death, probably not by the author himself, as in the case of Jonson, but by the book and in others’ eyes. 13 13 I would like to thank all those who took part in the Freie Universität Berlin workshop, “Performing the Poetics of Passion: Troilus and Criseyde / Troilus and Cressida,” in May 2010, particularly Wolfram R. Keller. I would also like to thank Irene Morra for her timely comments. <?page no="105"?> The “Author’s Drift” 105 References Bednarz, James P. Shakespeare and the Poets’ War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Bevington, David, ed. Troilus and Cressida. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomas Nelson, 1998. Bruster, Douglas, and Robert Weimann. Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Campbell, Oscar James. Comical Satyre and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. San Marino: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1938. Caxton, William, trans. Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Bruges: William Caxton, c.1474. Chapman, George. Seven Books of the Iliades of Homer. London: John Windet, 1598. Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Barry Windeatt. London: Penguin, 2003. Cheney, Patrick. Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Dawson, Anthony B., ed. Troilus and Cressida. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dekker, Thomas. Satiromastix. OR The untrussing of the Humorous Poet. London: Edward White, 1602. Dolven, Jeff, and Sean Keilen. “Shakespeare’s reading.” The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 15-29. Donaldson, Ian. “Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Invention of the Author.” Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007): 319-38. Dutton, Richard. “The Birth of the Author.” Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England. Ed. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti. London: Macmillan, 1997. 153-78. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “What is an author? ” The Book History Reader. Ed David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2006. 281-91. Gieskes, Edward. “‘Honest and Vulgar Praise’: The Poets’ War and the Literary Field.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 18 (2005): 75-103. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 1997. <?page no="106"?> 106 Johann Gregory Gregory, Johann. “Shakespeare’s ‘Sugred Sonnets,” Troilus and Cressida and the Odcombian Banquet: An exploration of promising paratexts, expectations and matters of taste.” Shakespeare 6 (2010): 185-208. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642. 4th edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist and Other Plays. Ed. Gordon Campbell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. Poetaster. Ed. Tom Cain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Mardock, James D. Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson’s City and the Space of the Author. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Meek, Richard, Jane Rickard, and Richard Wilson, eds. Shakespeare’s Book: Essays in reading, writing and reception. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Meskill, Lynn S. Ben Jonson and Envy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Peters, Julia Stone. Theatre of the Book 1480-1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. R. Hackforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Scott, Charlotte. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. London: Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, 1609. Shakespeare, William. Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: William Jaggard, Edward Blount, John Smethwick and William Aspley, 1623. Stern, Tiffany. “Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in Shakespeare’s Playhouse.” How To Do Things With Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays. Ed. Laurie Maguire. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 136-59. <?page no="107"?> Authorship from Homer to Wordsworth via Milton Neil Forsyth Somewhere on a spectrum of possible kinds of authorship between Homer and Wordsworth lies Milton. In Paradise Lost he stages himself as blind narrator, like Homer, but he also tells us, unlike Homer, how the poem gets written: the Muse “dictates to me slumbring or inspires / Easie my unpremeditated Verse” (9.23-24). In this respect, Milton is closer to Wordsworth, even his model. Yet there are important differences. Milton is not the main subject of his own poem. In the two allusions to Milton with which Wordsworth opens The Prelude, he collapses the distinction that Milton deliberately builds between the figure of himself as author/ narrator and the various characters he creates and who, like Satan, are consciously made close to, but still separate from, himself. Imagine a spectrum of possible kinds of authorship. At one end lies Homer, about whom we know absolutely nothing. He implores his Muse to help him sing about the anger of Achilles, or about that man of many turns, Odysseus, and we learn a good deal about both characters in those two remarkable poems, but we know as little about Homer as about his Muse. Even less. “He” is the empty “moi” to be filled by the singing Muses. 1 One prominent scholar, having edited the Iliad, declared that there is only one thing we know for certain about him, that he was not called Homer. “Homer” is “not the name of a historical poet, but a 1 In the first line of the Odyssey, or at Iliad 2.484, for example, the first person pronoun appears in this oblique dative case: “Sing to me Muse” or “Sing to me Muses.” Otherwise there is no direct reference within the poems to their author or singer. Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 107-123. <?page no="108"?> 108 Neil Forsyth fictitious or constructed name” (West 364). 2 This was also the argument of Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture at Basel in 1869, so it is hardly news. Ignorance of his identity did not stop at least seven different islands or city-states in various parts of the Aegean claiming to be the birthplace of Homer. As Goethe put it in his epigrammatic reply to Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795): Sieben Städte zankten sich drum, ihn geboren zu haben; Nun da der Wolf ihn zerri β , nehme sich jede ihr Stück. (478) Seven cities quarrelled over which gave birth to him; Now that Wolf has torn him apart, let each of them get a piece. (my translation) Of course tourist traps generally try to be associated with great poets and to profit from the association, and places like Chios and Smyrna depended on trade and fame. But claiming an identity for Homer is also a sign of our human hunger for knowledge about authors. Anonymity is frustrating. We accept it, as Foucault said (828), only “à titre d’énigme.” At the other extreme from that furious tumult over the unknowable Homer, and curiously contemporary with Wolf, is the Wordsworth who gave to The Prelude the subtitle “Growth of a Poet’s Mind,” and for whom Keats invented that rather unkind phrase, “the egotistical sublime.” For Wordsworth as for many of his contemporaries and followers, literature was drawn directly from the author’s life. Macaulay, reviewing in 1831Thomas Moore’s account of Byron’s life, wrote: He was himself the beginning, the middle and the end of all his own poetry - the hero of every tale - the chief object of every landscape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters, were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron; and there is every reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered. The wonders of the outer world [. . .] all were mere accessories, - the background to one dark and melancholy figure. (423) At this extreme of our spectrum, then, is the Romantic notion that all poetry is an expression of the author and, indeed, that that is what is 2 Others take the name of the poet to be indicative of a generic function. Nagy (Best 296-300), for example, takes it to mean “he who fits (the Song) together,” based on the root *arin the verb ararisko, to fit or join; he stresses the analogy with a skilled carpenter in Pindar, Pythian Ode 3.112-14. Elsewhere (Classic 317) he also notes that he who made the wooden horse, a master joiner, was called Epeios, i.e. a craftsman of epos. <?page no="109"?> Homer, Milton, Wordsworth 109 interesting about it. A similar attitude to literature also encouraged the writing of biography within the same period as the popularity of selfadvertising poems. Edmund Malone, as James Shapiro has recently shown, had just launched the “mad dash” (Wells 32) to find clues in the plays for Shakespeare’s life. 3 In the same spirit nineteenth-century readers took Hamlet and Prospero to be versions of Shakespeare, and thus tried to supplement their meager knowledge of his life. The example of Homer, however, shows that inventing an author on the basis of his works is not confined to Romanticism or Shakespearean biography. All antiquity seems to have known about Homer’s blindness: it is referred to as early as the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 172 (c. 600 BC), and it looks as if it is based on the image of the blind bard Demodocus who sings at the court of Alcinoos in Book 8 of the Odyssey. He sings three narrative songs (8.62-82, 8.261-369, 8.471-520). Two of them he sings in the palace itself: he has to be guided to his seat and shown where the lyre hangs from a pillar above his head. These songs are, remarkably enough, from the cycle of the Trojan War itself, including the story of the great wooden horse. Odysseus (who has not yet revealed his identity) is at first distressed at reliving his own experiences, and then challenges the bard to sing the song he himself knows so well. Indeed the singing provokes Alcinoos to ask Odysseus who he is, which he has so far graciously refrained from doing, and this in turn leads Odysseus to tell the tale of his own adventures. For the next four books of the poem, as divided by the Alexandrian editors, Odysseus sings his own song. The poet for a time becomes his hero. The overlap is provoked by Demodocus’ act of singing, clearly a kind of self-reflexivity on Homer’s part, and it is no wonder that antiquity constructed its image of Homer on the basis of the blind singer he himself created (Graziosi‚ Inventing 132-42). 4 The other song, which is performed in the market-place of Scheria to the accompaniment of dancing, is rather different, and in interesting ways. It is the amusing tale of the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite and their punishment by Hephaestus, trapped in his cunning net. This is the only one of the three tales given verbatim in the words of the bard, and it treats of things invisible to mortal sight, at least to all but bards. Indeed it insists on the visual aspects of the story: the sun, Helios, “who 3 Malone’s edition of the plays, including a biography, was published in 1790. His Attempt to ascertain the Order in which the Plays of Shakespeare were written had come out twelve years previously. Wordsworth began writing The Prelude in 1798. 4 Demodocus was the model for the invention of Homer, rather than the bard of Ithaka, Phemius, because of the association between blindness and prophecy, as in the case of Tiresias. <?page no="110"?> 110 Neil Forsyth sees everything,” notices the secret affair and alerts Hephaestus; the trap he sets for them is a net they cannot see; their punishment is to be looked at naked in bed and laughed at by the other gods (the goddesses stay home out of modesty). Thus the bard’s blindness is compensated by the power of seeing what passes among the gods (Graziosi and Haubold 82-83). And indeed the whole Odyssey is like that. Its characters, even Odysseus, often do not know which god is doing what to them, but the poet, loved by the Muse (8.63), knows all: Odysseus, for example at 5.302-05, blames Zeus for the storm the poet knows Poseidon sent (5.291-94). The point of the Ares-Aphrodite story in its particular context is to illuminate the pleasure-loving life of these Phaeacians (as Horace recalled in paraphrase at Epode I.2.28), as well as to close, by contrast, the theme of the maiden princess, Nausikaa and her modesty. But it is also there to display the power of the bard to sing of what cannot usually be seen. Quite a different response to our frustration at not knowing anything about the author has been to deny his existence. The disintegrationists, as they are usually called, many of them nineteenth-century German scholars beginning with the Wolf to whom Goethe wrote his epigram, broke up the received texts of Homer’s poems into separate and shorter poems or what Macaulay called “lays.” One person, after all, could not possibly have written those enormous epics, the seams were visible, and a good scholar could show you the stitches that held all those disparate poems together. It is hardly surprising that we know nothing about Homer, since he was no more than a sort of humdrum editor like the R (for redactor) who figures in scholarly accounts of the composition of what Christians call the Old Testament. Indeed it is no accident that the vogue of disintegrationism arose at the same time for both the Bible and for Homer, nor is it unrelated to that other nineteenth-century fashion - the various efforts to deny his plays to that lowly and elusive actor from Stratford called Will Shakespeare. Questioning authorship was all the rage: scholarship was out to deny him, or replace him. In either of these cases, I suggest, whether to claim his homeland or to discredit him altogether, both readers and scholars were responding to the mystique of the author. If only we knew something about the author, we would know more about the poem or plays. For the same reason, so much ink has been spilled on the mysterious Turoldus who is named at the end of the oldest manuscript of the Chanson de Roland: “Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet” is how those enigmatic words read, but whether he who thus declines were the source, the singer or the scribe no-one knows, any more than we really know what “declinet” means (Nitze). <?page no="111"?> Homer, Milton, Wordsworth 111 One wonders, then, whether Foucault was right to diminish the importance in some ill-defined earlier time of what he famously called “the author function.” He argued that texts we today “call ‘literary’ (stories, folk tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valorized without any questions about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their status” (“What is an Author? ” 245). The argument, such as it is, smacks rather of that fantasy about “oral tradition” or “folk narrative” which has often functioned as an ill-defined “other” for the idea of literature as writing. Neither Homer’s nor the Roland’s readers have been happy to bask in that anonymous ancientness that guarantees status. Under a similar impulse, and for some time now in critical theory, the author, or what Burke (ix) calls “situated subjectivity,” has been staging a brave return. Even Barthes, who killed him off, still needed him. “I desire the author: I need his figure [. . .] as he needs mine” (The Pleasure of the Text 27). Somewhere between the extremes on our imaginary spectrum of authorship lies Milton. He fills Paradise Lost with allusions to Homer and even claims he wants to be like Homer, or at least “equalled with [him] in renown” (Paradise Lost 3.34) because he too is blind. In an early poem, written as a student at Cambridge long before he went blind, he declared his ambition to write about “Kings and Queens and Hero’s old / Such as the wise Demodocus once told / In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast” (“At a Vacation Exercise” ll. 47-49). 5 Among Homer’s several adjectives in praise of Demodocus, curiously enough, “wise” does not occur. Milton was already projecting a composite image of the author he wanted to be, both poet and lover of wisdom. In the same poem he also imagines being able to hear Apollo sing “To th’ touch of golden wires” (l. 38). Yet in strict contrast to Homer, Milton very carefully managed his public reputation - more so than any previous writer, even Spenser and Ben Jonson. 6 He wrote so much about himself in fact that a whole book has been filled with these passages, many quite long (Diekhoff). We know that authorship in early modern England was often a composite affair involving several collaborators or at least the cooperation of printers and publishers in the production of texts, to the point that it might become a matter of some importance to sort out responsibilities. 5 All quotations from Milton’s poetry are from the Riverside Milton (Flannagan) and from the prose, the Yale edition (Wolfe). 6 Helgerson links these three poets as “laureates” in contrast with gentleman amateurs like Sidney, and insists on the importance of print technology for the wealth and fame it could bring. <?page no="112"?> 112 Neil Forsyth Hobbes, for one, formulated clear legal definitions of literary authorship within more general forms of ownership and the delegation of authority. 7 The author was defined as the owner of his text and thus as an individual who might be punished or subject to litigation. In this context Milton stands out strongly. Especially after his blindness rendered him even more dependent on “amanuenses, acquaintances, printers, distributors and retailers” (Dobranski 9) he made an extraordinary effort to distinguish himself as the one who controlled the works he produced. The contract he signed with Samuel Simmons - £5 for Paradise Lost, with more to follow depending on sales - is the first surviving contract on record between an author and a publisher (Lewalski, Life 453, Dobranski 35-36, 78). He did collaborate when it suited him. Indeed his first intrusion into polemical pamphlet writing was probably as the anonymous author of “A Postscript” to a work produced by five Presbyterian polemicists whose initials make up the acronym Smectymnuus by which they were collectively known. 8 But soon he was writing this characteristic passage in Areopagitica (1644) which asserts the rights of the author, not only over the censor, but over and above his collaborators: When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to be inform’d in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him (Wolfe 2: 532). Above all it was the idea of authorship as a vocation which informed the image Milton would constantly present of himself (Lewalski, “Authorship”). Already in that “Vacation Exercise” poem he was seeking “some graver subject” on which to exercise his talents, and the Sonnet “How Soon Hath Time” shows him painfully conscious of achieving little compared to his contemporaries. Soon he was thanking his father for making it possible for him to be the poet he was born to be (me genuisse poetam, “Ad Patrem” l. 61). In the autobiographical preface to Book Two of The Reason of Church Government, his first signed tract, he represents himself as responding to God’s trumpet blast (Wolfe 1: 803). 7 “For that which in speaking of goods and possessions, is called an Owner, and in latine, Dominus [. . .] speaking of actions is called Author. And as the Right of possession, is called Dominion, so the Right of doing any Action, is called Authority” (Hobbes 217). 8 An Answere to a Book Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance, published in March 1641; the postscript was first identified as Milton’s by David Masson, a conjecture confirmed by recent stylometric analysis: see Campbell and Corns (139). <?page no="113"?> Homer, Milton, Wordsworth 113 True, he had toyed with the idea of patronage as a practical support when Arcades and Comus were written for the Countess of Derby and the household of the Earl of Bridgewater. But when he fantasizes about it in his poem of gratitude to Manso (Milton 234-35), who had cared for Tasso, he inverts the conventional idea: the patron’s claim to immortality derives from his association with the poets, and Milton ends up pronouncing his own praises on Olympus! His first volume of verse in 1645 addresses no patron: it is introduced by personal tributes from Italian scholars and poets he met in Italy, plus Sir Henry Wotton of Eton and Henry Lawes, who had written the music for Comus. These texts show the early Milton beginning to define himself among contemporary ideas about authorship: collaboration, patronage, vocation. Also very early he articulates what is perhaps the most unusual of all Milton’s ways of presenting authorship, the link of life to writing. “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true Poem, that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroick men, or famous Cities, unlesse he have in himselfe the experience and practise of all that is praiseworthy” (Wolfe 1: 890), as he wrote in all seriousness in one of the early tracts, An Apology for Smectymnuus. In further autobiographical passages he presents long and revealing versions of his life that are clearly designed to function as an ethical proof, in the Aristotelian tradition of rhetoric, for the correctness of his political positions, whether hostility to bishops or the right of the people to execute the king. “One purchases authority by demonstrating one’s own gravity and virtue” (Fallon x, 39-40). This procedure poses a problem for many readers of Milton. Puritans usually write at length about their sins, religious failings, backslidings, painful recoveries, conversions. But Milton had no faults. He never confesses to any sins, rarely even to any mistakes. Even when he changes his mind, as he does about Calvin and Presbyterians, he never admits he once thought another way. There is one brief “retraction” of his youthful Latin Elegies in the 1645 edition of his poems, but even there it isn’t clear what he means exactly. The flaws he does talk about, often at great length, are all other people’s. So tiresome is this aspect of Milton’s constructed persona that some recent biographers, such as Barbara Lewalski (xiii) or Stephen Fallon, have to insist at the outset that they still admire or even like the man. Like Coleridge, Fallon (xiii) finds that a sense of Milton’s intense egotism gives him the greatest pleasure: “The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit.” Milton writes as if untouched by human frailty. He often “scrutinizes himself, finds nothing amiss, and asserts his innocence” (21-22). A telling contrast is with Bunyan: Milton’s guardian angels find Satan “Squat like a Toad, close at <?page no="114"?> 114 Neil Forsyth the eare of Eve” (Paradise Lost 4.806), but in Bunyan the one likened to the toad is himself. He writes in Grace Abounding, “I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad” (84). The Jesus of Paradise Regained is obviously an idealized version of the flawless Milton himself, and decidedly difficult to sympathize with for that reason. It is, however, the self-presentation of Milton in the great poem with which we are most familiar, and with which it is much easier to sympathize. In Paradise Lost he stages himself as blind narrator - part of a much more elaborate characterization in the four proems that are, in their length and personal references, unprecedented in earlier epics. He is “fall’n on evil days” (7.25) and everything that implies about the political situation of the author. He even tells us how the poem gets written, as the Muse “dictates to me slumbring, or inspires / Easie my unpremeditated Verse” (9.23-24). All the things we wish we knew about Homer. 9 In this respect Milton is obviously closer to Wordsworth, and we might argue that he initiates the Romantic cult of the author. Both poets write extensively about themselves and assume that the readers will be interested. And yet there are important differences. Milton is not the main subject of Paradise Lost, nor did he suffer from that Romantic inability to write proper drama, i.e. to invent characters who, like Shakespeare’s, are not himself - Keats’s “chameleon poet.” 10 Thus in the famous opening lines of The Prelude, Wordsworth consciously echoes and extends what Milton’s narrator tells us about Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost (“The world was all before them,” 12.646), but these words are now the poet on himself (“The earth is all before me,” 1.14), not describing the situation of his characters. Even more significantly, a few lines earlier Wordsworth, delighted to find himself leaving the city, buries a further allusion to Milton - and this time to one of the Homeric similes with which the narrator dramatizes Satan. In a celebrated passage in Book 9, just as he goes to meet Eve, Satan, “as one who long in populous City pent,” is compared to a man who leaves the smelly city, goes into the countryside to breathe the clean air, and meets a pretty girl: 9 After writing these words, I came across Samuel Johnson on these “short digressions”: “who does not wish that the author of the Iliad had gratified succeeding ages with a little knowledge of himself? ” (1: 175). 10 In the letter of 27 October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse in which he mentions “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” Keats contrasts it with the character of “the chameleon poet” who has no self, and who takes “as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.” <?page no="115"?> Homer, Milton, Wordsworth 115 Much hee the Place admir’d, the Person more. As one who long in populous City pent, Where Houses thick and Sewers annoy the Aire, Forth issuing on a Summers Morn to breathe Among the pleasant Villages and Farmes Adjoynd, from each thing met conceaves delight, The smell of Grain, or tedded Grass, or Kine, Or Dairie, each rural sight, each rural sound; If chance with Nymphlike step fair Virgin pass, What pleasing seemd, for her now pleases more, She most, and in her look summs all Delight. (9.444-54) Within a few lines of this simile, Satan finds himself, in an even more famous phrase, “Stupidly good,” such is the effect of Eve. A complicated series of allusions, via Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” links this simile to Wordsworth. In the opening lines of the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth addresses the breeze: O welcome messenger! O welcome friend! A captive greets thee, coming from a house Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free. A prison where he hath been long immured. (1.5-8) The commentators note the allusion to Exodus 13: 3, “out from Egypt, out from the house of bondage,” and then argue about whether this is London, Bristol, or Goslar. There is also an important and explicit reference to Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” to the lines in which he addresses his son: My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, And in far other scenes! For I was reared In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds. (ll. 49-56) So Coleridge’s complaint about being reared in the city is “quietly trumped,” as Lucy Newlyn has put it (149), 11 by Wordsworth’s celebra- 11 At Prelude 1805 8.601-10, Wordsworth congratulates himself that he “did not pine / As one in cities bred might do,” and as Coleridge did, “beloved friend.” Coleridge is indeed the supposed addressee of the whole poem. <?page no="116"?> 116 Neil Forsyth tion of his own rural childhood. In the 1850 version of The Prelude, the Exodus allusion is further buried and instead we get closer to Coleridge’s language and Milton’s Satan: Whate’er his mission, the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me; escaped From the vast city, where I long had pined A discontented sojourner: now free, Free as a bird to settle where I will. (1.5-9) Five lines later he says “The earth is all before me,” and insists that with his “chosen guide,” not Milton’s Providence any longer, but “nothing better than a wandering cloud,” nonetheless, “I cannot miss my way” (1.14-18). If we follow up Wordsworth’s two allusions to Milton in the opening lines of The Prelude we can find, I think, contrasting paradigms of authorship. In the one, the direct allusion, Wordsworth simply enlists himself in a great tradition, and wants us all to recognize it. In that respect he is like the Milton who invokes parallels with Homer, and also, quite deliberately, like the Milton who carefully managed his own selfpresentation. But the other, the allusion via Coleridge, is both more casual and more complex. The phrase “city pent” does indeed lead back to Milton, 12 and Wordsworth may have recognized the allusion in his friend’s poem. In revising his own poem, he may even have introduced the word “pined” as a kind of echo or sound-memory (“the vast city, where I long had pined”), and so making a further connection to the Miltonic original. 13 We are not, as in the case of the other allusion, explicitly required to read Wordsworth’s poem as an extension of Milton’s. Wordsworth’s language alludes loosely to Milton’s simile, but this is allusion working at a different level of poetic consciousness. 12 Finch (10-11) also notices the allusion to Milton, but his interest is in autobiographical issues and in Coleridge. Hollander (80) briefly explores Coleridge’s address to Lamb in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” as one who “pined / And hunger’d after Nature, many a year, / In the great city pent,” along with Keats’s echo in his sonnet “To one who has been long in city pent.” 13 Ricks, following Hollander, explores this kind of allusion in Friendship and less often in his earlier work such as Allusion. For Ricks, Wordsworth characteristically used to soften originals, not as parody, but in dreaming of restoration. “What he does in this poem is what he loves to do: to transmute nightmares into dreams for kindly issues. Such redemptions, such feats of rescue and renovation, are characteristic of how his mind works with allusions, and not his mind only but his heart.” Thus Wordsworth echoes Milton’s fallen angels building Pandemonium for the prayer that Cologne cathedral might one day be completed (Allusion 104). <?page no="117"?> Homer, Milton, Wordsworth 117 Does it matter then that in both cases Wordsworth adapts language that Milton used not for himself but for his characters? It does if we are trying to read Milton through Wordsworth, that is, to understand how Milton and Wordsworth, working with the same idea, can differ so radically, how each stands out more clearly against the other. It is less significant that Wordsworth deliberately adapted Milton’s words about Adam and Eve than that he unconsciously, or semi-consciously, collapsed the distinction between Satanic character and Miltonic narrator (as many did and have done): the language for either fuels the expression of the author’s self. In doing so, Wordsworth loses, or ignores, the tension that Milton deliberately builds between the figure of himself as author/ narrator and the various characters he creates and who, like Satan, are consciously made close to, but still separate from, himself. I tried to make clear in The Satanic Epic how much of our reading of Paradise Lost depends on the relation of Satan and narrator (Forsyth 114- 46). Indeed even the idea of authorship itself becomes more interesting through the link with Satan. Milton invents two angels who tell Eve stories (and one of them Adam hears too). One is Raphael’s supposedly true story of the War in Heaven, which is clearly beyond the understanding of its audience, the other is Satan’s remarkable tale of how he found a special tree in the garden and what happened to him when he ate its fruit: he became, in that wonderful phrase that Eve uses to him “speakable of mute” (9.563). Satan is thus, like Milton’s narrator, one of many story-tellers in the poem. The similarity of Satan and the Milton who dramatizes his own narration has been noted by countless readers, and variously explained. The most obvious of these parallels results from Milton’s decision to have his narrator fly. Anne Ferry (16-55) notes with memorable consonance that the epic voice is divided into bard and bird, but never calls attention to the most obvious effect of giving him wings. Although Dante the pilgrim seems to walk or climb everywhere, the romantic Renaissance epic of Boiardo or Ariosto, imitating Lucian, was fond of having characters fly about. Nonetheless, Milton’s is a striking departure from classical epic, where the relation of poet to Muse is one of modesty: Homer begins the Iliad’s Catalogue of ships, for example, by invoking the Muses who know all things, while we have heard only a rumour and know nothing (Iliad 2.485-86). Hesiod’s Muses live on Helicon, but he cannot go there: they have to come to him, and he begs them to do so. Modesty of this kind, as we have seen, was not Milton’s strongest characteristic, and he readily abandoned it along with the classical Muse herself, now only “an empty dream” (Paradise Lost 7.39). With his wings, Milton put on Satan’s boundless Faustian ambition. His song is adventurous, and he intends with no middle flight to soar above the <?page no="118"?> 118 Neil Forsyth Aonian mount, and aspires to sing of “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.13-16) - though the fact that those famous words are actually a translation from Ariosto adds a certain indecipherable layer of irony to the bold claim to originality. Far from allowing his unconscious identification with Satan to slip out unawares, as the Blake tradition would have it (“of the Devils party without knowing it,” Blake 35), Milton invites us “to compare his portrait of the poet with his portrait of Satan. The similarities are not hidden; the differences are consciously and carefully defined” (Riggs 17). Writing Paradise Lost was a presumptuous thing to do, he admits (7.13), and he wants to ward off the potential punishment by anticipating it. He wants to ride Pegasus - a Renaissance commonplace for poetic inspiration since he had created the Muses’ spring on Helicon, Hippocrene (“horse spring”), with a stamp of his hoof - but not to suffer the fate of one of his riders, Bellerophon (7.4-20). Indeed, being Milton, he claims to soar above the Olympian hill, and even “Above the flight of Pegasean wing” (7.4). It is no surprise that he also feels the need to pray for safety as he imagines himself descending from this Empyreal flight to his “Native Element” (7.16). If we turn the prism, however, away from whatever the poet might be trying to achieve for his own private salvation to what the reader may thus be invited to perceive, then the insistent similarities of language extend the sense we already have of a potentially satanic narration. The effect is often to identify the two perspectives. Even in its chief point, the darkness of the Stygian pool and the darkness in which Milton’s blindness obliges him to live, the prooimion to Book 3 recalls the voyaging Satan: both Satan and Milton use the formulaic “Chaos and ancient Night” (2.970), “Chaos and eternal Night” (3.18), and Satan himself describes that place, wonderfully, as “The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss” and as “the palpable obscure” (2.405-06). Furthermore Satan’s feet are “wandring” (2.404), he is “Alone, thus wandring” (3.667) through the newly created world, and, to reinforce the parallel, Milton proudly announces that, in spite of his blindness, “not the more / Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt” (3.26-27). But now notice the difference: Milton, knowing himself alone, nonetheless hopes for, prays for, the Muses’ company. He has, he says boldly, been “Taught by the Heav’nly Muse to venture down / The dark descent, and up to reascend, / Though hard and rare” (3.19-21). Indeed this is the very moment when Milton explicitly invokes the parallel with Homer (“blind Maeonides,” 3.35) 14 and his desire for similar renown. It is as if Homer, or rather the 14 Milton includes at this point other blind precedents in antiquity, Thamyris, Phineus, and especially Tiresias (3.34-36). <?page no="119"?> Homer, Milton, Wordsworth 119 Muse, has had to protect Milton from what he fears may be his main source of inspiration, that marvellously inventive and original Satan. Wordsworth ignores the distinction so carefully constructed by Milton between author/ narrator and Satan. The Prelude echoes both indifferently. And yet, and yet, we may perhaps allow slightly more insight, a higher level of reading consciousness, to Wordsworth’s echo. For the famous simile of leaving the city at 9.445 is not quite so straightforward. It is introduced by a characteristically overlapping set of allusions, Adonis, Solomon, and including the gardens of Alcinous where Odysseus (Laertes’ son, 441) had listened to Demodocus’s song. The simile itself begins as if the “hee” it refers to is the last person in the narrative, Solomon, “the Sapient King” who “Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.” We have to pause to realize that this “hee” is Satan, a trick Milton’s narration often plays (Forsyth 124-28). What is more, the simile is not as carefully marked off from the narrative as Homeric similes usually are, so that Eve begins to appear as the “fair Virgin” before the simile ends: it merges back into the story of Satan’s approach to Eve who “in her look sums all Delight” (452-54). In his insistent way the great editor of Milton, Alastair Fowler comments on the Satan simile that “one has to be a very devoted member of the devil’s party to stop short at sympathy with the townsman’s need for a holiday and appreciation of beauty - without reflecting how mean it would be for him to take advantage of the country girl’s innocence” (Fowler 465). 15 This extraordinary riff is one example among many of how Milton’s commentators need to point out the dangers of that sympathy with Satan that the poem evidently invites. So in view of the complexities of the passage, and the deliberate parallels between Satan and Milton, Wordsworth may not have been so insensitive to Milton’s meanings in finding himself in this Homeric and Satanic simile. He gets half the story at least. What is missing in Wordsworth is the Renaissance playfulness about authorship that Milton inherited, and almost lost. 16 Many Elizabethan and Jacobean writers put versions of themselves into their works. Spenser introduces himself into his poems in the persona of Colin Clout, and celebrates his own wedding in his Epithalamion. Astrophil and 15 In Fowler’s second edition (1998), the note is usefully expanded, but, as often, loses its rhetorical bite. Fowler also points to the biographical possibilities that emerge by connecting the passage with Milton’s early “Elegia VII,” but changed his mind for the second edition. 16 I am deliberately ignoring in this context the complexities explored by Geoffrey Hartman in which Wordsworth’s self is both represented and transcended, for which see Bennett, Gill 57. However one reads that layered and constructed self, there is little that is playful about it. <?page no="120"?> 120 Neil Forsyth Stella suggests identification as well as ironic distance between Sidney and Astrophil. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers enjoyed playing on the boundary between self-disclosure and self-concealment. Are Donne’s poems sincere professions of feeling based on personal experience, or are they witty and provocative exercises in role-play? They can be read both ways: Donne and his contemporaries knew that, paradoxically, authenticity is one role among others. 17 Shakespeare’s Sonnets are one of the most consummate performances in these poetic games. We will never know for certain if the poet really loved a young man or a “dark lady,” or who they were, but reading the poems makes it hard not to wonder - and not surely just for a modern reader infected by Romanticism. Pound and Eliot needed to argue themselves out of the Romantic temptation, and pronounce an advance version of the death of the author. Ezra Pound insisted that “It’s immensely important that great poems be written, but it makes not a jot of difference who writes them” (Harvey). Indeed this soon became a characteristic Modernist reaction to Romanticism, akin to Eliot’s striving for “impersonality.” Fortunately we are no longer slaves to that Modernist dogma, or its postmodern heir in Barthes and Foucault, and can allow it to take its historical place as a rather hysterical reaction to Romanticism or to simplistic biographical criticism. What has happened in more recent theory, to quote Burke’s argument about those famous theorists (74) is that “the principle of the author most powerfully reasserts itself when it is thought absent,” and further that “the concept of the author is never more alive than when thought dead.” From our point of view, as I have tried to show, there are very real distinctions to be made among periods and writers when we try to assess the idea of the author, and it is now possible for them to come back into focus. 17 I borrow this and other points in this paragraph from Hackett (21). <?page no="121"?> Homer, Milton, Wordsworth 121 References Barthes, Roland. “La mort de l’auteur.” Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1984 [1968]. 61-67. . The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: The Noonday Press, 1975. Bennett, Andrew. “The Idea of the Author.” Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Nicholas Roe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Second edition. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Ed. G. B. Harrison. London: J. M. Dent, 1928. Burke, Sean. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Second edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Campbell, Gordon and Thomas Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008. Diekhoff, John. Milton on Himself. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939. Dobranski, Stephen. Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Fallon, Stephen M. Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Ferry, Anne. Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in Paradise Lost. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1963]. Finch, John Alban. “Wordsworth’s Two-Handed Engine.” Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. 1-13. Forsyth, Neil. The Satanic Epic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? ” Dits et écrits 1954-1988. Ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald. 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2001 [1969]. I. 820-39. . “What is an Author? ” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post- Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 239-52. Fowler, Alastair, ed. Paradise Lost. Second edition. London: Longman, 1998 [1971]. Gill, Stephen, ed. William Wordsworth: The Prelude. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Der Wolfische Homer.” Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche. Ed. Ernst Beutler. Vol. II. Zurich: Artemis, 1953. <?page no="122"?> 122 Neil Forsyth Gracia, Jorge J. E. “Can There Be Texts without Historical Authors? ” American Philosophical Quarterly 81 (1994): 245-53. Graziosi, Barbara. Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. and Johannes Haubold. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London: Duckworth, 2005. Hackett, Helen. “Best Known for His Guzzleosity.” London Review of Books. 11 March 2010: 21-22. Hartman, Geoffrey. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Harvey, Giles. “The Two Raymond Carvers.” The New York Review of Books. 27 May 2010: 39-40. Helgerson, Richard. Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. C. B. MacPherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974. Hollander, John. The Figure of Echo: a Mode of Allusion in Milton and After. Berkeley: University of California Press: 1981. Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the Poets. Ed. George Birkbeck Hill. 3 vols. London: Faber, 2009 [1905]. Lamarque, Peter. “The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy.” British Journal of Aesthetics 30 (1990): 319-31. Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. . “Milton’s Idea of Authorship.” Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Ed. Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. 53-79. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Lays of Ancient Rome. London: Longman, 1842. . “Moore’s Life of Lord Byron.” Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Vol. I. Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Company, 1840 [1831]. 388-427. Milton, John. The Riverside Milton. Ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. . Homer the Classic. Washington DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009. Newlyn, Lucy. “‘A Strong Confusion’: Coleridge’s Presence in The Prelude.” William Wordsworth’s The Prelude: a Casebook. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 147-80. Nitze, W. A. “Turoldus, Author of the Roland? ” Modern Language Notes 69 (1954): 88-92. Ricks, Christopher. Allusion to the Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. <?page no="123"?> Homer, Milton, Wordsworth 123 . True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2010. Riggs, William. The Christian Poet in Paradise Lost. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Wells, Stanley. “Plotting Against the Stratford Man.” The New York Review of Books. 27 May 2010: 31-33. West, Martin. “The Invention of Homer.” Classical Quarterly 49 (1999): 364-82. Wolfe, Don M., et al, eds. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. 8 Vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1979. <?page no="125"?> Marvell’s Pronouns and the Ethics of Representation Stephen Hequembourg This article looks at the formulation in Andrew Marvell’s prose of a complex theory of authorship in the field of political and religious polemic. It sees in his pamphlets a profound meditation on the ethics of representation (specifically, who has the right to speak for others, against others, or in the place of others) that did much to shape the notions of authorship and polemical style at the birth of early modern liberalism. As a guiding thread to his conception of authorship, the article takes Marvell’s often comic obsession with pronouns, and looks at the troublesome group of rivals - we, thou, you, it - that clusters around the authorial “I.” His pronominal playfulness actually reveals a two-part inquiry, firstly into the relation between the author and the social group he claims to represent, and secondly into the relation of author and text. What the essay calls Marvell’s ideal “I-thou” form of polemic address is shown to be undermined first by Parker’s arrogant “we” and plural “you,” and then by Marvell’s comic fictional third person “he.” Finally the essay explores the mysterious “It” of the late Remarks and Marvell’s conception of an authorless text. From 1671 to his death in 1678, Andrew Marvell, lyric poet and longserving Member of Parliament for Hull, wrote a series of controversial pamphlets in favor of religious toleration and representative government, and deeply critical of absolute monarchy and episcopacy - all famously Miltonic stances, and Marvell had once written to Milton of having got most of the Second Defense by heart. But the reader coming to Marvell’s prose from Milton’s will notice that while the polemical ends are similar and often identical, the style of argumentation is vastly different. In place of Milton’s strong single voice, confrontational and confi- Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 125-136. <?page no="126"?> 126 Stephen Hequembourg dent in its ability to speak of and often on behalf of the Commonwealth, Marvell’s is more often playful, evasive, and light-hearted. Next to the image of Milton sallying forth to do single battle with Salmasius in the open field, we might picture Marvell rather as performing satiric guerilla raids on his polemical adversaries - always with a kind of Shandean distaste for hectoring and affectations of gravity. Leaving aside much of the explicit concerns of the pamphlets, I will explore here Marvell’s more subtle formulations of authorship in the field of political and religious polemic. Marvell, I argue, takes his engagements in written controversy as an opportunity to elaborate an ethics of representation - to inquire who is able to speak for others, against others, or in the place of others - at the inception of early modern liberalism. “Ethics of representation” is a rather vague formulation, but I will narrow the inquiry considerably by focusing on the rather humble level of the pronoun, and Marvell’s comic obsession with it. Unable and probably unwilling to adopt Milton’s monolithic “I,” Marvell finds himself caught in a network of rival pronouns - we, thou, you, he, and finally and most strangely, It. I will focus primarily on the earliest and latest of the pamphlets, the two parts of the Rehearsal Transpros’d (1671-72) and the Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse (1678), to point to the evolution of Marvell’s ideas on the subject as his concern shifts over the years from an author’s right to speak for others to what would seemingly be a less complicated affair - the right of a text to speak for and in place of its author. In his first and certainly most famous pamphlet, the two-part Rehearsal Transpros’d, Marvell sets his satiric sights on Samuel Parker, archdeacon of Canterbury and spokesman for the harsh persecution of religious dissenters, who once infamously claimed that it is better to err with authority than to be in the right against it (308). From the opening pages of his first pamphlet, Marvell reveals his deep interest in all aspects of print culture as medium of the exchange of ideas. He speaks familiarly in his prose of various printers and presses, of everything from licensing and suppression to the minutiae of pricing, binding, circulating, and paragraph blocking. In fact Marvell’s first direct address is not to Parker, or to Parliament, or to his gentle reader, but, oddly, to the medium itself: “O Printing! how hast thou disturb’d the Peace of Mankind! ” (Prose Works I: 46). He muses about an earlier, happier time when all writing was in manuscript and the bounds of learning and opinion were more rigorously controlled, when “some little Officer, like our Author, did keep the Keys of the Library [. . .] But now, since Printing came into the World, such is the mischief, that a man cannot write a Book but presently he is answered” (Prose Works I: 45). And while the government has found the means to stop religious dissenters from <?page no="127"?> Marvell’s Pronouns and the Ethics of Representation 127 meeting in secret conventicles, “no Art yet could prevent these seditious meetings of Letters” (Prose Works I: 45). Marvell’s nostalgia here is deeply ironic - he would certainly not enjoy a world in which someone like Parker exercised complete control of learned discourse, and Marvell’s adamant defense of the right of dissenters to meet in conventicles would seem to imply a similar feeling about the freedom to print - to send abroad those noisy conventicles of letters, as he calls them. But Marvell goes on to admit the danger of the modern press, recognizing that “two or three brawny Fellows in a Corner, with mere Ink and Elbow-grease,” can now “do more harm than a hundred Systematical Divines with their sweaty Preaching” (Prose Works I: 45). These opening pages of his first pamphlet concisely present Marvell’s conflictual relationship with his medium - his recognition both of its advantages and its potential dangers. This recognition leads Marvell, in all of his pamphlets and whatever the issue of debate, to meditate on the rules of polite civic discourse in the brave new world of seventeenth century print culture - a meditation that often tends to focus on the use and abuse of pronouns. Parker’s gravest pronominal sin, and the one that most annoys Marvell, is his habit of always speaking “in the Us and We of himself” (Prose Works I: 277). Marvell quotes one of these instances from Parker’s writing, “For We all know, you say” but interrupts himself with a parenthesis: “what We are you? I doubt you stand single, and no man else will vouch for you” (Prose Works I: 366). Marvell toys with his bombastic adversary, mockingly addressing him as “his We-ship” (Prose Works I: 276). Beneath this comic treatment of a minor linguistic habit lies a serious threat to Marvell’s idea of civil discourse - the assumption that one’s voice is representative, speaking on behalf of an unidentified many. Marvell accuses Parker: “But you imagine doubtless [. . .] that by the Doctrine of punishing Non-conformity more severely than the foulest Immorality, you have made your self the Head of a Party, and a World of People will clutter henceforward to shelter themselves under the Wing of your Patronage” (Prose Works I: 371). Marvell may have had much of the Second Defense by heart, but unlike Milton he never spoke from a position authorized as representative of England or any subsection of it, and he is deeply suspicious of those like Parker who attempt to claim such a status - in pronominal terms, of the insidious slide of “I” into “we.” “But I wonder,” he writes, “how he comes to be Prolocutor of the Church of England! For he talks as if he were a Synodical Individuum; nay, if he had a fifth Council in his belly he could not dictate more dogmatically” (Prose Works I: 65). In the later pamphlet Mr. Smirke, Marvell will make a similar accusation against Francis Turner, claiming that Turner speaks as if he contained in himself the whole of Parliament, as if he were called “to Represent in his peculiar person the whole Representa- <?page no="128"?> 128 Stephen Hequembourg tive” (Prose Works II: 48). The problem is one of what we might call unwarranted self-pluralization, which Marvell likens at one point to the controversial practice of holding multiple ecclesiastical benefices - describing Parker as one of a particular brand of persons who “to shew they are Pluralists, never write in a modester Stile than We, We” (Prose Works I: 160). As we will see in the final pamphlet, Marvell’s stylistic and polemical concerns have a curious way of coming together. The natural corollary to this unwarranted self-pluralization, and one which Parker is equally guilty of, is the practice of pluralizing one’s adversary and inflating him into an entire coherent sect. Marvell complains of the pestilent way that he has of Youing me, and so making me an Epidemical person, affixing thereby what hath ever, he pretends to have been said or done by any in the Cause of Non-conformity at any time to my account: although […] he had been more kind, if, as sometimes he does out of civility he had Thou’d me to the end of the Chapter. (Prose Works I: 267) This “epidemical Person” is simply the negative other of Parker’s “synodical individuum” and the image of Turner as one-man Parliament; all are examples of the assumption of an unfounded representative status. Marvell is attempting the difficult task of speaking of and for the nonconformists while not on behalf of them - not as the head of a party to whose beliefs he subscribes. So while Parker wants to play at Milton and Salmasius - two doughty controversialists clashing, each the representative of a specific political or social group - Marvell’s ideal of written controversy seems to be one of two authors representing only themselves, speaking respectfully in the “I” and “thou” rather than the “we” and plural “you.” The problem is that at this point in his polemical career Marvell is far from living up to this ideal. If Parker sins in the first and second person plural, Marvell’s own particular vice is very clearly in the third person singular. Over the course of the Rehearsal he speaks much more frequently “of” rather than “to” Parker, offering the reader a brief and none too flattering biography of his opponent, speculating on all the possible Parker ancestors (such as Martin Parker, atheist purveyor of doggerel verse), and retailing the occasional bit of gossip - all of which however is quite common in the genre of animadversion. But Marvell takes it a step further, speaking in the third person not simply of Parker but of Bayes - the fictional adversary he creates by fusing the raw material of Parker with the ridiculous playwright from George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham’s comedy The Rehearsal (just as his later antagonist Turner becomes Mr. Smirke, a minor character from George Etherege’s Man of Mode). In Marvell’s hands, Parker’s six main <?page no="129"?> Marvell’s Pronouns and the Ethics of Representation 129 theses against the nonconformists become the six scenes of one of Bayes’ absurd creations. The grave personage of the arch-deacon can suddenly be seen in various ridiculous postures - running off to his publisher with his breeches down, flirting with the ladies of his parish in private chambers, or skulking around town attempting to overhear the good people praising his books. While such poetic license clearly leads Marvell away from the ideal “I-thou” conversation, one can hardly wish the fault undone. It was after all his brilliant satire of Parker-Bayes that made the Rehearsal such an immediate sensation - a book Gilbert Burnet claimed was thoroughly relished by all ranks of society, “from the king down to the tradesman” (478). But beyond its spectacular entertainment value, Marvell’s third person fictionalization of both Parker and Turner allows him to explore the causes of the unwarranted pluralizations these authors perform in their own work. By turning his antagonists into creatures obviously of his own making Marvell is able to provide his readers with novelistic glimpses into the secret workings of their minds - even to depict them at the moment they conceive their own devious polemical strategies. He describes Parker plotting his book: But yet, thought he again [. . .] in all matters of Argument I will so muddle myself in Ink, that there shall be no catching no finding me; and besides I will speak alwayes with so Magisterial a Confidence [. . .] and plain men shall think that I durst not talk at such a rate but that I have a Commission. I will first, said he in his heart, like a stout Vagrant, beg, and, if that will not do, I will command the Question; and as soon as I have got it I will so alter the property and put on another Periwig, that I defie them all for discovering me or ever finding it again. (Prose Works I: 121) Several strands of the pronominal narrative come together in this passage. Through Marvell’s fictional “he” we see Parker at work, creating his magisterial “We” voice as a deep stratagem to cloak his weak and ineffectual “I.” Finally Marvell is even able to offer a biographical account of Parker’s fall from singularity into the state of degraded plurality. He describes a young Samuel Parker suddenly ravished with a sense of self-importance at the sanctity of his office, and being lifted off the ground in ecstasy - giving himself a strong crack on the head, which was the beginning of his unfortunate megalomania: “he grew beyond all measure elated, and that crack of his Scull, as in broken Looking- Glasses, multiply’d him in self-conceit and imagination” (Prose Works I: 76). <?page no="130"?> 130 Stephen Hequembourg So far I have tried to show not only Marvell’s tentative formulation of an “I-thou” ideal for polemical address, but also the ways in which this ideal fails in the Rehearsal - first through Parker’s attempt to pluralize both himself and his adversary, to make it a pitched battle of champions representing different social groups, and then through Marvell’s creation of a fictional “he” to describe Parker (and later Turner), which allows Marvell to explain psychologically the megalomania he sees behind the unjustified use of “Us and We” (Prose Works I: 277). But finally, in the second part of the Rehearsal, Marvell revisits the question of the first person plural and what exactly it signifies in the work of his We-ship, Mr. Parker-Bayes. When Parker claims: “We derive not therefore the Magistrate’s Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from any grant of our Saviours,” Marvell abruptly breaks in: “We derive it not: that is, sure you and your Book. For if you meant it otherwise, you should have done well to shew your Plenipotence from all those that authorized you. However methinks betwixt You and your Book, you might have had more wit” (Prose Works I: 296). At last, Marvell seems to have cracked the pronominal mystery - if Parker cannot justify his assumed role as plural speaker by showing any official authorization (“your Plenipotence from those who authorized you”) then the first person plural can only mean one thing - the author and his Book. For the remainder of the Rehearsal Bayes and his book travel everywhere together, even occasionally “lodg[ing] at one another’s expense” (Prose Works I: 352). Marvell’s “he” seems in danger of becoming “they” - man and book. But Parker and his Book more often appear in conflict, with Marvell playing the part of one trying to determine exactly how they relate to each other. Parker accuses Marvell of perverting the design of his treatise. Marvell responds: “What do I know the Designs that are managed betwixt him and his Book when they are together in Private? But when any discourse is made publick, it must abide the common interpretation (Prose Works I: 292). In the genre of animadversion, a very close author-text relationship is generally taken for granted - in the sense that every aspect of the text and its flaws (from logical mistakes and misattributed sources to a poor grasp of Latin) can be used by the animadverter to undermine the character of the author. After dividing Parker’s “we” into man and book, Marvell begins jokingly to question how close this connection actually is: Your Book hath said so and so concerning the Magistrate as you have seen in my former quotations. And now you come and would bear me down with more then ordinary confidence that your Book said no such thing, or else you understand its sense better than itself [. . .] But I hope at least, Mr. Bayes, that if I do convince you that the quotations are right on my part, <?page no="131"?> Marvell’s Pronouns and the Ethics of Representation 131 you will be so ingenuous as to put me upon no further trouble, but confess your Book misunderstood you and was in an errour. (Prose Works I: 293) He advises Parker several times to admonish and reprove his book, for it seems to have a certain “felonious intention” separate from that of the author (Prose Works I: 293). However, at this point in his polemical career, Marvell does not consider very seriously the possibility of any author-text disjunctions. He is simply irritated by what he calls the “double drudgery” Parker is putting on him, of proving not only that Parker said what he said but also that he meant what he said (Prose Works I: 302). Marvell writes, “But, though I know this is only a piece of his Art, hoping to tire out the Auditory, not out of any belief of his own Innocence, yet a Guilty person ought not to be debarr’d from making the best of his own Case” (Prose Works I: 302). Far from the ideal of a personal “Ithou” correspondence, Marvell here reveals the more judicial or forensic nature of animadversion. It is a question of assigning guilt and innocence, and in this genre authors and their texts stand or fall together: “The crimes indeed are heinous, and if the Man and Book be guilty, may, when time comes, furnish special matter for an Impeachment” (Prose Works II: 49). So after all his playful speculation on the possibility that Parker and his treatise misunderstood each other, or that the Book had a separate, secret intention of which the author was unaware, Marvell’s aim in the early pamphlets is ultimately to bring them back together, in order formally to impeach and condemn both. And this he accomplishes much to his own satisfaction: “And now I hope I have pretty well evidenced that your Book hath said what it did say, and that you meant what you said, and it was but the self same design which both of you managed together” (Prose Works I: 315). In 1678, six years after the Rehearsal and only months before his own death, Marvell made one last appearance in the world of public controversy. In the previous year John Howe, a nonconformist minister and former chaplain to Cromwell, had published a treatise attempting to reconcile God’s foreknowledge with his exhortations to his creatures. This rather innocuous work provoked the sharp response of Thomas Danson, another nonconformist minister but of a more strictly Calvinist persuasion, who turned the controversy into a debate on predestinarian theology. In the simplest terms, Howe had argued that God’s immediate concurrence was necessary to our good works, while to our wicked deeds He enables but does not positively determine; Danson then replied by insisting that immediate concurrence was necessary to both. The intricacies of the argument do not concern me here, mostly because they did not concern Marvell either. He wrote his Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse primarily because he was offended with Danson’s <?page no="132"?> 132 Stephen Hequembourg tone and style - his hectoring posture, his belittling of Howe, and his pedantic argumentation. Marvell has almost nothing to say directly about the question under discussion; his intervention is purely to teach people how civil discourse is to be conducted, for which he takes Howe as a positive example to be followed and Danson as representing everything to be avoided. The reader coming from the Rehearsal and expecting a similar pyrotechnic satire will be disappointed. The late polemical Marvell does not resort to ad hominem attacks, retail interesting gossip, or turn his adversaries into his own ridiculous dramatis personae. Annabel Patterson has claimed that in the act of refuting Parker, Marvell had abandoned his pacifist ideal (which I have been relating to his ideal of an “I-thou” form of polemical address) and that “the more successfully he attacked Parker’s personality, the closer he came to committing Parker’s own offences” (116). This led him to adopt what she calls “obvious strategies of depersonalization” in the late Remarks (116). In terms of my interest in pronouns, the authorial “I” disappears almost entirely as Marvell attempts to become a kind of vanishing mediator for other polemical adversaries. The pamphlet is signed only “By a Protestant.” Perhaps more interesting than his own self-effacement is Marvell’s depersonalization of Danson in the Remarks. In fact, as far as Marvell is concerned, Danson’s treatise De Causa Dei does not even have an author. Marvell makes one final pronominal innovation, referring throughout the Remarks to Danson’s book merely as “It,” in contrast to Howe whom he simply refers to by name. Danson had placed his initials, T. D., on the cover page of his pamphlet. Marvell writes: “By which first Letters, seeing it appears he desires to pass Incognito, I will so far observe good manners, as to interpret them only The Discourse, heartily wishing there were some way of finding it Guilty, without reflecting upon the Author” (Prose Works II: 421). Marvell here revisits the idea of a book taking on a life of its own, distinct from the author. But what was said only in jest about Parker - that perhaps his book misunderstood him, or had its own secret intentions and hidden malice - is spoken much more earnestly in the case of Danson. In the Rehearsal the ultimate goal was to prove that Parker and his text (that mysterious “We”) were one and the same: man and book both found guilty. In the Remarks, however, the book is condemned so that the author may go free. By its self-aggrandizing “we” Parker’s text attempted to claim a representative status it did not possess; Marvell’s “It,” by contrast, makes Danson’s text entirely unrepresentative - even of its author. In terms of seventeenth century polemic, the Remarks is really the opposite extreme of Milton’s Pro Se Defensio, where he tells Alexander More: <?page no="133"?> Marvell’s Pronouns and the Ethics of Representation 133 If I find that you wrote or contributed one page of this book, or even one versicle, if I find that you published it, or procured or persuaded anyone to publish it, or that you were in charge of its publication, or even lent yourself to the smallest part of the work [. . .] for me you alone will be the author of the whole work, the culprit and the crier. (712-13) Milton is prepared, if More has so much as breathed on the book, to insist that it belongs to and represents him entirely; Marvell on the other hand completely absolves Danson of authorship, making The Discourse, or “It,” something like what Milton’s devils image themselves to be: selfbegot by their own quickening power. In this way Marvell protects the author from the contaminating effects of his own text, in order to “preserve his [. . .] former Reputation, and leave him a door open to Ingenuity for the future” (Prose Works II: 421). With the author thus safely preserved, Marvell can focus his critique on the now autochthonous “It” of The Discourse. His personifications of “It” are remarkably strange and visceral. “It” is described at various times as having its own brain, memory, eye-sight, nervous system - even its own sweaty arm-pits. It is The Discourse itself that cites innumerable authors to show “Its great Reading,” and Marvell imagines this autonomous text reading Howe’s work with its eyes by turns open and shut (Prose Works II: 422, 450). It comes as little surprise to find a few pages later that not only is “It” capable of reading but that “It” has all the while been reading and writing itself, as Marvell describes “Its Pen” and all the faults it commits over the course of its own self-inscription (Prose Works II: 430). Not only does “It” read and write itself, but ultimately “It” comes to argue not with Howe or Marvell, but again only with itself: This indeed will serve The Discourse for argument either of Discourse or Dispute with It self [. . .] But till It be better agreed with it, and can come to a clearer understanding of It self, no third person needs or can be interessed in the Contest further than as a spectator of some strange sight for his money, like the double Child from Sussex. (Prose Works II: 431) Against Parker’s self-important “we’s” and “you’s,” with their attempt to represent large undefined swathes of the population, this final “It” is perfectly self-enclosed, arguing only with itself, put on display like a carnival monstrosity. In the Rehearsal, Marvell indulged in a brief fantasy of Parker living in the time of Caligula, when the Emperor would force those authors whose works displeased him to blur them over with a sponge, eat them, or lick them out with their tongues. The Discourse, having no repentant author to publicly consume it, has to do the job itself. <?page no="134"?> 134 Stephen Hequembourg Marvell writes: “and were The Discourse obliged to eat Its own words, and feed upon Its own Chain of syllogisms, ’twere a diet, though slender and unclean, yet fit enough for a Barbarian” (Prose Works II: 458). The Discourse, after reading, writing, and arguing with itself, will finally disappear by eating itself - a self-consuming artifact, if ever there was one. At times Marvell’s descriptions of the authorless text, the independent discourse, sound vaguely like Barthes’ formulation of the death of the author, the key difference being that this for Marvell is not a description of literature per se, but only of bad literature, or literature with “felonious intention,” as Marvell described Parker’s work. In Marvell’s formulation, encountering an authorless text like The Discourse, with its chains of entangled and often contradictory codes wound like human intestines, would not provoke any erotic frisson on the part of the reader. In fact Marvell’s version of the death of the author is not in the service of any kind of emerging reader but remains very much author-centered, the author’s death being also his possible redemption - that act of leaving the door open to future ingenuity. So while Barthes’ removal of the author was “an anti-theological activity” (147), a refusal to impose a limit on the text, Marvell’s entire formulation is deeply theological. In fact, his different treatment of Howe and Danson’s texts seems to follow quite closely Howe’s argument about God’s influence over good and wicked acts. Howe’s central claim was that God immediately concurs with our pious motions but not with our evil ones, while Danson insisted that God’s will is necessary and immediate to both. While Marvell refuses to weigh in on the controversy, claiming “I [. . .] meddle not as an Opinionist either way,” his author-text formulations mirror Howe’s description of God-creature relations (Prose Works II: 433). An author retains a close connection to his pious productions, directly concurring to all of its statements, claims, and questions. Howe’s book represents him, so closely in fact that Marvell expresses concern lest it be “defaced, mutilated, stabb’d in so many places” by Danson - “and the Author through it” he adds (Prose Works II: 420). Danson, on the other hand, cannot be hurt through any treatment of his text because Danson, as we have seen, is no longer the author. A bad text is a wicked creature whose demeanor has become entirely its own - a being with no authorial dependence. In aligning the God-creature and author-text relation in this way, Marvell may in fact have taken his cue from an analogy of Danson’s which combines them both. Several times in De Causa Dei Danson illustrates his predestinarian theology by the image of a writingmaster holding and guiding his pupil’s hand as he forms the letters on a page. The creaturely hand concurs with the divine, tracing out a script predetermined by God. It is perhaps against this rigorous causal chain that Marvell improvises his image of the anonymous, autonomous dis- <?page no="135"?> Marvell’s Pronouns and the Ethics of Representation 135 course, holding its own pen in the act of self-inscription. If Danson’s conception were true, he asks, “what Christian but would rather wish he had never known Writing-Master? ” (Prose Works II: 469). In closing, we might consider how Marvell views his own writing in the context of this perilous maze of pronouns. It seemed in the Rehearsal as if Marvell’s ideal form of written controversy were a sustained “Ithou” dialogue deliberately shunning the unwarranted pluralizations of Parker - of speaking in the “us,” “we,” and plural “you.” But his own treatment of Parker, the creation of a fictional “he” that Marvell can control and lampoon, conflicted with that ideal. The adversary of the Remarks is no longer a “thou,” a “you,” or even a “he,” but an “It,” and in thus adapting his polemical strategy Marvell’s “I” drops out almost completely as he attempts to create in his own writing an impersonal field in which other authors and texts can interact with civility and respect. But in the end, how close does Marvell consider his relation to his own pamphlets? Do they accurately represent him? Is he close and implicit with them as Howe was - able even to be stabbed through his text, like some poor Polonius; or does he see the finished work more as an autonomous “It” which he releases so that it can pursue its own agenda? On the one hand, he wrote to Sir Edward Harley of his plans for the second part of the Rehearsal: “I am drawn in [. . .] I hope by a good Providence, to intermeddle in a noble and high argument” (Poems and Letters II: 328). But if he rises briefly here to a Miltonic strain, Marvell begins that same text with an argument against writing (especially invective), in which he concludes that “not to Write at all is much the safer course of Life” (Prose Works I: 236). He often likes to end his pamphlets with an appeal to a third party (such as Bacon in the Rehearsal) who does not so much side with him as seem to condemn both parties. “I am weary of such stuff, both mine own and his,” he tells the reader of Mr. Smirke, and he ends the appended Essay with: “And upon this condition, let my Book also (yea my self if it were needful) be burnt by the hand of the Animadverter” (Prose Works II: 113, 176). But biographically, the author seems to have come off well enough in anonymously printing that same pamphlet. He describes its reception to Harley: “The book said to be Marvels makes what shift it can in the world but the Author walks negligently up & down as unconcerned” (Poems and Letters II: 345). Marvell seems to experience here a thrill of relief in his own separation from his text. Perhaps, in the larger context of Marvell’s pronominal adventures, it would be more precise to rewrite this line: “It makes what shift it can in the world but I walk negligently up & down as unconcerned.” <?page no="136"?> 136 Stephen Hequembourg References Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Burnet, Gilbert. History of My Own Time. Ed. M. J. Routh. Vol. 1. Oxford, 1833. Marvell, Andrew. Poems and Letters. Ed. H. M. Margoliouth. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell. Eds. Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Ed. Don Wolfe. Vol. 4. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Parker, Samuel. A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie. London: 1671. Patterson, Annabel. Marvell: The Writer in Public Life. Harlow: Longman, 2000. <?page no="137"?> “The forms of things unknown”: English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime Patrick Cheney During the late sixteenth century, a new form of authorship emerges. This authorship eschews the ethical paradigm of patriotic nationalism leading to eternity on which recent criticism depends. Instead, the new form of authorship fictionalizes literary greatness. The premier theorist is Longinus, whose On Sublimity is printed in 1554. The sublime is Longinus’ counter-national principle that replaces goodness with greatness, equilibrium with ecstasy, and self-regulated passion with heightened emotion. For Longinus, the sublime is an emotional principle of authorship, written in the grand style, in imitation of great works, and aiming for fame. Under the spell of sublimity, the author tells a story about the making of a great literary work. By centering the story on the “interval between earth and heaven” (9.5: 150), a sublime work produces either terror or rapture, leaving the human in the exalted condition of the gods. Poems and plays by Shakespeare and colleagues help build a bridge from Chaucer to Milton to form an early modern sublime. The key bridging figure is Spenser, whose canon betrays an entry into Longinian ekstasis. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern English authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a catalyst in the formation of an English canon. In this essay, I would like to yoke together two topics typically kept separate in literary criticism: “The Author” and “The Sublime.” These are titles to two New Critical Idiom volumes, both published by Routledge in 2005: The Author, by Andrew Bennett; and The Sublime, by Philip Shaw. While Shaw never refers to the category of “the author” directly, Bennett mentions “the sublime” twice in passing (60, 66), opening up a possibility that I suggest is important to the present volume: the connection between authorship and sublimity. Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 137-160. <?page no="138"?> 138 Patrick Cheney Bennett and Shaw write their books for the Routledge series because “the author” and “the sublime” constitute two major terms of modern critical theory. An important body of criticism addresses “the author.” Bennett goes so far as to write: The history of literary criticism from the earliest times may in fact be said to be organized around conceptions of the author [. . .]: the problem of criticism, the problem of reading, is in the end the problem of authorship. (4, 112) In early modern studies, recent criticism has made authorship a major topic, and the same could be said of other periods. Similarly, an important body of criticism addresses the sublime, though I suspect it is not as much on our critical radar. In another 2005 book, Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton, David Sedley calls the sublime “the preeminent modern aesthetic category” (153). Shaw’s Critical Idiom volume explains why: from Burke and Kant to Lyotard and Žižek - Coleridge, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida - philosophers, theorists, and literary critics have plumbed the depths (or heights) of this intriguing concept. In early modern studies, recent books by David Norbrook on Milton, Richard Halpern on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Paul Cefalu on the Metaphysical Poets, and one Patrick Cheney on Marlowe join Erich Auerbach on St Augustine and Piero Boitani on Dante to bring the topic into the limelight. Critics have not yet noticed that the invention of the modern notion of the author is coterminous with the recovery of the classical sublime as an aesthetic category (Bennett 49, Sedley 8). In separate lines of research, critics have traced the modern idea of authorship in England to the late sixteenth century. As Wendy Wall puts it in an overview, Scholars have long recognized the sixteenth century as a time when definitions of authorship were being transformed, but had not yet crystallized into the modern meaning that would arise in the late eighteenth century: the author as the ultimate origin and governing force for a text [. . .]. When Spenser and Jonson used the book format to generate the author’s laureate status, [. . .] they produced more modern and familiar images of literary authority - classically authorized writers who serve as the origin and arbiter of a literary monument. (64-65, 86) While many might accept Wall’s formulation, I have just benefited from some recent criticism to push the Spenserian laureate project back, through the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, to John Skelton and <?page no="139"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 139 the emergence of modern English (acknowledging forerunners in the Middle English of John Lydgate, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer). 1 Similarly, critics have traced the modern English emergence of the sublime to the sixteenth century. According to Shaw, the word “sublime” means “The highest of the high; that which is without comparison; the awe-inspiring or overpowering; the unbounded and the undetermined” (156). Yet The Oxford Classical Dictionary recalls that the word derives from the Latin sublimitas, and comes to mean “that quality of genius in great literary works which irresistibly delights, inspires, and overwhelms the reader” (Hornblower and Spawforth 1,450). Fortuitously, the OED’s first recorded example appears under Definition 6, “Of language, style, or a writer: Expressing lofty ideas in a grand and elevated manner,” when Angel Day in his 1586 English Secretary discusses the three styles of rhetoric: low, middle, and high or “sublime” style. The sublime style, Day says, is the highest and stateliest maner, and loftiest deliverance of any thing that maie bee, expressing the heroicall and mightie actions of Kinges, Princes, and other honourable personages, the stile whereof is said to be tragicall swelling in choice, and those the most haughtiest termes. (10) One of the sticking points of criticism is whether authors in sixteenthcentury England understand the sublime merely as a “style,” or whether it accrues the kind of “thought” to which Enlightenment figures like Kant lend to it. Day makes plain that he talks about the sublime style by expressing its content: it is a heightened style designed to depict the most elevated of topics, the politics of kings, within the high genres of epic and tragedy. As so often, the OED date of 1586 needs to be pushed back, at least to 1567, when Matthew Parker uses the word “sublime.” Thereafter, the word recurs throughout the sixteenth century. 2 1 See Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, which is indebted to Helgerson on the “self-crowned laureate” (book title), Griffiths on Skelton, and Walker on Wyatt and Surrey. 2 On the new English word “sublime,” see the following: 1. Matthew Parker, “To the Reader,” The Whole Psalter Translated into English Metre (1567): Accent in place: your voyce as needth, note number, poynte, and time: Both lyfe and grace: good reading breedth, flat verse it reysth SUBLIME . (sig. A2r) 2. Roger Ascham, The Scholmaster (1570): Discussing the three styles, “Humile,” “Mediocre,” and “Sublime,” Ascham finds the sublime “excellentlie handled” in “Ciceroes Orations” (sig. R2r). 3. Thomas Newton, Dedicatory Epistle, Seneca his tenne tragedies (1581): <?page no="140"?> 140 Patrick Cheney Moreover, as Bernard Weinberg has shown, the first known edition of the primary treatise on the concept, On Sublimity, written in Greek by the literary critic known as Longinus, was printed in 1554 by Franciscus Robortello, while another edition appears in 1555, and still another in 1569-70. Two lost Latin translations date to 1554 and 1560, while the first extant Latin edition dates to 1566, and another appears in 1572. That makes seven sixteenth-century Continental editions. The first English edition does not appear until 1636, a combined Greek and Latin text, while the first English translation, by John Hall, needs to wait until 1652. This publishing history helps explain why many today mistakenly think that the sublime becomes a significant topic in England only in the late seventeenth century. Yet the printing of Longinus on the Continent during the sixteenth century and the sixteenth-century use of the new word “sublime” suggest that something was in the water much earlier. Although no one has yet determined whether Robortello and Company migrated to sixteenth-century England, some evidence exists that they For it may not [. . .] be thought and deemed the direct meaning of SENECA himselfe, whose whole wrytinges (penned with a peerelesse SUBLIME and loftinesse of Style, are so farre from countenauncing Vice, that I doubt whether there bee any amonge all the Catalogue of Heathen wryters, that with more gratuity of Philosophicall sentences, more waightynes of sappy words, or greater authority of sound matter beateth down sinne, loose lyfe, dissolute dealinge, and unbrydled sensuality. (A3v-A4r) 4. Robert Greene, “To the Gentlemen Readers,” Menaphon (1589): If [. . .] you finde my stile either magis humile in some place, or more SUBLIME in another, if you finde darke Ænigmaes [...] as if Sphinx on the one side, and Roscius on the other were playing the wagges; thinke the metaphors are well ment. (sig. *2v) 5. Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella (1591): Those words which do SUBLIME the quintessence of bliss. (Sonnet 77.8) 6. King James, “The Translators Invocation,” His Maiesties poeticall exercises at vacant houres (1591): Thou that mightilie does toone My warbling holie Harpe, And does SUBLIME my Poëmes als. (sig. A4r) 7. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 5.8.30 (1596 [The Soldan and Prince Arthur]): Thus goe they both together to their geare, With like fierce minds, but meanings different: For the proud Souldan with presumpteous cheare, And countenance SUBLIME and insolent, Sought onely slaughter and avengement: But the brave Prince for honour and for right, Gainst tortious powre and lawlesse regiment, In the behalfe of wronged weake did fight. More in his causes truth he trusted then in might. <?page no="141"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 141 did. In a personal communication, the past Deputy Keeper of the Cambridge University Archives, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, writes: On the face of it, i.e., in terms of recorded ownership, Longinus was more or less unknown in sixteenth-century Cambridge and Oxford. [. . .] However, Longinus is found in Franciscus Portus (ed.), , 1569 . . . and this is very probably the book in the stock of John Denys, French bookseller in Cambridge, d. 1578, listed as “2 hermogenes Apthonius et alij Rethorici greci genevae vetus <8o>.” So, if I am right, [there are] two copies in a Cambridge bookshop in 1578. I am also buoyed by Brian Vickers, who reports that Longinus “was just beginning to be known in the late sixteenth century” (25). In particular, I speculate that one author whom I have discovered to be committed to the sublime, George Chapman, might not have waited to read Longinus until 1614, when he discusses On Sublimity in his dedicatory epistle to The Whole Works of Homer (Vickers 522-23). 3 I want to argue, broadly, that two historical phenomena emerging during the sixteenth century - the modern author and the classical sublime - are interconnected. Specifically, I argue that the resurfacing of the classical sublime serves as a catalyst to the formation of the modern author; and that, in turn, the emergence of the modern author lends impetus to the rediscovery of the classical sublime. Something unusual is happening during the sixteenth century. At the same time, I have intimated that the historical interchange between authorship and sublimity grows out of medieval culture, and finally classical culture. A fuller literary history would account for a long spectrum of literary time, continuities and ruptures. What authorship and sublimity share, I suggest, is a commitment to the project of literary greatness. Both authorship and sublimity are produced through imitation of preceding authors; they are written primarily in the grand style (occasionally in the plain style); they proceed through elevated figuration; they represent our most serious cultural ideas; and they aim for artistic immortality. This model might help us revise our understanding of both authorship and sublimity, but it aims rather to chart the new historical phenomenon that is my subject here: English authorship of the early modern sublime. What makes early modern authorship historically important, I am trying to suggest, is the early modern sublime. The reason is that be- 3 On Longinus in sixteenth-century Italy, see Logan, 532-34, and in France, 533-39. Like Sedley, Logan singles out Montaigne as an intriguing case, because we have no evidence that he knew Longinus, yet “three passages in the Essais echo the distinction Longinus makes in 1.4 between pleasure and transport or ecstasy” (535). <?page no="142"?> 142 Patrick Cheney tween Dante and Milton the sublime becomes the concept that authors inscript to register their own literary greatness. Without the sublime, then, we cannot accurately tell the story of authorship between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. For instance, Boitani helps us see that Dante ends the Divine Comedy with the sublime. First, Boitani traces St Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin (177-278) to 2 Corinthians 12, St Paul’s rapt vision of God (207), and then he tracks imitations by Petrarch in Rime sparse 362-65 (197-205) and Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and the Prologues to “The Prioress’s” and “Second Nun’s Tale” (205-22). For Boitani, the “Dantean sublime” (250) is about the medieval poetic imagination writing a poetics of “wonder,” featuring “an artist who is reaching [. . .] his utmost” (273). In contrast to Dante, Milton opens Paradise Lost with the sublime: I thence Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous Song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme. (1.12-16) Milton uses the sublime to mark the singularity of his authorship and to claim elevated status as a Christian poet. Specifically, he claims that his Christian subject overgoes the secularism of Parnassus epicists from classical culture, such as Homer and Virgil, and Renaissance culture, such as Ariosto and Spenser. In the Miltonic sublime, the Christian poet’s divine word elevates author and reader alike above the pagan to “make or unmake a world,” as Shaw puts it (33). We know that Milton read authorship carefully from Homer to Spenser, but I am suggesting that it is his epic discourse of the sublime that allows him to highlight what has been at stake all along. Through the sublime, Milton sets the terms of the debate over authorship for the centuries to come. Is the author an inspired “genius” of singular autonomy; or is the author swept along in “social energy” (Greenblatt 165)? According to Bennett, “recent discussions of authorship may be reduced [. . .] to two different kinds of concerns”: “On the one hand there is a series of problems to do with [. . .] intention [. . .]. On the other hand, there is a more historically, socially, and institutionally involved set of issues surrounding [. . .] authority” (4-5). This debate owes to the competing projects of Harold Bloom and Roland Barthes: “the anxiety of influence” versus “the death of the author.” Bloom and Barthes constitute a binary not just of authorship - “influence” versus “intertextuality” - but also of aesthetics: the sublime versus a counter-sublime. For Mil- <?page no="143"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 143 ton’s part, Paradise Lost makes it clear that the sublime author jumps the gap: he soars ethereally above the Aonian Mount because the Aonian Mount remains so solidly material below. John Milton’s sublime authorship is singular because it is intertextual; his inspired genius emerges out of social energy. Since our histories of the sublime tend to jump from Dante to Milton, on their way to the Enlightenment and modernity, I seek to argue for the importance of the blank between Dante and Milton. In particular, I propose to sketch out an authorship of the early modern sublime through a two-part structure. First, I will locate my model of sublime authorship within what I hope will be a fresh reading of Longinus, including his idiosyncratic contribution to a history of the sublime, largely forgotten by those enamored of the Kantian tradition. Second, I will inventory the early modern sublime itself, but then feature Spenser and Shakespeare. In a conclusion, I will speculate on the significance of this project for early modern authorship. *** Admittedly, a study of sublime authorship is hobbled at the outset. First, we do not know who Longinus was, when he wrote On Sublimity, what the full contents of his treatise were, or even what the treatise’s reception history looks like up to the mid-seventeenth century. Acknowledging these difficulties, scholars think that Longinus was a Greek who wrote during the first century AD. The earliest and most reliable of eleven extant manuscripts dates to a Paris codex of the tenth century (MS 2036), even though one-third is missing (Macksey). Still, enough exists for Vickers to call On Sublimity “one of the most intelligent works of literary criticism ever produced” (25). Yet, not a single reference to Longinus comes out of antiquity, and I can find none in England till Chapman early in the seventeenth century. Second, no one agrees about how to define the sublime. As Shaw wryly puts it, “We are never certain of the sublime” (11). Bloom is even more emphatic: “the literary sublime can be exemplified but not defined” (Sublime xv). For me, this conundrum is half the fun. The conundrum is compounded because, according to Sedley, in the sixteenth century the sublime “was just one among a cluster of similar concepts” in “a vein of interest in aesthetic extremes.” He singles out “wonder” but adds Neoplatonic “furor” and “Christian ecstasy” (9, 157n17). These are difficult to distinguish from sublimity, not least because Longinus uses <?page no="144"?> 144 Patrick Cheney “wonder” and “ecstasy” as descriptors of the sublime, and he sees Plato as a major sublime author. 4 According to the OED, the word “sublime” combines the Latin sub (up to) with limen (lintel, the top beam of a door), meaning up to the lintel. This etymology speaks to something vital: ascendant motion within architectural space, which helps explain why images of both height and flight become central to it. The sublime is that special space and place where the transcendent and the immanent meet (Shaw 3). Longinus calls it “the interval between earth and heaven” (9.5: 150). Unsurprisingly, the meaning changes between Longinus and Lyotard. The first phase to a history of the sublime, represented by Longinus in antiquity, I call literary: here the sublime is a discursive tool of language, exemplified in literary works like Homer’s Iliad and Sappho’s lyrics, and aims to arouse strong emotion in the reader about the terrifying or rapturous powers of the divine. The second phase, represented by Thomas Burnet’s 1684-89 Sacred Theory of the Earth, is naturalist: here the sublime is located in objects from the natural world, notably majestic mountains and swirling oceans, and signals a “darker meditation [. . .] on the nature of the self and relations with the external world” (Shaw 5). The third phase, represented by Burke’s 1756 Philosophical Enquiry, introduces an empiricist understanding: the sublime becomes primarily a psychological and secular phenomenon of the mind as it fixes on the terrible in nature to produce an exalted emotional state of alienating pleasure (Shaw 53-54). The fourth phase, represented by Kant’s 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment, is rationalist: the sublime becomes a cognitive site of consciousness that demonstrates “the ascendancy of the rational over the real,” so that “the mind of man [. . .] is greater than anything [. . .] in nature” (Shaw 6). The fifth and current phase, represented by such 4 It would take a separate essay to discriminate sublimity from wonder, furor, and ecstasy, in part because the sublime includes components of all three. In aesthetic terms, wonder is admiratio, and expresses an optimistic awe at grandeur, at once something in the text and the reader’s reaction to it; it speaks to the mind’s power to apprehend mysteries confidently (Sedley 7, 9, 11; see Bishop). Furor is specifically a Neoplatonic concept of divine inspiration, “poetic frenzy” (furor poeticus), a poetic state of mind beyond the human and the rational (Sedley 21, 68-71; see Allen). Ecstasy is a spiritual experience (Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Christian) of the kind Donne presents in “The Ecstasy,” wherein the soul is transported out of the body to experience exhilarating bliss. Only the Longinian sublime is a full and formal aesthetic theory, and only the sublime operates via philosophical skepticism (a theory of doubt), as Sedley demonstrates; for instance: “Whereas the wonderful reaches the frontier of understanding, the sublime plunges the mind into confusion. Knowledge inspires wonder; sublimity thrives on ignorance, the only inspiration available in the modern age of skepticism” (11). Importantly, the early modern period is significant because at this time “wonder ceded prestige to sublimity as the way that one was supposed to move and be moved” (9). <?page no="145"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 145 “poststructuralist theorists” as Lyotard, remains skeptical of the Kantian sublime, while operating within it: whether understood as literary, naturalist, empiricist, or rationalist, the sublime is fundamentally “paradoxical, unfulfilled, or self-baffling” (Shaw 8). Considering this long history, Shaw defines the sublime as follows: Sublimity [. . .] refers to the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a thought or sensation is defeated. Yet through this very defeat, the mind gets a feeling for that which lies beyond thought and language. (2-3) This definition is helpful, but I want to emphasize how un-Longinian it is. For Shaw defines the sublime in post-Longinian terms, viewing it as primarily epistemological. In contrast, Longinus defines the sublime as literary: Sublimity is a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse. It is the source of the distinction of the very greatest poets and prose writers and the means by which they have given eternal life to their own fame. For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. (1.3-4: 143) I take Longinus’ cue to define the sublime as fundamentally a counterrhetorical mode of “discourse” - a form of language, the expression of emotional and cognitive “experience” - and further, to emphasize the linguistic form of the sublime as literary, exemplified by “the very greatest poets.” Above all, On Sublimity does not advance philosophy but poetics. Longinus’ treatise joins Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s Poetics, and Horace’s Ars poetica as the major treatises on poetry to emerge from antiquity (see Cronk). Yet Longinus differs from all three. Plato, Aristotle, and Horace themselves differ, but they share a baseline rooted in the ethical principle of goodness; they just line up on different sides. In The Republic, Plato rejects poetry as dangerous to the ideal state, whereas Aristotle and Horace argue for its importance to individual health within and utility to the state. Longinus’ master stroke is to replace philosophical “goodness” with literary “greatness.” He is the first literary critic to theorize a form of authorship that gives Plato, Aristotle, and Horace the slip. Critics have been scrambling to theorize such an authorship since the heyday of “harmony” during the 1960s and ’70s gave way to New Historicist “contradiction” (Greenblatt 168). “Sublimity,” says Longi- <?page no="146"?> 146 Patrick Cheney nus, “produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind” (1.4: 144). The structure of On Sublimity suggests that Longinus understands the sublime as an aesthetics of authorship. Accordingly, he organizes the concept around “five sources”: 1. “the power to conceive great thoughts”; 2. “strong and inspired emotion”; 3. elevated “figures of thought and figures of speech”; 4. “Noble diction”; and 5. “dignified and elevated word-arrangement.” (8.1: 149) Longinus calls the first two “natural” and the last three “art[istic]” (8.1: 149). To us, thought and emotion are subjective, while figuration, diction, and syntax are textual. This distinction directs us to a process that is fundamentally literary, relating author and reader to work and its afterlife. The process has four phases. The first pertains to the author, who has “the power to conceive great thoughts” and possesses “inspired emotion,” which he generates, significantly, through “imitation [. . .] of great writers of the past” (13.2: 158). In other words, the process originates in textuality, and through intertextuality becomes cognitive, with the author relying on previous texts to form his own intellectual and emotional subjectivity. The second phase pertains to the author’s style: relying on “figures,” “diction,” and “word-arrangement” (8.1: 149), the author composes a sublime literary representation. The third phase pertains to the effect of the author’s sublime style on the reader: “amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer” (1.4: 143). The fourth and final phase pertains to the consequence of the reader’s exalted condition for the author himself: he acquires “posthumous fame” (14.3: 159). Hence, Longinus designs the complete literary process of sublimity to be immortalizing. One specific technique of the immortalizing process helps pinpoint the sublime as a form of authorship. Longinus says that the sublime “poet is accustomed to enter into the greatness of his heroes” (9.10: 152). He quotes Euripides’ Orestes, when the young man spies the Furies: “‘O! O! She’ll kill me. Where shall I escape? ’” According to Longinus, “The poet himself saw the Erinyes, and has as good as made his audience see what he imagined” (15.2: 159). 5 This feature of the sublime 5 In a famous essay, Hertz focuses on what he calls “the sublime turn - the moment [. . .] that fascinates Longinus, the point of the near-fatal stress of passion [. . .] turn[s] into [. . .] <?page no="147"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 147 uncovers the authorial expression of a character’s experience: the character expresses the moment in the work when the author speaks to the reader in his or her own voice. 6 Intriguingly, Longinus discovers a myth for the author not where Horace and early modern heirs like Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham do, in the civic-building figure of Orpheus (or Amphion), but rather in the ancient story of “the Pythia at Delphi” (14.2: 158): She is in contact with the tripod near the cleft in the ground which (so they say) exhales a divine vapour, and she is thereupon made pregnant by the supernatural power and forthwith prophesies as one inspired. Similarly, the genius of the ancients acts as a kind of oracular cavern, and effluences flow from it into the minds of their imitators. (14.2: 158) Longinus interprets the story of Apollo and the priestess at Delphi as an allegory of the author’s eternizing experience of an intertextual sublime. The work of an earlier writer functions as a womblike “oracular cavern” of invention, from which mystically sacred “effluences” flow into the “mind” of the imitating author, impregnating him with “supernatural power,” the power of the sublime. Instead of Orpheus civilizing nature, or Amphion building Thebes, Longinus figures the sublime in the priestess at Delphi, ravished by the god. Longinus does not mention Orpheus, because, shockingly, his sublime model of the author operates independently of a civic-building project of social utility. Longinus does not ignore utility but opens his treatise by considering whether the sublime “may be thought useful to public men” (1.2: 143); and later he says that “grandeur is not divorced from service and utility” (36.1: 178). Yet he never equates utility with what is so important to Kant: ethics (Observations 57). Rather, Longinus says that “in poetry, the aim is astonishment” (15.2: 159). Although he notes that “sublimity is the echo of a noble mind” (9.2: 150), he never says that sublime astonishment creates delight, instruction, or virtue. Sublimity, the energy that is constituting the poem” (583), the transfer of power from the fictional world of the character to “poetic activity itself” (584). 6 On the Longinian author speaking through character, see the following: 1. “[T]he poet is accustomed to enter into the greatness of his heroes” (9.10: 152). 2. “May one not say that the writer’s soul has mounted the chariot [of Euripides’ Phaethon], has taken wing with the horses and shares the danger” (15.4: 160). 3. “[S]ometimes a writer, in the course of a narrative in the third person, makes a sudden change and speaks in the person of his character” (27.1: 170). <?page no="148"?> 148 Patrick Cheney rather, is “that bursting forth of the divine spirit which is so hard to bring under the rule of law” (33.4: 176). 7 Longinus can speak of the sublime as above “the [. . .] law” because the utility he imagines looks to the “divine” rather than the “human” - the human transmogrifying into the divine. This explains why his most famous metaphors for the sublime are the whirlwind and the thunderbolt, natural images that have a seemingly godlike origin. The “divine gifts” of a “sublime genius” like Demosthenes, he says, are “almost blasphemous to call [. . .] human [. . .]. The crash of his thunder, the brilliance of his lightning make all other orators [. . .] insignificant” (34.4: 177). Here Longinus betrays his real problem; it is the human, the default that sublimity overgoes: “great geniuses in literature,” he writes, “tower far above mortal stature. Other literary qualities prove their users to be human; sublimity raises us toward the spiritual greatness of god” (36.1: 178). The word “toward” is crucial, for it is Longinus’ commitment to the capacity of the human for divinity that leads him to abandon Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Horace’s rational principle of moderation for an emotional principle of ecstasy: “emotion,” he says, is “essential” to “sublimity” (30.1: 172). Instead of self-regulated or tempered passion, so important in today’s criticism, Longinus celebrates unfettered, heightened emotion. 8 For Longinus, then, the sublime is not a Kantian principle of the mind’s confrontation with the ineffable, but an emotional principle of counter-national authorship. 9 Under the spell of sublimity, the author tells a story about the making of a great literary work. The purpose of a great literary work is to move the human “toward the spiritual greatness of god,” whether the lucid state of terror, as with Oedipus, or the intoxicating burn of rapture, as with Sappho. Longinus is our great critic of the interstice; his authorial sublime is an interstitial phenomenon. Although Longinus gestures towards divinity, he ends his treatise with an “appendix” on “the politics of the sublime” (cf. Shaw 86-88). He recalls how an unnamed philosopher says that “democracy nurtures greatness, and that great writers flourished with democracy.” “Freedom,” the philosopher continues, “nourishes and encourages the thoughts of the great [. . .] [T]hey shine forth, free in a free world”; and he ends by referring to “that fair and fecund spring of literature, free- 7 Cf. Shaw on the “social function” of the sublime: “the true sublime is on the side of morality” (18). 8 For a model of self-regulation, see Schoenfeldt. For a model of tempered passion, see Rowe. Paster’s model of the “body embarrassed” also cannot account for the Longinian model. 9 By this phrase, I mean an authorship that responds to the writing of nationhood by eschewing the patriotic, civic-building goals of literature. <?page no="149"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 149 dom” (44.2-3: 185-86). Yet neither the philosopher nor Longinus says that the author of the sublime civilizes a democracy; instead, a democracy houses the sublime author. In early modern England, it will take Longinus’ first English translator, Milton’s disciple John Hall, to turn this around, and appropriate the sublime for a free English republic (Norbrook 212-21), as Milton does in Paradise Lost. Hence, we need not see early modern sublime authorship as opposed to a republican politics of freedom but rather as its greatest artistic expression. *** In the second part of my essay, I suggest that the Longinian authorial sublime better theorizes much early modern literature than does Aristotle, Horace, or Sidney. Critics often note the gap between theory and practice in the English Renaissance, including in Sidney himself. During the past few decades, we have spilt much ink trying either to make the practice conform to the theory or to exult in the gap. Like Sidney, Marlowe and Shakespeare rarely square with Aristotle, Horace, and The Defence of Poesie. Spenser is a test case, since he avows in the Proem to Faerie Queene 1 to “moralize” his “song” (1.Proem.1.9), while the song itself chronically escapes the stricture, as much criticism testifies. Camille Paglia, for instance, says that Spenser’s “wanton voice” usurps his “ethical voice” (190). What has been missing in this conversation is recognition of the one theory coming out of antiquity that licenses this project: the Longinian authorial sublime. We may not know whether Longinus was being read during the Elizabethan era, but it hardly makes much difference. Longinus did not invent the sublime; he theorized it. The sublime was there “in the beginning,” and quite technically so, since Longinus quotes Genesis 1.3, “‘God said’ [. . .] ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light’” (9.9: 152) - discussed by Auerbach as the fount of the Christian sublime, which uses the humble style to represent the high “mystery” of unity between “man and God” (51, 41). Yet the sublime is there also in our first classical work, the Iliad. Longinus is simply the first to articulate a theory of literature innate to literature itself. Authors like Spenser and Shakespeare need not have read Longinus to produce such sublime masterpieces as The Faerie Queene or Hamlet. Rather, they need only have read classical and biblical works that write the sublime, and then attempted to imitate them on page and stage. In some cases, authors need only have translated classical literature. For much of the sixteenth-century translation movement Englishes the classical sublime, as discussed recently by classicists. For instance, in <?page no="150"?> 150 Patrick Cheney Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge, Philip Hardie locates the mainstream of the classical sublime in Lucretius, and sees responses by Virgil, Ovid, and Horace creating an “early imperial aesthetic of the sublime” (8). For Hardie, the sublime is a principle of “literary aspiration”: the “history” of the sublime, he says, “carries with it [. . .] [a] combination of literary aspiration and deflation” (201), while the image of “the poetic fall” in Icarus and Phaethon becomes “a semi-technical term for the hazards of aspiring to the sublime” (215). Through Hardie, we can see how sixteenth-century translators write the sublime. Major instances important to Hardie would include Surrey’s Fama from Virgil’s Aeneid 4 and Arthur Golding’s Speech of Pythagoras from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15. We could add Marlowe’s Caesar overtopping the Alps in Lucan’s First Book and Chapman’s Achilles in the Iliad. Certain generic groups seem to operate from the principle of sublime authorship. Longinus makes no substantive contribution to genre theory, but he cites examples from epic, tragedy, and love lyric, and he distinguishes “poetry” from “prose” (33.1: 175), and “lyric poetry” from “tragedy” (33.4: 176). Specifically, he observes that “tragedy” is “a genre which is naturally magniloquent” (3.1: 145), and in my first group are tragedies that critics have independently identified as seeming to be about, finally, the making of a great tragedy: • Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (“where’s the author of this endless woe” [2.5.39]); 10 • Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (“burned is Apollo’s laurel bough” [Ep.2]); • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (“tell my story” [5.2.349]); • Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy (“When thunder claps, heaven likes the tragedy” [5.3.50]); • John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (“behold my tragedy” [4.2.36]); • John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (“A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy” [5.1.8]). Ford’s ’Tis Pity might be the most glaring instance of the Longinian sublime in English Renaissance drama. Ford presents a nominal world, the city of Parma, filled with incest between brother and sister; but he also presents a second world, superimposed onto the first and visible to most readers: the world of Ford’s literary imagination, the author making his drama out of the works of previous authors, especially Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, and Middleton (see Bartels). In this regard, perhaps, “incest” accrues added resonance. Giovanni is Ford’s figure of the 10 All quotations from Renaissance tragedy come from Bevington. Shakespeare quotations come from the Riverside edition, and Spenser quotations come from Hamilton. <?page no="151"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 151 sublime Marlovian superhero who enters the divine through sublimity: “I hold Fate / Clasped in my fist, and could command the course / Of Time’s eternal motion” (5.5.11-13). Ford’s literalizing of metaphor in the image of Annabella’s “heart” on Giovanni’s “dagger” (5.6.9) is arguably the crown of the early modern sublime on the cusp of Milton: “Here, here, [. . .] trimmed in reeking blood / That triumphs over death [. . .]. / [. . .] Fate, or all the powers / That guide the motions of immortal souls, / Could not prevent me” (5.6.101-04). Northrop Frye (66-67, 93-94), Ernst Robert Curtius (398-99), and recently John Drakakis and Naomi Conn Liebler (6) have all drawn attention to a fundamental opposition between Aristotelian catharsis and Longinian exstasis, the one purging the emotions of pity and fear, the other producing them. While critics have tried to make English Renaissance tragedy conform to catharsis, I suggest that sublimity alone can explain the terrifying exaltation we experience at the end of King Lear. The same could be said of the rapturous exaltation featured in most Ovidian epyllia, including by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Chapman, and Michael Drayton. 11 In a third generic group of authorial sublimity are epics. Angus Fletcher once called Drayton’s Poly-Olbion “one of the most comprehensive and powerful of English sublime poems,” joining The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost (236n24). For Fletcher, The Faerie Queene is a “sublime poem” because it meets the following criteria: it “is extraordinarily spacious and grand in design; it is enigmatic; it challenges all our powers of imagination and speculation; it ‘proves, in a peremptory manner our moral independence’; it further is marked by ambivalence of attitude toward moral dichotomies” (269). Let us look at a single instance of the Spenserian sublime, one that represents rapture. At the close of Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, Spenser narrates the betrothal ceremony of the Redcrosse Knight and Una. The guests are listening to “sweete Musicke” in order “To drive away the dull Melancholy,” while “one sung a song of love and jollity.” Listening to this inset-epithalamium, the guests suddenly hear a second form of music: 11 On sublimity in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, in particular, see Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship, 71-75. <?page no="152"?> 152 Patrick Cheney During the which there was an heavenly noise Heard sownd through all the Pallace pleasantly, Like as it had bene many an Angels voice, Singing before th’eternall maiesty, In their trinall triplicities on hye; Yet wist no creature, whence that heauenly sweet Proceeded, yet eachone felt secretly Himselfe thereby refte of his sences meet, And rauished with rare impression in his sprite. (1.12.39) Instead of moralizing his song, Spenser lets his allegory lapse into fiction. The guests inside a “Pallace” hear a “noise” that sounds to the poet like the “voice” of angels but that the guests themselves cannot fathom, although “eachone” experiences an individuation that transports him to a state of ecstasy. Spenser may liken the heavenly noise to angelic music, but the guests do not know where “that heavenly sweet” came from. Instead, each “secretly” rests content. Whatever is happening to these “creature[s],” they enjoy what they cannot know. Reft of their senses meet, ravished with rare impression in their spright, they become unwitting humans experiencing a baffling godhead. 12 The guests’ experience constitutes a Spenserian version of what Kant means by the sublime. For Kant, the sublime is a mental state of dizzying consciousness, beyond the senses, characterized by terror and brought about when the mind comes up against the limits of human knowledge, a state that Kant uses (paradoxically) to prove the mind’s divinity. The Spenserian sublime shares with the Kantian sublime an emphasis on the failure of reason to grasp what lies beyond it, as well as a judgment about the divine nature of the experience, but also the yoking of sweetness and ravishment. 13 Yet the Spenserian sublime differs from the Kantian in three respects. First, rather than a rational process of horror proving the mind’s divinity, Spenser emphasizes a spiritual process of harmony exhibiting Protestant grace. Second, instead of a private experience by one Immanuel Kant, Spenser presents a public experience occurring in a “Pallace.” The secret, individualizing character of the public ritual is arguably its defining feature, with each “creature” feeling what happens to everyone collectively. Third, rather than describing a theory of knowledge, Spenser represents a theory of art. The transposition from a human wedding song to a divine song associated with angels makes the passage 12 Cf. Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable”: “one cannot represent the absolute, but one can demonstrate that the absolute exists” (68). 13 Kant’s words are “pain and pleasure”; hence, he speaks of “negative pleasure” (quoted Shaw 78). <?page no="153"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 153 self-consciously about “sweete Musicke” - about poetry. As editors note, Spenser’s epic alludes to two forms of poetry vital to his literary career, with origins in Scripture and Greco-Roman poetry: Epithalamion and Fowre Hymnes (Hamilton 154-55). Spenser may conceal the divine ordination of the “heavenly noise,” but in the background of the “Angels voice” is the authorial voice of Edmund Spenser. The self-allusions suggest a self-advertisement for England’s laureate, the sublime author of divinely sanctioned marriage poetry on behalf of the nation in the context of eternity. In contrast to Spenser, Shakespeare is a counter-laureate author of the sublime, because he uses his canon of poems and plays to respond to Spenser, concealing rather than revealing his authorship. According to Bloom, “Shakespeare’s sublimity is the richest and most varied in all literary history” (Sublime xv). Let us look briefly at A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Theseus compares “the poet” with the “lover” and “the lunatic” (5.1.7-8): The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing A local habitation and a name. 14 (5.1.12-17) Theseus is critical of the poet because he commits himself to falsehood, but, as readers report, Shakespeare is critical of Theseus, and the speech constitutes one of the most renowned fictions of poetry in English literature. “[T]here are two voices here” (Bloom, Invention 169): a character’s and the author’s. Longinus articulates the principle, for Shakespeare speaks through Theseus. If, as editors determine, the author revised the speech to include the part about “the poet” (Holland 257-65), we witness here a remarkable exposure of the rib of Shakespeare’s sublime authorship. Theseus is speaking to Hippolyta, and doubting the story that Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius have told about their experience in the forest. Whereas Hippolyta finds the story “strange,” Theseus finds it “More strange than true”: “I never may believe / These antic fables, nor these fairy toys,” since “such shaping fantasies [. . .] apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends” (5.1.1-6). As a politi- 14 Effectively, Shakespeare’s “poet” reverses the Kantian process, since he starts with the formless, the unbounded, and gives it “a local habitation and a name.” The Shakespearean author has agency. <?page no="154"?> 154 Patrick Cheney cal leader of the state, Theseus values “reason” as the arbiter of truth, but his bride expresses sympathy for “imagination” - and for poets, lunatics, and lovers: But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. (5.1.23-27) In “the story of the night,” Hippolyta sees more than “fancy’s images.” The evidence of “all their minds transfigur’d so together” witnesses an uncanny truth: four separate minds experience a single transfiguration, creating a “great constancy,” at once “strange and admirable.” Whereas Theseus sees the story as a figment of the lovers’ imaginations, Hippolyta believes that a collective imagination has singularly “apprehend[ed]” a mystical truth, which the audience alone sees. A Midsummer Night’s Dream moves to center stage an irrational idea that drives the Shakespearean canon: the poet’s sublime imagination can use an “antic fable” and “fairy toy” to transfigure our perception, change the world. As scholars suggest, Shakespeare presents Theseus alluding to The Faerie Queene, for “antic fables” and “fairy toys” become Spenser’s two primary mimetic terms for his epic (Bednarz 88). While Shakespeare lets Theseus poke fun at Spenser, A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings to the London theater the “fairy toys” of “antic fables” more sublimely than any work in English literature. In this romantic comedy, Shakespeare uses the register of the sublime to stage a fiction of authorship about the making of modern English poetry. *** By way of conclusion, I might suggest that we work in a post-revisionist phase of authorship. This phase reconciles “traditional” and “revisionist” methodologies: agency, influence, and form cohere and jostle with culture, intertextuality, and context. In this climate, what makes sixteenthcentury England unique is its new institution of authorship. This institution combines the new commercial theater with an emergent print technology, poems as well as plays. I call the new author working within this institution a literary poet-playwright, exhibited in the pioneering roles of Marlowe and Shakespeare, who both respond to the laureate career of Spenser, whom Gabriel Harvey claimed wrote not merely The Faerie Queene but also Nine Comedies (Smith 1: 115-16). In this new model, the <?page no="155"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 155 English author produces poems and plays out of the social energy of print and playhouse. Until recently, I never used the word “sublime,” despite writing a book called Spenser’s Famous Flight. The phrase “famous flight” derives from the October eclogue of the 1579 Shepheardes Calender, where Cuddie says that Colin Clout would “sing as soote as Swanne” if his love for Rosalinde did not ground him (88-90). Colin’s swanlike aspiration is the famous flight to sublimity. By the end of the sixteenth century, authors writing modern English discover both rapture and terror as defining features of their art, in ways I cannot find earlier in the century. They plot sublimity in “the interval between earth and heaven,” and they chart that interval through imitation and intertextuality, using heightened language to produce elevated emotion and great thought along the path to fame. Modern English literature, then, could not come into being until the gap between the classical sublime and the modern author had been bridged: until authorship and sublimity were wed, and the English author became sublime. If, as Bennett says, “critical interest in literature is driven by an uncertainty about the author, about what the author is” (127), then the sixteenth century solved the problem through the sublime, the Western principle of literary greatness. If, as Shaw suggests, the “Kantian legacy” lies in the “subject of the sublime [. . .] wanting what it cannot have [. . .] locked in melancholia, divorced for ever from the object of its desire” (151), then the quest for literary greatness could not be completed without baffling costs. When Colin Clout says in the June eclogue, “I play to please my selfe” (72), he might mean it. As Colin’s arresting comment intimates, the Longinian authorial sublime can be significant to authorship studies, because it helps revise some popular ideas: in Spenser studies, for instance, the most important idea about the national poet, that Spenser became disillusioned with his public poetry in the 1590s. Rather, I suggest, Spenser plays a powerful bridging role in a history of the sublime from Dante to Milton, because in a canon vowing to moralize song, the author betrays a profound entry into the Longinian model of ekstasis, illustrated in the secluded raptures of Colin Clout, from the dales of Kent to the heights of Mt Acidale; but also in the ghostly terror that the author discovers stalking Alcyon in Daphnaïda (Cheney, “Daphne”). Spenser does not become disillusioned with his public poetry but discovers that the center of public poetry may lie beyond “the generall end of all the book,” which was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (737). Written in the sublime style, the works of Spenser and his colleagues - above all Shakespeare but also Marlowe - alter the institution of English authorship forever. The result is a new standard of authorship, lo- <?page no="156"?> 156 Patrick Cheney cated not simply in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical or Christian goodness, but also in the eternizing greatness of the author’s literary work: free, heightened, ecstatic, outside the pale of unitary truth, in the interval. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern English authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a key catalyst in the formation of an English canon. <?page no="157"?> English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime 157 References Allen, Michael J. B. “The Soul as Rhapsode: Marsilio Ficino’s Interpretation of Plato’s Ion.” Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus. Ed. John W. O’Malley, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson. Leiden: Brill, 1993. 125-48. Ascham, Roger. The Scholmaster. London, 1570. Auerbach, Erich. “Sermo Humilis.” Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. 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Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2005. Sidney, Sir Philip. Astrophel and Stella. London, 1591. Smith, G. Gregory, ed. Elizabethan Critical Essays. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1904. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. Harlow: Pearson Education-Longman, 2001. Vickers, Brian, ed. English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Walker, Greg. Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Wall, Wendy. “Authorship and the Material Conditions of Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600. Ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 64-89. <?page no="160"?> 160 Patrick Cheney Weinberg, Bernard. “Translations and Commentaries of Longinus, ‘On the Sublime,’ to 1600: A Bibliography.” Modern Philology 47 (1950): 145-51. <?page no="161"?> Exchanging “words for mony”: The Parnassus Plays and Literary Remuneration John Blakeley Enquiries into the emergence of literary authorship in the sixteenth century often suggest that most contemporaries regarded reading and writing as ethically dubious activities, and that consequently literary endeavour was accompanied by uncertainty and anxiety. However, in a number of ways, the trilogy of university plays known as the Parnassus plays (1598-1601), which are the focus of this essay, provide striking contrary evidence. In order to pursue the argument, the argument is divided into two parts: in the first part some of the critical assumptions that have underpinned enquiries into authorship are considered, and in the second part the evidence the plays provide for the views of university graduates with literary aspirations is discussed. The article argues that as the trilogy progresses the plays’ initial valorisation of a literary vocation extends to a wider exploration of the writer’s place in society, in which ethical questions surrounding literary creation are increasingly superseded by material consideration. I If one book more than any other has contributed to critical perceptions of uncertainty surrounding literary endeavour, it is Richard Helgerson’s monograph of 1976, The Elizabethan Prodigals. 1 In it, Helgerson argues that those young men who wrote the pioneering literary fictions of the Elizabethan period came to identify themselves with the figure of the 1 I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and suggestions of Colin Burrow and Patrick Cheney in the preparation of this article. Responsibility for its shortcomings is mine alone. Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 161-174. <?page no="162"?> 162 John Blakeley prodigal son. Through studies of John Lyly, George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge, and Robert Greene, he demonstrates the deep psychic hold that the parable had. It is evident both in the way that it turns up again and again, in many different guises, in the fictions they wrote, but also in their repentant turns away from literature, as all five apparently come to repudiate their earlier amatory fictions. These incipient literary careers seemingly replicate the parable’s narrative arc, if one grants that the merciful resolution of the original is excised; as Helgerson demonstrates, it is that merciful resolution, which sixteenth-century versions conspicuously lack (Prodigals 2-3). Thus viewed, the sixteenthcentury writer is subject to an anxious, even abject, condition. Helgerson’s exposition of the writer as prodigal has proved compelling, and has gone on to influence many subsequent studies. The reason, I think, it has proved so persuasive - apart from the fact that the parable indubitably was one of the period’s most prevalent and potent narratives - is because it resonates strongly with our ideas about the uncertainties, even the dangers attendant upon, the emergence of authorship. Arguably, it is in this period that for the first time it becomes possible to earn a full-time living as a writer. But such a potentially immobile occupation was anomalous in a society with inflexible notions of place, of social hierarchy, of status and degree. Moreover, such was the capricious nature of patronage, and even of the newer forms of literary employment, provided by printing press and stage, that the writer could never be certain that the material returns would be sufficient to provide a living; dining on the husks, as it were, was an only-too likely outcome of literary endeavour. 2 Moreover, making your words public - as a full-time commercial writer necessarily would do - was attended by the risks of giving offence to the powerful, or of simply being seen to have demeaned oneself. Most crucially of all, the image of the prodigal conveys a potent sense of dereliction. To the young, the attractions of literature were obvious - the enticing romance, the amorous lyric - but was the reading, and writing, of such stuff really what a well-educated young man should be spending his time upon? Literary writers, according to Helgerson, suffered “an acute consciousness that they were not doing what they had been brought up to do” (Prodigals 23); he argues, rather, that they were expected to serve the state: 2 For a resonant example of how the material condition of the writer could convey itself to the minds of contemporaries, see the opening of Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Diuell (1592). <?page no="163"?> Exchanging “Words for Mony” 163 Elizabethan fathers expected more of their sons than virtue and wisdom. Those qualities, valuable as they were, hardly merited praise if kept in seclusion. They were rather to be used and tested in an active life of service to the state. This is what Sir Henry had in mind when he alludes to “that profession of life that you were born to live in” and prays that God will make Philip “a good servant to your prince and country.” (Prodigals 22-23) The idea has become something of a critical commonplace. For example, a rather more recent work - having acknowledged its debt to Helgerson - asserts that “Most educated young men in Elizabethan England were trained to expect and aspire to positions of responsibility within the growing state apparatus” (Alwes 16). The emergence of authorship is thus found to be not only tentative and uncertain, but also accidental and contingent. The creation of literature may be explained as a means of advertising the writer’s mastery of rhetoric, and hence of suitability for service. Lorna Hutson, for example, again engaging Helgerson, writes that “they, aspiring towards promotion and official recognition, felt it incumbent upon themselves to advertise their intellectual and discursive abilities by publishing such (juvenile) verses as they had written” (29); in what one might describe as a stumbling towards authorship, rather than a whole-hearted embrace of it, publication is seen as subordinately instrumental to the achievement of more important, non-literary ambitions. Similarly, in an influential essay, Louis Adrian Montrose claims that pastoral provided “a medium in which welleducated but humbly born young men could gracefully advertise themselves to the courtly establishment” (433). The broader, rather bleak, critical perspectives offered to us by New Historicism have, of course, chimed with, and reinforced such views. 3 However, this evident anxiety surrounding literary endeavour is at first sight difficult to reconcile with what has traditionally been seen as the “Golden Age” of English Literature. How can the literary efflorescence of the late-Elizabethan period be reconciled with the apparently unpromising ideological terrain it encountered? Helgerson himself, conscious of the paradox, explains the rationale of his following - and equally influentially - book, Self-Crowned Laureates, as an attempt to answer the question of how Spenser came to achieve a “fully developed poetic career,” in the light of the “uncertainty about the whole literary enterprise” (Laureates 17). Subsequently, for many critics the theorisation of literary careers and modelling of authorship has attempted to establish how individual writers or groups of writers were eventually able to 3 For a provocative account of the prevalently pessimistic world view of New Historicism, see Pechter. <?page no="164"?> 164 John Blakeley successfully evade or escape the strictures and disapproval of their betters. But let us pause momentarily. In response to Derek Alwes’s assertion quoted above one might ask whether those young men, of relatively humble origins, who managed to go to Oxford or Cambridge, via the “leg up” provided by their local grammar school - estimated to be as many as 60% of entrants in the earlyto mid-Elizabethan years (McConica 159-63) - really think that their education would provide an entrée to powerful and elite circles? Of course, the intimate environs of the university could in theory open doors; indeed, one might argue that a university education allowed an ambitious young man to establish familiar, quasi-patronal relationships with aristocratic students and their families. For example, it is reasonable to suppose that it was by such means that Marlowe came to the attention of the Walsingham family, and found subsequent employment at Rheims doing “her Majesty good service” (quoted by Riggs 180). But the university was a milieu characterised by clearly understood, clearly visible hierarchies, in which dress itself was one quite obvious indicator of social distinction. The college life of scholars and sizars, as opposed to that of the more privileged fellow commoners is vividly reconstructed by Riggs (62-71) in his biography of Marlowe; and his final point should be noted: In the real world of Elizabethan society, a poor scholar’s prospects of finding preferment at court were virtually nil. Lord Burghley, the Chancellor of Cambridge University, firmly believed that educational institutions should reinforce the existing social hierarchy. [. . .] Burghley recognized the need for a complement of poor scholars who could fulfil the degree requirements and fill vacancies in parish churches; but such men were expected to remain in the lower echelons of the university and the Church. (70) Part of the problem here - to return to Helgerson - is the evident weight he places upon Sir Henry Sidney’s famous paternal precepts; given the “great expectation” placed upon young Philip’s shoulders, we surely have something of a special case that ought not be generalised and found applicable to the situation of rather more humbly-connected young men. 4 Furthermore, the notion of a young man using his literary facilities as a means of fulfilling an aspiration to state service also implies a broader, uncomplicated historical process by which the Tudor State increasingly brings previously independent institutions under its control: 4 For the phrase see Astrophil and Stella 21.8. Duncan-Jones (xvii) notes the “half-explicit allusion” to Sidney in Dickens’ novel, though the echoes are, of course, quite possibly coincidental. <?page no="165"?> Exchanging “Words for Mony” 165 a totalising society exercising a centripetal force upon everything within its domain. 5 In considering the place of the university in early modern society, Jonathan Walker has recently reiterated such assumptions, while also, a little awkwardly, indicating the autonomous nature of the universities: Like other early modern institutions, the academy resided within the purview of the state and the church, whose ideological and economic interests it served by regularly producing suitably educated young men to fill governmental, diplomatic, and clerical posts, among other esteemed occupations. At the same time, however, academies like Oxford and Cambridge administered their day-to-day activities in large measure as independent institutions, often insulated from issues of Realpolitik. (4-5) Rather more promisingly, Warren Boutcher, in an article that makes brief reference to the Parnassus plays, considers the circumstances and writings of a few of the most influential pedagogues, and demonstrates that their varied attempts to advocate and implement a “reformed” curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge were far from being simply driven by the requirements of church and state; he shows that individuals, groups of students, and colleges were often responding to distinctly local conditions, both in addition to, or even instead of, the ostensibly state and church centred focus of Tudor humanist reform. In other words, antecedent connections were not necessarily superseded by connections formed at university. The focus and motivation of a particular student, or group of students at one college could differ quite radically from that of others, and it is with that in mind that I wish now to turn to the Parnassus plays. II The first point I will make is the obvious one that the Parnassus plays should be regarded as a better source for indicating how young men and their parents viewed literary endeavour than Sir Henry’s precepts. Written by, performed by, and performed in front of members of St. John’s College, Cambridge over the Christmas periods between 1598 and 1601, they come from the heart of the university milieu which nourished so many of the period’s most important writers. They have, moreover, obvious relevance to enquiries into the conditions of early modern author- 5 For discussion of New Historicism’s methodological propensity to assume a “unitary culture,” see Kastan 29-31. <?page no="166"?> 166 John Blakeley ship as, essentially, the subject matter of all three plays encompasses the literary aspirations and fortunes of university graduates. In the very last years, both of the sixteenth century and of the long reign of Elizabeth I, there is a sense of taking stock, of reflection upon the rightful place of writers in society. The Parnassus plays are also, I might add, very lively, and often amusing. And yet, in so much of the writing about literary careers in the period, they have been either ignored or mentioned merely in passing. If we know of them, it is usually because of the way they have been mined for references to Shakespeare or Jonson; the focus has been much more upon particular allusions than on the plays in their own right. The neglect of them is rather astonishing; a basic MLA bibliographic search “Parnassus Plays” yields eight items, only one of which was published in this century. After it, the most recent is Paula Glatzer’s excellent, though also rather neglected, monograph on the plays, which dates from 1977; the other entries go further back in time, with the oldest of the eight dating from 1929. 6 Suggestively, in the light of Helgerson’s notion of the writer as prodigal, the plays open with a scene that recognisably engages the tradition of the prodigal’s narrative. 7 A father, Consiliodorus, counsels his son and nephew, Philomusus and Studioso, on the perils of their forthcoming journey to Cambridge, or Parnassus, as it is termed in the plays. He makes the goal of their journey clear: Youe twoo are Pilgrims to Parnassus hill Where with sweet Nectar you youre vaines may fill, Wheare youe maye bath youre drye and withered quills And teache them write some sweeter poetrie That may heareafter liue a longer daye. (Pilgrimage 36-40) 8 Rather surprisingly, in the light of the dominant models of authorship already discussed, father and son, old and young, are agreed that their highest endeavour and achievement will be the creation of immortal literature, and that this is the justification for the expense of their education. Literary pursuit, then, is figured not as rebellion, but as obedience, and there is no evident anxiety, prevarication, or other reservation about the goal of authorship. 6 Search conducted at http: / / www.ebscohost.com, 16 June 2010. 7 The narrative, of course, provides a suitable theme for educational drama. For other examples, see Auberlen, 136-42. 8 This and all subsequent quotations from the plays are taken from Leishman’s edition. <?page no="167"?> Exchanging “Words for Mony” 167 Consiliodorus goes on to warn his young charges against possible diversions and distractions from their goal. In the ensuing play - which has aptly been described as a poetic psychomachia (Glatzer 29) - the presumed spatial journey from the family home to Parnassus is figured as a temporal journey through the curriculum. Along the way they are tempted from their course by more dilatory pilgrims, among whom we encounter Madido, who attempts to lure them to the tavern, and Amoretto, who encourages them to “sportfull dalliance” (439). However, in another challenge to convention, they never lose their sense of direction, and within some 700 lines they reach their destination, where they “heare the Muses tunefull harmonie” (714). In the Pilgrimage’s depiction of curricular progression, literary endeavour is not viewed as subordinately instrumental to the mastery of academic disciplines - logic, rhetoric and philosophy - disciplines with which our pilgrims are shown to be progressively grappling; rather literary creativity is the ultimate goal, and the academic disciplines merely the stages through which they have to pass in order to reach it. The difference between the short, allegorical Pilgrimage and the two lengthier, more complex, Return plays that follow it can be thought as a transition from ideal to real. These two plays are set in a contemporary social milieu. We encounter patrons and clients, a press corrector, the printer John Danter, and there is even an appearance by Shakespeare’s fellow-actors, Richard Burbage and William Kemp. It seems as though the author, or authors, of the play, having established the value of literature - and the university as its appropriate training ground - determined that the next stage was to address how in practical terms literature is to be pursued in the world outside of Cambridge/ Parnassus; the question now is what recognition and material support will be provided to its graduate litterateurs? 9 The opening of the first Return play echoes the opening of the Pilgrimage, except that old and young are now separated. Consiliodorus, having used up the resources derived from his small farm in supporting Philomusus and Studioso during their seven years of study - the period of time, of course, during which they should have acquired a BA and MA - speculates upon the returns from his investment, and worries that it has all been for nothing: 9 Criticism on the plays has focused on the question of who wrote them. While Leishman (26-34) and Glatzer (33, 169-79) both suppose - though for different reasons - that the distinct character of the individual plays suggests the involvement of more than one author, Lake’s stylistic analysis of them indicates that “it is highly probable that one man wrote all three Parnassus plays” (290). <?page no="168"?> 168 John Blakeley If they haue spent there oyle, there strength, there store In artes quicke subtleties and learninges lore, Then will god Cynthius (if a god he be) Keepe these his sonns from baser pouertie. But if they haue burnt out the suns faire torch In foolish riot and regardless plaie Then lett them liue in want perpetuallie: (1 Return 76-82) Clearly in his view, if they have applied themselves properly to the arts there is nothing to fear: “I knowe this well, artes seldome beg there breade” (85) is his concluding line. If they have worked hard and shunned temptation, then the material rewards will necessarily follow. However, Consiliodurus’s concluding line is immediately, and pointedly, followed by Studioso’s exclamation, as the scene switches to Parnassus, “Fie coosninge artes” (86); and his ensuing speech makes it clear that though they have applied themselves single-mindedly, no reward is as yet forthcoming. The scene establishes what is to be the motif of the two Return plays: the unwarranted hostility of the world beyond Parnassus to the scholar-poets. Philomusus and Studioso, to whom I will return shortly, in fact become rather more peripheral as the two Return plays progress; a number of other university graduates attempting to realise their literary ambitions beyond Parnassus are introduced. They include in 1 Return the bibulous balladeer, Luxurio, and in 2 Return the bombastic Furor Poeticus and his Latinising sidekick, Phantasma. Above all, increasingly taking centre stage there is Ingenioso, whose straightforward materialistic approach to literary creation is evident in his dealings with patrons and printers: he will write for whoever pays him. In the Pilgrimage he had a minor role as one of the tempter figures, denigrating the pilgrims’ Parnassian ideals. But now, in what is in itself a strong indication of their changed perspective, he becomes the presiding spirit of the two Return plays. The introduction of these additional characters allows a more searching exploration of the place of the scholar-poet in society, an issue which comes to be inextricably-linked to the means provided for his material support. The two major episodes involving Ingenioso in 1 Return both depict his unsuccessful search for patronage. In the first, the audience witnesses his attendance upon a “goutie patron” (215-16) to whom he has presented his latest work. The patron acknowledges Ingenioso’s lines to be “pritie” (318), and the scene culminates in his being paid two groats, as the patron tells him that “Homer had scarse soe much bestowed vpon him in all his life time” (322-23). Then, in a more substantial episode spread across three scenes, the relations he has with <?page no="169"?> Exchanging “Words for Mony” 169 Gullio, a foppish lover-courtier manqué, are detailed. Gullio commissions Ingenioso to write verses for his mistress in the styles of several different authors, but when his subsequent embassy to the mistress does not have the desired result, he is dismissed empty-handed. If there is a gull here, that gull is Ingenioso. His fortunes in this play appear designed to illustrate both the unworthiness and ignorance of potential patrons, and the grossly insufficient material returns to writers in a literary economy founded upon patronage. Similarly, in the same play, away from the specifically literary milieu, Philomusus and Studioso are equally unsuccessful in their attempts to secure a remunerative place for themselves. Their literary aspirations having been thwarted, they take up other forms of employment, one as a sexton and the other as a private tutor; however, they are both dismissed for effectively failing to demean themselves sufficiently towards their respective employers. The decadence of patronal forms of employment, both literary and non-literary, is further elaborated in 2 Return, through its central episode concerning the corrupt endowment of a church living upon the ill-educated Immerito over the deserving university man, Academico. The bestowal of the living lies within the power of the wealthy knight and magistrate, Sir Raderick, a man who “embodies the materialistic world both as a public figure and as a private personality” and who through his wealth “wields economic, political, social and even artistic control of the world of the play” (Glatzer 211). Sir Raderick’s hostility towards scholars and university education is manifested most clearly in a lengthy exchange on the subject (1153-235) with his legal and business associate, the Recorder, where the chief grounds of their hostility lies in the university’s capacity to endow “some stammell weauer or some butchers sonne” (1161) with gentlemanly status. 10 The conclusion of this exchange, perhaps darkly alluding to such events as the Bishops’ Ban of June 1599 and the ensuing clampdown on satiric writing (Leishman, note to 1228-29, p. 299), extends their personal animosity to that of the nation: Recorder [. . .] schollers are pryed into of late, and are found to be busye fellowes, disturbers of the peace, Ile say no more, gesse at my meaning, I smel a ratt. Sir Raderick [Well,] I hope at length England will be wise enough, I hope so, I faith, then an old knight may haue his wench in a corner without any Satyres or Epigrams. (1228-35) 10 Glatzer (211-12), reading the character in the light of analogues from city comedies, views Sir Raderick as an upstart; there is, in fact, no textual evidence to suggest that he is not of a long-established aristocratic family. <?page no="170"?> 170 John Blakeley In the face of this kind of hostility, it is perhaps not so surprising that the loyalties of the scholar-poets are to themselves as a group rather than to the nation or church. 11 This is notably illustrated by the fortunes of Philomusus and Studioso in the two Return plays. At the end of 1 Return, following their failure to find remunerative employment, they resolve to leave for the Continent, indicating that their destination will be “Rome or Rhems” (1560), strongholds of anti-Elizabethan, Catholic subversion. 12 However, by the start of 2 Return, they have returned, still having failed to prosper (393-98). And now they turn to criminality, using their acquisition of French to pose as a French doctor and his assistant in order to “gull the world, that hath in estimation forraine Phisitians” (429-30). Predictably, this venture also fails, as is apparent from their reappearance on the run from “perseuantes” seeking to imprison them in Newgate (1381-85). While our scholar-poets’ conceptions of their writerly identity is clearly a long way removed from any neo-Spenserian conception of literature in the service of nation and church, the university is fundamental to their self-definition. Indeed, for the lowly born scholar, the plays could be seen to establish what Eckhard Auberlen has suggested we think of as an alternative commonwealth, a “commonwealth of wit,” in which the poet’s learning overrides, or even dissolves, other forms of social distinction (27-33). One might also fruitfully apply to the Parnassian ideals of the plays’ scholar-poets the notion of Libertas, as expounded by Patrick Cheney. Writing about Marlowe’s literary career, Cheney identifies a turn away from Spenser’s patriotic and Virgilian model for a literary career, in favour of an Ovidian model that aligns itself with scholarly libertas in place of nation, and affirms instead the immortality of the individual writer’s verse (Counterfeit Profession 21-25). 13 11 Boutcher (140-41) identifies in the plays a “north by north-west” perspective, which can be accounted for by the strong connections that St. John’s had with Yorkshire and Lancashire. 12 In a recent article which touches on the plays, Edward Gieskes wrongly claims that “Ingeniosio, Philomusus, and Studioso, all impoverished scholars ‘goe to the press’ (1474) as a response to the failure of the traditional patronage economy to support them” (79), when in fact only Ingenioso does so; he thus completely misses the more sinister implications of their departure from England. 13 Cf. Pilgrimage 39-40, quoted above. More recently, Cheney has described the distinction thus: “Ovid’s poetry is counter-national in the sense that it writes not a collective form of nationhood, whether imperial or republican, but rather an individual form of nationhood foregrounding the authority of the poet” (Literary Authorship 154). The oftquoted tag, “vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena minister aqua,” from Ovid’s self-asserting elegy on immortality and his poetic vocation, Amores, I.15.35-36, is echoed closely by Philomusus upon his arrival at Parnassus: “Let vulgar <?page no="171"?> Exchanging “Words for Mony” 171 However, increasingly the scholar-poets’ inability to find place in, or material support from, the traditional patronal economy, muddies the waters. For Auberlen the distinction he argues that the plays maintain between university-educated litteratus and “hack” writer is crucial (145-56). The first play clearly insists upon ethical, aesthetic, and qualitative difference between the field of the discerning Latinate scholar-poet and that of the hacks and poetasters who live by the press and/ or write for the stage. However, as the trilogy progresses, we witness a partial collapsing of this dichotomy. The Pilgrimage’s incorporation of a short clown scene, derisively included simply because “a playe cannot be without a clowne” (664-65), possibly gestures towards Sidney’s famous neo-classical mockery of the practice (Apology 112). This, along with the Pilgrimage’s easy dismissal of Ingenioso’s pamphleteering (655-56), makes its position on popular forms of literature quite clear. By the time we get to the second Return play such distinctions are no longer sustainable; the refiguring and repositioning of Ingenioso from easily-dispatched tempter figure of the Pilgrimage to the central embodiment of the scholar-poet’s dilemma in the two Return plays is the clearest manifestation of this. The need the scholar-poet has to earn a living is accompanied by the realisation that the only worthwhile means of income are in fact those provided by press and stage. While, as we have seen, the patronal system fails to provide remotely adequate support for literary endeavour, the material returns from the seemingly more debased and popular forms of literature associated with the press and stage are rather more promising. When towards the end of 2 Return, Kemp and Burbage appear, their prosperous condition contrasts greatly with that of the impecunious Philomusus and Studioso, whom they seek to employ as actors; as they put it “for money, they come North and South to bring it to our playhouse” (1789-90). Similarly, while Ingenioso fails to secure any meaningful patronage for his work, he does appear to secure some kind of living through money earned writing for the printing houses (1 Return, 152-54; 200-02). Early in 2 Return, there is a scene depicting a negotiation between Ingenioso and Danter over his recently completed “Chronicle of Cambrige Cuckolds” (356). Danter offers “40 shillings and an odde pottle of wine,” an offer unequivocally rejected by Ingenioso. As Danter peruses the manuscript he exclaims it “will sell gallantly” and that he’ll “haue it whatsoeuer it cost” (362-63). They exit to further negotiation, and though we never find out the final agreed price, it does seem as though Ingenioso wittes admire the common songes, / Ile lie with Phoebus by the Muses springs” (713- 14). <?page no="172"?> 172 John Blakeley will receive a sum considerably in excess of the initial offer. Inevitably such negotiation - so emphatically conducted on the basis of what will sell rather than upon literary merit - involves compromise of literary ideals. After all, the cuckolds of Cambridge are probably not the most Parnassian subject matter imaginable. The Danter scene of 2 Return is immediately preceded by a scene in which Ingenioso appears in the company of a press corrector, Iudicio. Here, Ingenioso shows himself to be quite aware of the distinctions, typically made by university men, between good and bad writing. The two pass judgement on the work of fifteen of the best-known literary contemporaries, including Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare, all of whom are featured in the anthology, Bel-vedere (1600). At the end of the scene, the corrector Iudicio, pointing to the remaining writers’ names, simply dismisses them in a conventionally disdainful way: Iudicio As for these, they haue some of them beene the old hedgstakes of the presse, and some of them are at this instant the botts and glanders of the printing house. Fellowes that stand onely vpon tearmes to seure the tearme with their blotted papers; write as men go to stoole, for needes, and when they write, they write as a boare pisses, now and then drop a pamphlet. (2 Return 320-26) However, it is Ingenioso’s response that is most striking: “Durum telum necessitas. Good faith, they do as I do, exchange words for mony” (327- 28). 14 This sudden divergence of view is especially striking given the distinctions between good and bad writing that Ingenioso and Iudicio have shared about various writers in the preceding lines. There is, ultimately, in the Parnassus plays an inescapable materialism overriding qualitative judgements. In short, the plays enact what could be described as a materialist analysis of the conditions of literary production, which in the second and third plays shows that if the writer fails to realise the ideal articulated in the first play, it is not because of any personal inadequacy, or failure to heed the advice of an elder, but simply because the environment in which they find themselves prevents it. 14 “Durum telum necessitas,” a Latin saying, means “necessity is a hard weapon.” <?page no="173"?> Exchanging “Words for Mony” 173 References Alwes, Derek. Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Auberlen, Eckhard. The Commonwealth of Wit: The Writer’s Image and His Strategies of Self-Representation in Elizabethan Literature. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1984. Boutcher, Warren. “Pilgrimage to Parnassus: Local Intellectual Traditions, Humanist Education and the Cultural Geography of Sixteenth- Century England.” Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning. Ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 110-47. Cheney, Patrick. Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter- Nationhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. . Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Introduction.” Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. vii-xviii. Gieskes, Edward. “‘Honesty and Vulgar Praise’: The Poet’s War and the Literary Field.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 18 (2005): 75-103. Glatzer, Paula. The Complaint of the Poet: The Parnassus Plays, a Critical Study of the Trilogy Performed at St. John’s College, Cambridge 1598/ 9-1601/ 2, Authors Anonymous. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977. Helgerson, Richard. The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. . Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare after Theory. London: Routledge, 1999. Lake, D. J. “The Integrity of the ‘Parnassus’ Trilogy.” Notes & Queries 219 (1974): 286-90. Leishman, J. B., ed. The Three Parnassus Plays. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson Ltd, 1949. McConica, James. “Scholars and Commoners in Renaissance Oxford.” The University in Society. 2 vols. Ed. Lawrence Stone. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. I: 151-81. Montrose, Louis Adrian. “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Forms.” English Literary History 50 (1983): 415- 59. Pechter, Edward. “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama.” PMLA 102 (1987): 292-303. <?page no="174"?> 174 John Blakeley Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Sidney, Sir Philip. An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd; rev. R. W. Maslen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Walker, Jonathan. “Learning to Play.” Early Modern Academic Drama. Ed. Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2008. 1-18. <?page no="175"?> Fictions of Collaboration: Authors and Editors in the Sixteenth Century Colin Burrow This essay tracks the changing relationship between authors and editors (or print-shop “overseers” of literary texts), in the second half of the sixteenth century. Beginning with the publication of works by Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, it shows how editorial activity helped to fashion the ways in which authors were represented. A narrative is traced through successive editions of A Mirror for Magistrates to explain how the names of Thomas Sackville and Thomas Churchyard came to the fore of this collaborative volume, and why poets in the 1560s and ’70s sometimes artificially foregrounded the role of the “editor” to create fictions of collaboration. It is then argued that a sequence of publications in the very early 1590s altered the customary relationship between authors and “editor” figures, with the result that Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson felt able to absorb what I term “the editor function” into their own activities. The overall aim of the paper is to revise the traditional view that in the later sixteenth century “middleclass” laureate poets shook off the “stigma of print.” Rather, it is suggested, by the 1590s a degree of stigma had come to be attached to the figure of the press “overseer,” while poets tended silently to absorb the editor function into themselves. Once upon a time it was relatively easy to talk about the non-dramatic “author” in late sixteenth-century England. There were effectively only three of them, all boys. One was a courtier-poet, who composed his manuscript poems for private circulation among a few friends, and who was driven by the “stigma of print” to avoid publication (Saunders; cf. May, “Mythical ‘Stigma of Print,’” Krevans, and Wall, esp. 11-22). We might call him Philippo. After his death some disloyal friend or unscrupulous stationer plundered his remains and set his works forth on a bookseller’s stall for all and sundry to buy and enjoy. Behold: Sir Philip Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 175-198. <?page no="176"?> 176 Colin Burrow Sidney became, against his will, an “author.” At the other end of the social scale was a prodigal impecunious renegade (who might be called Roberto), who tried to live by the pen, sold pamphlets to a group of avaricious printers who in turn sold them to a popular readership. On the few pounds earned in this way Roberto lived the life of Riley in taverns and whorehouses. Finally his evil ways caught up with him. He succumbed to a surfeit of pickled herrings, whereupon he repented and died (Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals). His legacy was a mass of pamphlets which sported his name, and perhaps a few plays which did not, as well as a large pile of tavern bills. This was effectively the story of the “professional” writer as it was told in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte, which in 1592 narrated the career of the Johannes Fac-totum of the Elizabethan literary trade, Robert Greene. That narrative of a “professional” author’s life has retained much of its hold on the critical imagination (although see Wilson, Fictions of Authorship and Melnikoff and Gieskes). The third man in these stories about Elizabethan authorship was the “laureate poet” (call him Colino). He was low-born but determined to emulate Virgil and Horace, and strove through print to present his poems as works which had value for the commonwealth. The aspirational “laureates” - who included among their number Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson - shared social origins with the “professional” writers, but they sought recognition among the “amateurs” (Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates). They aspired to royal reward and patronage, but their careers ended in disappointment as their fictions inevitably failed to change the world. This cast-list of literary character-types substantially derives from work done in the 1970s and ’80s by the late Richard Helgerson. His literary map of England in the 1590s was explicitly influenced by structuralism (Self-Crowned Laureates 17-18). It was therefore on the whole synchronic, and it tended to be founded on mutually defining binary oppositions between the roles of laureate and professional, professional and amateur. The main aim of this essay is to revise Helgerson’s map of literary authorship in the late Elizabethan period in the light of more recent critical preoccupations with book history, and with diachronic narrative more generally. I shall suggest that each of these three types of author owed a great deal to the activity of a range of agents who would today be described as “editors,” people real or fictional who mediated between authors and stationers. Authorship in the sixteenth century, I shall suggest, was substantially defined by changing relationships between these figures and authors. My diachronic discussion of authorship in the second half of the sixteenth century will suggest that “coterie” poets, “professionals,” and “laureates” were in fact much less distinct in their origins than Helgerson’s map of early modern authorship allowed. <?page no="177"?> Authors and Editors 177 The story might begin with an early Tudor author who came to prominence in print despite the fact that he had no published oeuvre. On or about the 6 October 1542 Sir Thomas Wyatt died of a cold contracted while he was galloping to Dorset to meet a Spanish envoy. Shortly after this two printed volumes of elegies appeared. One was a set of Latin verses by the antiquarian John Leland, the Naeniae in mortem Thomae Viati equitis. The other was a small collection of vernacular poems printed under the title An Excellent Epitaffe of Syr Thomas wyatt, which included elegies by the Earl of Surrey. The date of this second volume is sometimes conjectured to be 1545 (Pollard and Redgrave 26054), but there are good grounds for assuming it appeared at around the same time as Leland’s Naeniae. The publisher of the Excellent Epitaffe, Robert Toye, was working with its printer, John Herford, by 1542, and Surrey’s elegy on Wyatt is referred to in Leland’s Latin verses. Both publications used a woodcut image of Wyatt, magnificently bearded, which was based on a lost portrait by Holbein. Leland’s Latin epigrams praised him as an equal of Dante and Petrarch, while Surrey presented him as a deep thinker and moralist. No English poet had been celebrated in print so soon after his death in such terms, and that in itself makes the autumn of 1542 a significant moment (Sessions). These two celebratory volumes were not simply representations of Wyatt’s achievements as an author, however. At his death he had only published his Translatyon of Plutarckes boke, of the quyete of mynde (1528), and his poetry remained in manuscript. Wyatt nonetheless was made into an “author” in 1542 because of several converging accidents. Leland was at the time of Wyatt’s death at work on his (endless and unfinished) catalogue of British authors. As canon-maker in chief for Protestant England he needed more recruits. He had been in service to Surrey’s grandfather, so was in a position to solicit an elegy for Wyatt, the new English author, from the house of Howard. He also was in close contact with the printer Reyner Wolfe, in whose house he resided for a period. That is, he was interested in English authors, knew a printer well, and knew who to ask for an elegy. Those connections were enough to make Wyatt in 1542 appear to be an “author.” No collection of Wyatt’s verse followed, however, despite the fact that a decade before 1542 the collected works of the most famous of all earlier English poets, Geoffrey Chaucer, had been published in a form which explicitly called them Workes (Gillespie 134-43). There was no market for volumes of short poems by the recently dead, and Wyatt lacked an editor or person who might prepare and convey his work to a print-shop. Leland succumbed to insanity in 1547; Surrey was executed in the same year. <?page no="178"?> 178 Colin Burrow A decade after those sad events, in April 1557, The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chauncellour of England, a huge volume of over 1,400 pages, was printed “At the costes and charges of Iohn Cawod, Iohn Waly, and Richarde Tottell.” This publication showed that by the mid-century printers (particularly printers associated with the legal profession, as Tottel was) had capital, and that printing large vernacular texts by a single author could be a source of profit. The other aspect of More’s Workes which had major historical consequences was equally humdrum: it was produced by collaboration between a group of printers including Richard Tottel, and an editor, More’s nephew William Rastell, who had direct connections both with More and with the printing press (Rastell’s own press from 1529-34 had produced a mixture of plays, legal texts, and editions of separate works by More: see Reed). Rastell boasts in his preface that he did diligently collect and gather together, as many of his workes, bokes, letters, and other writinges, printed and vnprinted in the English tonge, as I could come by, and the same (certain yeres in the euil world past, keping in my handes, very surely and safely) now lately haue caused to be imprinted. (More sig. ¶2r) His publication was clearly a polemical act, in which More’s name and works were presented to the nation in order to help (as Rastell’s dedication to Queen Mary put it) “in purging this youre realme of all wicked heresies” (More sig. ¶2v). Rastell’s role as editor sounds like an entirely marginal feature of the volume - indeed literally so, since he added a number of marginal comments to the text. But More’s Workes established what was to become a very influential model of authorship, in which texts from the relatively recent past were put together and arranged by an intermediary who prepared them for the press. Leland had not managed to do this for Wyatt, but Rastell did it for More. He also made More’s Workes suggest the outlines of a life: the volume pointedly ends with a collection of letters described by Rastell as having been written “while he was prisoner in the towre of London” (1428). In 1557 there was no clear terminology to describe the role Rastell fulfilled for More’s Workes, and divisions between functions we might today ascribe to publishers, scribes, editors, and authors were extremely blurry. To call him More’s “editor” is, strictly speaking, anachronistic: the OED does not record sense 2 (“One who prepares the literary work of another person, or number of persons for publication”) before the eighteenth century, although that sense was in fact clearly current by the mid-seventeenth century. Before that period, though, an “editor” was something very close to a pub- <?page no="179"?> Authors and Editors 179 lisher: the 1565 edition of Thomas Cooper’s Anglo-Latin Dictionary defines an “editor” as “a publisher, a setter forth” (sig. Rr5r). As the century progresses the terminology becomes a little clearer, and by 1590 the person who prepared or modified a text for the press was sometimes called an “overseer.” The earliest usage in this sense, which predates that given for OED †3, is in the 1590 edition of Sidney’s Arcadia, a work to which I shall return. “Overseer” is probably the best word to describe Rastell’s activity, partly because it could also be used in the period of a person who “oversaw” the work of the executors of a will ( OED 1†b). The editor/ overseer shapes and modifies a text, and creates a legacy. Little more than two months after the appearance of More’s Workes, in June 1557, one of the consortium of printers who had provided the significant investment for Rastell’s edition, Richard Tottel, produced another volume which looked back to the reign of Henry VIII. This was the book now known as Tottel’s Miscellany, or more properly and windily Songes and Sonettes written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other. The combination in that title of loose generic terms with a single authorial name had immense historical significance. The volume does not claim to be Surrey’s Works, and indeed omits his translation of Virgil, which must have been available to Tottel since he was to print it only a couple of weeks later. The title does not mention the fact that the miscellany also contains almost a hundred poems ascribed to Sir Thomas Wyatt, as well as (in its first edition) forty or so poems by Nicholas Grimald, and more than ninety by unidentified authors. Tottel’s Miscellany presents a model of lyric authorship as being, if not exactly collaborative, then at least combinatory, with a range of names and occasions tumbling together. And yet a single name, that of Surrey, the poet of the highest social status in the volume, presides over the whole. This decision by Tottel meant that Surrey was to become without doubt the single most significant figure in the history of English poetic authorship up to about 1570. Tottel’s Miscellany is often said to have presented in print for a mass audience the manuscript poems of a generation of writers who were too courtly, too nobly born, and too embedded in the circles and secrecies of the Henrician court to wish to print their poems. This wellestablished narrative depends on taking more or less entirely straight Tottel’s claim to have printed “those workes which the ungentle horders up of such tresure have heretofore envied thee” (Tottel 1). That phrase did more to establish the myth of the print-shy author Philippo than any other, but it is only as trustworthy as any other piece of printer’s puffery. According to the orthodox story, however, Tottel’s publication of poems by the courtiers Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey encouraged “middle class” authors to emulate the Miscellany by producing <?page no="180"?> 180 Colin Burrow collections of their own: Barnabe Googe’s Eglogs Epytaphes and Sonettes (1563), George Turbervile’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567), as well as George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) all emulated Tottel’s collection, and sought by doing so (so the story continues) to bring their authors’ names into print and prominence (Saunders, Heale 11-40). The story of Tottel’s influence on later poetic practice is more complex and more curious than this. Tottel’s Miscellany was edited by someone, although we do not know the identity of its editor/ overseer. Tottel himself almost certainly did not perform this role (Byrom). As a hardworking printer of legal texts it seems unlikely he could have spared the time to count and reform Wyatt’s syllables, as the editor evidently did. Tottel had an anonymous middle-man, possibly Nicholas Grimald, who mediated between manuscript texts and the printer, just as he had a few months before worked with William Rastell to produce the edition of More’s Workes. Tottel printed poems from the late Henrician period in 1557 because he had the resources to do so, because he had connections with a highly literate legal readership, and because his Workes of Thomas More suggested an intrinsic connection between reprinting works from an earlier age and the aims of the Marian counter-reformation. He also did it because he had a tame editor. The “editor” had a notorious effect on the ways in which Tottel’s texts - and, more significantly, authors - were presented to their readers. He or they gave the poems titles which turned authors into generic lovers (e.g. “The lover laments the death of his love”). In the second (and much reprinted) edition, Tottel’s editor, or the “overseer,” tended to arrange the poems in sequences that suggest the outlines of authorial life-stories, as well as, in the second edition, intimations of political unease (Tottel xxxix-liv). The Surrey section ends with his elegies on Wyatt, reflections on youth and age, and finally “The fansie of a weried lover,” with its declaration that “alas, those daies / In vayn were spent” (34). The Wyatt section concludes with his satires and the highly philosophical “Song of Jopas unfinished.” The sections devoted to each poet begin with more straightforwardly erotic pieces - poems on springtime love and meditations on “The long love, that in my thought I harber” (35). This simple arrangement of poems created not just a model of authorship, but the sense of an authorial oeuvre shaped in an arc of apparently increasing gravity. The poet who begins complaining of his mistress ends lamenting the slipperiness of courts or praising the happy life according to classical example. There are of course many precedents for lyric sequences which present something like a narrative of a repentant life, from Petrarch’s Canzoniere through dozens of retractations of youthful and erotic poems in classical and medieval collections of verse. <?page no="181"?> Authors and Editors 181 But ahead of Tottel’s editorial ordering lay dozens of vernacular imitations, which continued well into the next century: even Ben Jonson’s posthumously printed collection of lyric poems The Underwood followed Tottel in ending with a sequence of classical translations on the good life. The repentant self-presentation of “professional” writers described by Helgerson in The Elizabethan Prodigals also owes something to Tottel’s editor. The printing of Thomas More’s Workes and Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557 marked a Marian mini-renaissance. This mini-renaissance was founded on retrospect, and was driven by a desire to encourage readers and writers to follow afresh the example of poets from the 1530s. It was enabled by the only partially visible editors or overseers who revived and in part revised the texts from the previous generation. What these overseers did had a massive influence on later authorial practice. The way these editor-figures turned authorial lives at least in part into exemplary lives also had a more immediate bearing on the mid- Tudor literary scene. The second most popular collection of verse in the latter half of the sixteenth century was A Mirror for Magistrates (there were eleven printings of Tottel’s Miscellany before 1593 to six of the Mirror), which was in conception and execution roughly contemporary with Tottel’s retrospective volume of poems and with More’s Workes. A first edition was planned for 1554 but was suppressed. The first surviving edition is from the very early years of Elizabeth’s reign, 1559. The Mirror began life as an attempt to continue John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century collection of lives of fallen great ones, so it was itself something of an opus posthumus, historically arranged and explicitly didactic. The author as dead man takes on a new vitality, shall we say, in the Mirror, as figures from English history rise from the dead to instruct the living on how to avoid their fate. The surviving fragments of the 1554 edition (Pollard and Redgrave 3177.5) contain a suggestive address to the reader from the Catholic printer John Wayland, which presents a mid-sixteenth-century printer’s eye view of how books are written. While waiting for copy for a Catholic primer for which he had been granted a patent, Wayland started to produce an edition of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes along with a proposed continuation. He apologizes that “Yet it is not so throughly well corrected as I would have wyshed it, by meanes of lacke of certayne copies and authours which I could not get by any meane” (Baldwin 5). That is a striking sentence. This mid-sixteenth-century printer thought of an “author” in the same mental category as a copy-provider-cum-reviser. This is exactly the world of More’s Workes and Tottel’s Miscellany, in which the construction of a book requires effectively two different kinds of “author”: one a dead exemplum, the other a living overseer who corrects, orders, and perhaps augments the text. <?page no="182"?> 182 Colin Burrow When the first surviving edition of The Mirror appeared in 1559, a preface by its chief compiler William Baldwin offered further insights into this kind of “author.” Baldwin claimed that the printer gathered together a group of seven writers who could complete the task, of whom only Baldwin himself, George Ferrers, and Thomas Chaloner are identified by name. These writers agreed “that I [that is Baldwin] shoulde usurpe Bochas rowme [take Boccaccio’s place in the original De Casibus], and the wretched princes complayne unto me” (Baldwin 69). Baldwin’s prose links create the fiction that each author performs his tragic complaint before the group, members of which sometimes comment on moral meaning or style. This fiction is clearly based on medieval story-collections such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, but the reality was probably that Baldwin served as an overseer who collated tales from a number of authors, and edited them into a collection. Baldwin the editor is therefore an “author” in the sense in which the word was used by Wayland the printer: he wrote several of the individual complaints, but he was also a corrector and collator of materials. Baldwin’s background (like Rastell’s, and of course like Caxton’s before him) lay in print-shops. In 1549 his translation of The Canticles or Balades of Salomon appeared with his own emblem and motto in the colophon at the end of the book, declaring the book was “Imprinted at London by William Baldwin, servaunt to Edwarde Whitchurche.” Baldwin seems to have thought of himself as not just an author, but as an editor-printer-author similar to his near contemporary Protestant printer-author-editor Robert Crowley - famous as the first editor of Piers Plowman (King 319-406). The early editions of The Mirror for Magistrates therefore embody a distinctly mid-Tudor model of collaborative authorship: a print shop brings together the works of individual authors who have a roughly common brief, who attempt to make their work into a single “Mirror” for all “magistrates,” or officers in the commonwealth. Early editions of the work argue that political and moral authority should be distributed among several agents in the commonwealth, and in parallel to that political ideal the collection implies a model of what might be called distributed authorship. Each person has his office in the commonwealth; each author presents a slightly different perspective on a slightly different historical scenario. In this respect The Mirror for Magistrates builds on Tottel’s Miscellany to establish a central assumption of the mid-sixteenth century literary scene, and one which persisted until the final decade of the century: that major poetic works are generally retrospective, and are more likely to be the products of corporate activity than of single authors. <?page no="183"?> Authors and Editors 183 Since the Mirror remained in print throughout the sixteenth century it provides a particularly good means of observing changes in the ways authorship was represented through the later decades of the century. There are also good grounds for regarding it as the driver of at least some of those changes. The “second part,” which appeared in 1563, marks a significant departure. This volume has often been regarded as something of a botch up (e.g. Lucas 202), as Baldwin, shortly before his death, put together a set of complaints which he had “procured and prepared” (243) earlier in the project. The second part is much more explicit than its predecessor about who wrote individual tragedies. Baldwin records that the printer “delyvered unto me” the tragedy of Hastings “penned by maister Dolman, & kyng Rychard the third compiled by Francis Segars,” while the tragedy of the Blacksmith is ascribed to one “Cavyl” (244). The 1563 version develops the collaborative model of the earlier versions. An authorial group under the control of the print-shop co-ordinator author Baldwin becomes something more like a chorus within which individual voices can be heard and within which distinctive authorial styles can be assessed and appreciated: “diuersity of deuice is alway most plesante” (243). The most significant novelty in the 1563 edition of the Mirror was of course the inclusion of Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” to his tragedy of the Duke of Buckingham. “Sackville’s Induction” (as it came to be known) was designed as a general prologue to an alternative collection of poems on the falls of great men, in which the ghosts of the dead would address Sackville rather than Baldwin. We do not know why or when this alternative Mirror was begun or why it was never completed. It may derive from attempts around 1557 to make a new start after the suppression of the original edition of 1554 (Lucas 244-47). “Sackville’s Induction,” though, along with the tragedy of Buckingham, became one of the most influential poems in the sixteenth century. This was partly because of the way in which Sackville carefully constructed his poetic persona as the clear and unmistakeable heir of the Earl of Surrey. The Induction’s narrator is introduced lamenting the loss of “lively green” as the year fades to winter, in a direct recall of the opening poem by Surrey in Tottel’s Miscellany, “The sunne hath twise brought furth his tender grene” (2). He then encounters “A piteous wight, whom woe had al forwaste” (l. 74) in a way that recalls the Chaucerian narrator of The Boke of the Duchess. This figure, who turns out to be Sorrow herself, takes him to hell to see the souls of the fallen, as Virgil’s Aeneas had done in Book VI of the Aeneid. Sackville’s fusion of Chaucerian language and elegiac setting with the most influential classical description of the underworld was a major statement: it suggested that the English tradition of complaint also had epic overtones and potential. Combined with his archais- <?page no="184"?> 184 Colin Burrow ing vocabulary, his “wights” and his “weens,” Sackville provided the central enabling conditions for Edmund Spenser to produce his simultaneously classicizing and Chaucerian Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene. The tale of Buckingham itself takes Sackville’s authorial project a step further. He adapts the wounded and solitary lyric voice to suit a political tragedy. In his final expression of rage at his betrayal by one of his servants Buckingham all but ventriloquizes Surrey at his most relentlessly lonely: Mydnyght was cum, and every vitall thyng With swete sound slepe theyr weary lyms did rest, The beastes were still, the lytle byrdes that syng, Nowe sweetely slept besides theyr mothers brest: The olde and all were shrowded in theyr nest. The waters calme, the cruel seas did ceas, The wuds, the fyeldes, & all thinges held theyr peece. (ll. 547-53) This is a direct - and for most readers in the 1560s a completely unmistakeable - allusion to Surrey’s sonnet which was called “A complaint by night of the louer not beloued” in Tottel’s Miscellany: Alas so all things now do hold their peace. Heaven and earth disturbed in nothing: The beasts, the ayre, the birdes their song do cease: The nightes chare the starres aboute dothe bring: Calme is the Sea, the waves worke lesse and lesse: So am not I, whom love alas doth wring. (Tottel 9) There is a complex chain of allusions here. Surrey himself was imitating the description of Queen Dido’s solitary passion in Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid via Petrarch’s imitation of that passage in Canzoniere 164. Sackville then reworks Surrey’s erotic solitude into a political solitude, smoothing his language and meter in a manner that goes even beyond the activities of Tottel’s editor. A solitary aristocratic author becomes not just an exemplum of Petrarchan frustration, but a figure of political despair. Most people would say that Sackville is “imitating” rather than “editing” Surrey here, of course, but nonetheless Sackville clearly thought of himself as both a Surrey-style and a Baldwin-style “author.” The fact that he wrote an “Induction” at all suggests that he aimed to usurp not only Boccaccio’s room, but Baldwin’s as well. He seems, that is, to be fusing together the Surrey persona of isolated elegist with the role of editorcum-overseer. <?page no="185"?> Authors and Editors 185 In later editions of the Mirror Sackville’s authorial voice came increasingly to the fore. This was largely the result of decisions taken by the printer Thomas Marsh rather than Sackville himself. The 1571 reprint (eight years after the death of the author-editor Baldwin) gave the “Induction” the title which has stuck to it: “Maister Sackuils Induction.” That title appears on the running-titles of the induction, making Sackville the only author in the Mirror to have his name elevated in this way. It is tempting to see this as a tribute to Sackville’s distinctive authorial presence, to his hijacking of Surrey’s poetic voice, or perhaps to the appearance in print of his name as one of the authors of Gorboduc in 1565. The presence of Sackville’s name in the running-titles is actually more likely to be the result of a series of decisions by the printer. The 1563 Mirror tended to begin new tragedies on rectos. This often left a blank verso facing the new tragedy, which, being blank, had no running-title. As a result the facing recto on which a new tragedy began would often display the partial running-title “For Magistrates.” This was ugly and asymmetrical: in short, a printer’s nightmare. In the 1571 edition Marsh tidied this up by using the name of each complainant as a running-title (so a verso might have “Thomas Mowbray” as its running title while the facing recto would have the honorific “Duke of Northfolke”). This new style in turn created a practical problem when it came to setting the “Induction.” For the purposes of symmetry the printer decided it should have running-titles that included a name. Whose name should that be but that of the author? There is no doubt that Sackville was the most influential poet from the mid-sixteenth century. But curiously enough it was his editorial aspirations - to be an “author” in Wayland’s or Baldwin’s sense, the overseer of the volume, author of an Induction - that meant he came to be singled out as the most visibly prominent author in editions of the Mirror after 1571. It was not only Sackville’s name that was foregrounded in 1571. The printer also supplied names or initials at the end of several tragedies in order to identify their authors. This brought another name to particular prominence: that of Thomas Churchyard. Although Churchyard was to become extremely keen to get his name onto title-pages (Churchyardes Chippes [1578], Churchyards Challenge [1593], and so on), his emergence as a central author of the Mirror was again more or less a printer’s device. From 1571 onwards his complaint of “Shore’s Wife” was printed as the final monologue in the volume, partly because Shore’s wife explicitly describes herself in the final stanza of the complaint as a “mirror,” and so makes a good ending for the whole. As a result, the words “Tho. Churcheyarde” were proudly emblazoned across the final page of later editions below the word “Finis,” almost as though Churchyard were signing the whole work. An Elizabethan annotator of Malone’s copy of <?page no="186"?> 186 Colin Burrow the 1575 edition (Bodleian Library, Mal. 270 (3) sig. Xiiiiv) scribbled enthusiastic verses next to Churchyard’s name at this point: “Of all the works that Churchyard yet hath pend / Which none may mend, this story I commend.” The annotator was clearly not a great lost Tudor poet, but his interest in Churchyard’s name is historically significant. By the early to mid-1570s readers and printers alike were determined to find individual authors within collaborative fictions. Churchyard seems to have taken some flak for the prominence of his name in the Mirror. Was he the “author” or just a collaborator? He had a simple response, which was to threaten to fight anyone who denied that he wrote “Shore’s Wife” unaided. Introducing a revised version of “Shore’s Wife” in Churchyards Challenge (1593) he declared that some doubting the shallownesse of my heade (or of meere mallice disdaineth my doeings) denies mee the fathering of such a worke, that hath won so much credit, but as sure as god liues, they that so defames me or doth disable me in this cause, doth me such an open wrong as I would be glad to right with the best blood in my body, so he be mine equall that moued such a quarrell, but mine old yeares doth vtterly forbid me such a combat, and to contend with the malicious I think it a madnesse, yet I protest before God and the world the penning of Shores wife was mine, desiring in my hart that all the plagues in the worlde maie possesse me, if anie holpe me either with scrowle or councell, to the publishing of the inuencioun of the same Shores wife. (Churchyard sig. K8v) It is all too easy to see this passage as representing the rise of a new class of “professional” author, perhaps, or a burgeoning awareness of literary property. We should, however, pause before doing so. The issue in this passage is less literary proprietorship than honour. Churchyard offers to fight those who have dishonoured him by claiming he has lied about what he has authored. In the same volume Churchyard prints a list of all his works, or “The bookes that I can call to memorie alreadie Printed,” along with a record of “An infinite number of other Songes and Sonets, given where they cannot be recovered, nor purchase any favour when they are craved” (sigs. A4v-*2v). Churchyard is thus at once the named author and the nonchalant heir to the Earl of Surrey, who spills songs and sonnets recklessly from his pen. He is also keen to transpose the notorious honour-consciousness of Surrey, his former master, into his conception of authorship. The self-canonizing of a print author is cloaked in an aristocratic gown of honour, rather as the fictional page of the Earl of Surrey, Jack Wilton, disguises himself in his master’s clothes in Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (Nashe 2: 267). Churchyard was <?page no="187"?> Authors and Editors 187 clearly made anxious by his earlier appearance in a collaborative volume. It prompts him to edit, augment and defend his own works. It was not Sackville or the Mirror alone that brought about these shifts of emphasis. The period between 1563 and 1575 was an absolutely crucial one in the history of Tudor authorship. In this period the dominant fashion was for what might be called single-authored fictions of collaboration. Publishers and individual authors recognized the enormous influence of the Marian collaborations, Tottel’s Miscellany and The Mirror for Magistrates, but they also knew that readers increasingly wanted works that could be ascribed to a single author, whose writings would have characteristics which they recognized and admired. The problem was how to reconcile the single-author model of authorship with the collaborative. Through the 1570s this particular squaring of the circle was done by foregrounding in various ways what might be called the “editor function” - the Baldwin role, the overseer, the person who puts a body of works together - and at the same time foregrounding authorial names. Collections of verse by a single author printed in the 1560s and ’70s often mention the authors’ friends in the prefatory material. Barnabe Googe claims he was urged by his friends “dayly & hourely” (sig. a5r) to publish, and that “A verye frende of myne, bearynge as it semed better wyll to my doynges than respectyng the hazarde of my name, commytted them all togyther vnpolyshed to the handes of the Prynter” (sig. a6r). The modest author who leaves the country while his “friend” decides to nip down to the nearest print-shop and have his poems printed is one of the clichés of the age, which is of course duly echoed and elaborated by George Gascoigne in his fictionally collaborative volume of Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, with its “Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen,” and its “familiar friend Master G.T.,” the procurer of the manuscript of The Adventures of Master F.J. (Gascoigne 141). Traditionally these “friends” have been regarded as a strategy to avoid the “stigma of print” by suggesting that the author is innocent of a vulgar desire to publish (Saunders 145). Rather these “friends,” real or imagined, are a fiction of collaboration. And that fiction does two not entirely compatible kinds of work. The primary aim is simply to establish a community of value. It enables the author to say that his friends thought his poems good enough to print. The second function of the author’s fictional light-fingered friends is to suggest that the author’s work and the “editor function” are separate. Someone else is copying and overseeing the text; that means not only that the work is good, but that the author is, as it were, more of a Sackville or a Churchyard than a Baldwin, more a maker than a copyist or overseer. The phenomenon also perhaps carries a residuum of a Baldwin-style commonwealth model of authorship: a volume which appeared to represent the output of many men <?page no="188"?> 188 Colin Burrow might be regarded as more “authoritative” in 1573 than one which was produced by a single person. It implied that a lyric voice existed not in splendid isolation, but as part of a more or less fictional frame of group activity - a voice, as it were, in a choir of more or less identifiable individuals. By the last quarter of the century the light-fingered “friend” as editor becomes more of a heavy-weight. He became a glossator, and indeed something of a bore. Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia of 1582, which claims in its dedication that “many haue oftentimes and earnestly called vpon mee, to put it to the presse” (sig. A3r), has an editor-figure, who annotates and explains each poem. This learned figure draws attention to the author’s imitations of Serafino or Petrarch or Sophocles, and also explains the occasions which gave rise to many of the poems. Most of these notes refer not to the author as a generic type of the lover (as Tottel’s editorial titles had done, and as Googe’s pseudo-editorial titles also did), but to “the Author.” That is indeed the main function of Watson’s “editor” figure: he exists to foreground “the Author.” Watson (who adopted this fictional editor/ author hybrid in his autograph manuscript of the poems, British Library Harley MS 3277, as well as in print; see Watson, Complete Works 140-41) may well have got the idea from annotated editions of Petrarch which he could have seen during his Italian travels in the early 1570s. He may even have known the 1576 edition of Dante’s Vita Nuova, in which of course Dante combines the roles of auctor and glossator. But wherever he learned his tricks the result is a perfect fiction of collaboration, visible on nearly every page: the Sackville/ Surrey style lovelorn voice of “the Author” is framed by a busy analytical friend, and the activities of “the Author” as scholar and lover are highlighted by the collaborative labours of the annotator. This use of the editor figure to highlight the author brings us back to my initial cast-list of characters, and in particular to Colino, the wouldbe laureate pastoral poet. The Shepheardes Calender of 1579, billed as the work of the humble “Immerito,” is often seen as the work of a new poet, who uses the mechanics of print to advance his own status (e.g. North 99-104). Edmund Spenser’s (and Colin Clout’s) first appearance in print coincided with the high-water mark of fictions of collaboration. The Shepheardes Calender is deeply rooted in the hybrid models of authorship established by later editions of the Mirror, which combined the individualized voices of Sackville and Churchyard with a framing fiction of collaborative and editorial activity. The Calender’s text is surrounded by the commentary of the anxiously pedantic editor E. K. Its language, full of Chaucerisms, Surreyisms and Sackvillisms, deliberately positions the work in the stylistically and historically nostalgic milieu of the Mirror. Its representation of the poet is rooted in the conventions that had <?page no="189"?> Authors and Editors 189 grown up through the printed volumes of verse in the 1560s and ’70s, too. Colin Clout is an elegiac figure, whose work is repeatedly remembered and retrieved from the past by a community of friends and acquaintances who also repeatedly praise his poetic achievements. Colin even, of course, in “November” laments the death of Dido - which is a piquant detail in view of Sackville’s reworking of Surrey’s imitation of Dido’s solitary vigil in the Mirror. Colin Clout, absent and mourning loss, is set within a larger community of shepherds, friends and memorializers. His “editor” presents him to us as something special. The “author” in the late 1570s and early ’80s seems to need an editor and a set of framing social fictions. This leads on to a major question. What happened to these conventions at the end of the century? How did they influence the dominant models of poetic authorship in the 1590s and beyond? Richard C. Newton suggested that when Ben Jonson compiled his verse collection The Forest, which appeared in the 1616 volume of his Workes, he was doing something new. In that collection, Newton argued, the poet became an editor, who arranged and revised his verse to form a book (“[Re-]Invention of the Book”; “Poets Become Editors”). This claim is both significant and in need of significant modification. Viewed from the wider sixteenth-century perspective Jonson is actually not unusual in performing the “editor” function and gathering his poems into a volume. What would have made the collections of verse which appeared in the 1616 Folio look odd, however, was the absence of fictions of collaboration. Jonson does not invent an editor or a set of fictional friends in order to foreground the agency of the author in creating his volumes of verse. He does the editorial work himself - and does not say that he is doing so. That indicates a big change in ways of representing poetic authorship between about 1580 and 1616. Fictions of collaboration fall out of favour in the late century. Why did this happen? It is tempting simply to line up the usual suspects and shine inquisitorial lights into their eyes until they provide the answers. Through the 1580s John Lyly, and in a rather different way Martin Marprelate, had established that an instantly identifiable style could be associated with a particular name in print. Writers we anachronistically call “professional,” such as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, were quick to learn from them that associating an authorial name to a strongly individualized style was the best way to stand out on the crowded bookstalls at St Paul’s. As a result by the early 1590s authorial names were much more regularly displayed on the title-pages of literary works than they had been fifty years before. Authors and printers in the late 1580s and early 1590s definitely had a more secure sense of a market and a receptive critical environment for their works than their <?page no="190"?> 190 Colin Burrow equivalents in the 1570s. As a result, perhaps, they had less need to create fictive communities, groups of shepherds, unnamed friends, or enthusiastic editors as support systems for their labours. Large-scale narratives about the rise of middle-class authorship or the birth of the professional author might also be woken from their slumbers and pumped for an explanation. But even the most zealous literary critical Gauleiter is unlikely to be able to persuade these tired old phonies to reveal the whole story. As we shall see, a number of very specific knotty episodes in the printing of literary works in the very early 1590s put particular pressure on the role of editors and overseers. That pressure had a major influence on the practice of authors who lived through the 1590s. Indeed I shall suggest that what we see in the 1590s is less the birth of the author, or the emergence of the laureate poet, than the absorption of many of the editor functions into that of the author. This happened not as a simple consequence of large-scale historical changes, but partly because of a sequence of accidents from which quite a narrow group of poets learnt very rapidly that it could be in their interests to collapse together author and editor-functions. One benign impulse towards combining editor and author functions came from Sir John Harington’s translation of Orlando furioso of 1591. This exceptionally lavish folio had a portrait of Harington himself, not to mention his dog Bungay, on the title-page. Harington was translating “il divino Ariosto,” the classic whose works were regularly ornamented with portraits of the author, and whose texts were given extensive commentary (Javitch). This meant that Harington the translator could do the full works on his own authorial image. He could exploit for himself while he was still alive the continental fashion for making a cult of recently dead authors. Because Harington was translating not just Ariosto but also a whole range of Italian commentators, he could represent himself as not just an author but as a reader and editor too, whose omnivorous, garrulous, and voluble “I” is everywhere present in the margins and notes to the text. “I have in the marginall notes quoted the apt similitudes and pithie sentences or adages with the best descriptions and the excellent imitations and the places and authors from whence they are taken” (Ariosto 16). Harington refers to himself as “I,” not “the author,” and he does so throughout the commentary. He represents himself as behind every aspect of the book: notes, illustrations, glosses. Although Harington had a well-documented host of professional scribes on whose services he could draw, he presents himself as the author, editor, compiler, literary theorist and all. Another high-end production from the very early 1590s certainly encouraged authors to stand on their own without relying on friends fictional or real: Spenser’s Faerie Queene of 1590. This volume, published by <?page no="191"?> Authors and Editors 191 the stationer William Ponsonby, set a new chaste style in authorship: it has a title-page, then (in most copies) a short dedication to the Queen signed by the author, and then the poem. There are no friends, no editors, no overseers of the press, no fanfare of collaborative activity. The poet just stands forth. The “preliminary” poems, commendations from friends and commendations of patrons were, curiously, printed at the back of the book. This resulted in a strikingly solitary presentation of the author. The relegation of the preliminaries to the rear of the 1590 Faerie Queene was odd enough for Spenser’s contemporaries to have noticed it, and for Thomas Nashe to have mocked it in Pierce Penniless (Nashe 1: 150, 240-41; Zurcher). It is impossible to be certain why the book was arranged this way. It could have been a manifestation of Spenser’s laureate ambition, but the most likely explanation is some kind of accident, which delayed the arrival of the dedicatory and commendatory sonnets, or some problem in printing the dedication to the Queen (various opinions are expressed by Loewenstein, Brink, and Zurcher). The final effect - willed or accidental - is to suggest that an author who dedicates a work to the Queen needs no “friends,” no overseers, no editor. He simply enters with “Lo I the man.” While “the author” grew, by accident or design, in visible independence in the early 1590s, the figure of the “overseer” or editor was taking a pounding. The publication of Greenes Groats-worth of Witte in 1592 played a crucial part in inventing Roberto, the professional writer, whose career as a repentant scallywag was finally displayed to the world (so it seemed) in his own authorial voice. Greenes Groats-worth of Witte stemmed, of course, from a particularly zealous act of “editing.” There is still argument as to whether Henry Chettle wrote the pamphlet under the name of Robert Greene or compiled it from a ragbag of Greene-ish leavings (see Chettle and Greene; Jowett). But Chettle’s defence against the charge that he or Thomas Nashe actually wrote the work is worth quoting as a sign of the times: I had onely in the copy this share, it was il written, as sometimes Greenes hand was none of the best, licensd it must be, ere it could bee printed which could never be if it might not be read. To be breife I writ it over, and as neare as I could, followed the copy, onely in that letter I put something out, but in the whole booke not a worde in, for I protest it was all Greenes, not mine nor Maister Nashes, as some unjustly have affirmed. (Chettle sig. A4r) Given the mass of material which Chettle appears to have written (according to Henslowe’s diary he had a hand in nearly fifty plays) he is astonishingly invisible as an author. That is because he was among other <?page no="192"?> 192 Colin Burrow things the clearest late Elizabethan example of the Wayland conception of an “author” - an augmenter, a corrector, a conveyor of texts, a print over-seer, who worked closely with the printer John Danter for much of his career (see Jenkins). Chettle only is prepared to reveal his invisible function as “editor” in the preface to Kind-Harts Dreame because of allegations that he had abused identifiable and nameable authors in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte. His defence is to deny authorship and to hide behind the role of scribe, or humble overseer of Greene’s literary testament. The publication and subsequent arguments about the Groats-worth had a big effect, and not just in extending the posthumous reputation of Robert Greene. The argument about Chettle’s part in the publication contributed to a wider tendency in the mid-1590s not to treat authorship as the guilty secret to which stigma attaches but editorship, overseeing, presenting texts to printers. Being a Wayland-style “author” is not something to which people tend to confess after 1590 unless, like Chettle, they were accused of theft, libel, or a similar offence against the literary person, and wanted to deny responsibility. The Groats-worth sent a strong signal to overseers or editors to keep themselves invisible. The posthumous publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s works in the early 1590s is often rightly said to have provided a model of authorship which others could emulate, a model which was at once aristocratic and uneasy about print (Wall 13). The publication of Sidney’s works also did serious and serial damage to the role of overseers and editors. The 1590 edition of the Arcadia implicitly criticizes the “overseer of the press” for having inserted chapter breaks (Sidney, 1590 Arcadia sig. A4v). The 1593 edition mentions the “spottes” on the “disfigured face” of the earlier text, which the Countess of Pembroke herself had undertaken to wipe away (Sidney, 1593 Arcadia sig. ¶4r). Even more significant though, was the pirated edition of Astrophil and Stella of 1591. This did more to establish the mythology of the print-shy courtier-poet than any other volume since Tottel. But it also had a massive negative effect on fictions of collaboration. Thomas Nashe - who was in a way the visible named double of the invisible unnamed Chettle, working, like Chettle, closely with print-shops, but unlike Chettle establishing his own name as he did so - wrote a preface for this unauthorized volume. The identity of the person who obtained the manuscript is unknown, as is that of the person who prepared it for the press. Steven May has plausibly suggested that Abraham Fraunce may have played a part in obtaining or preparing the manuscript, while Henry Woudhuysen accuses Samuel Daniel of having at least some involvement in the publication (Woudhuysen 371-84; May, “Fraunce”; and Wilson, “Astrophil and Stella”). Twenty-eight of Daniel’s sonnets appeared as part of the collection of “Poems and Sonets of <?page no="193"?> Authors and Editors 193 Sundrie other Noble men and Gentlemen” (a title that by 1590 would have sounded decidedly old-fashioned) printed at the end of the first Quarto of Astrophil and Stella, and Daniel’s name is the only one provided in that section of the volume. Even if Daniel was not directly involved as overseer or editor, the suppression of the 1591 Astrophil would have had a dramatic effect on him, and, in turn, on his attitudes to both editorship and authorship. The next year he dedicated the “corrected” text of Delia to the Countess of Pembroke in what may have been an act of reparation for his earlier work as a “friend” of Sidney who conveyed a manuscript to the press. Daniel protests his reluctance to publish “seeing I was betraide by the indiscretion of a greedie Printer, and had some of my secrets bewraied to the world, vncorrected: doubting the like of the rest, I am forced to publish that which I neuer meant” (Delia sig. A2r). This is, like Churchyard’s declaration of ownership over his “Shore’s Wife,” a historically layered utterance. The more or less token claim that Daniel wished to keep his poems private is a throwback to the prefatory manoeuvres of the 1570s and ’80s in which poems are secrets betrayed into print. More “modern,” though, and perhaps more revealing about how Daniel actually conceives of poetic labour, is that arresting fear of corruption, of wanting to present a text that is “corrected.” Daniel wishes to be thought of as a Philippo, a man who jealously keeps his sonnets among his private friends; but he is also an author in a slightly new version of Wayland’s sense of the word, a person concerned to correct texts: his own texts in particular. In 1601 that same Samuel Daniel published a volume containing poems and plays which he called his Works. This was a big event. Before Daniel the only living author to have used that title for a collection of poems was John Heywood in 1565, whose title (given that he was an heir to More and friend to William Rastell) was probably more of a tribute to More’s Workes than a sign of his own authorial ambition. Daniel’s volume presents the author as unmediated by overseers or editors or even friends. It represents the author in this way because Daniel had learnt all the lessons of those high-profile publications from the early ’90 that I have suggested influenced attitudes to the relationship between authors and editors. He clearly took the absence of allusions to friends or editorial mediators from the front of Spenser’s Faerie Queene as a mark of authorial strength. He follows Spenser in plunging straight in to a dedication to the Queen. He also, though, has absorbed the editor function into himself. The only sign Daniel’s Works give of the author’s own editorial activity are the chaste words “Newly augmented” on the title-page. The bibliographical nightmare of the Works volume and of Daniel’s oeuvre more widely is a testament to the <?page no="194"?> 194 Colin Burrow massive activity of Daniel the editor, who obsessively supplemented, augmented, reshaped his works (Pitcher). But although Daniel performed this labour, he rarely refers to it: the author, and especially the author of his own Works, appears to operate independently of clerkly labour, independently of friends, editors, overseers. Indeed Daniel worked hard to create metaphors which would imply that the tedious labour of copying and revising poems was not only an intrinsic part of authorship, but a high status activity. In “To The Reader” prefixed to his Certain Small Works of 1607, he declares that like an architect he had refashioned and rebuilt his verse: Behold once more with serious labor here Haue I refurnisht out this little frame, Repaird some parts defectiue here and there, And passages new added to the same, Some rooms inlargd, made some les then they were Like to the curious builder who this yeare Puls downe, and alters what he did the last. . . (Daniel, Certaine Small Workes sig. ¶3r) Daniel’s metaphor of Works as building-works without doubt deliberately echoes the description of the Countess of Pembroke’s editorial labours over the 1593 Arcadia as described by Hugh Sanford in his preface to that volume: “often in repairing a ruinous house, the mending of some olde part occasioneth the making of some new” (Sidney, 1593 Arcadia sig. ¶4r). Daniel adopted that metaphor of editing as “repairing” in order to combine the architectonic with the artisanal, to collapse together the “editorial” and the authorial. Daniel is at once a humble labourer, correcting his verses, and the noble architect engaged in a labour of abstract reinvention, and perhaps even his own noble patron who decides to put up a new wing to his grand edifice. William Baldwin suddenly seems worlds away: the author is not a printer and collector of copy, but architect, builder, and overseer of the works all at once. The author-editor-builder-renovator-architect Daniel takes us back to the monumental volume of Ben Jonson’s Workes of 1616. As we have already noted, when viewed alongside its sixteenth-century predecessors this volume is remarkably free from fictions of collaboration, as well as from explicit allusions to the significant revisions and corrections which Jonson had made to many of its constituent elements. These features of Jonson’s Workes illustrate a strange but fundamental law in the history of print authorship: the accidents which create books are forgotten, but the results of those accidents remain. The final material forms which books take on establish conventions from which later printers and authors <?page no="195"?> Authors and Editors 195 learn, while the tortuous or accidental processes which may have led to their production are forgotten. Jonson and Daniel came to be regarded as “laureate” authors. They were able to create books which made claims for their singular authorship. This was the result of a wide range of factors, which certainly include the events described here. This generation of authors had seen Sackville’s and Churchyard’s names emerge from the chorus of the Mirror, they had seen Harington combine the role of editor and author; they had witnessed close at hand the growing stigma attached to overseers in the 1590s, and they had been shocked and excited by Spenser’s accidentally or deliberately bald preliminaries to The Faerie Queene. Certainly Jonson and Daniel were by training and education prepared to copy, revise, order and prepare texts for the press, as Wyatt and Surrey were not. But in order to become producers of Works, they did not have to be middle-class or “professional”: they had to absorb the role of the overseer into their own authorial identities. The emergence of what has come to be called the “laureate poet” was, I would suggest, substantially the result of this gradual absorption of the editor and overseer functions into the figure of the author. <?page no="196"?> 196 Colin Burrow References Ariosto, Lodovico. Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, by Iohn Harington. London: Richard Field, 1591. Baldwin, William. The Mirror for Magistrates. Ed. Lily Bess Campbell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938. Brink, Jean R. “Materialist History of the Publication of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” Review of English Studies 213 (2003): 1-26. Byrom, H. J. “The Case for Nicholas Grimald as Editor of ‘Tottell’s Miscellany.’” The Modern Language Review 27 (1932): 125-43. Chettle, Henry. Kind-Harts Dreame, Conteining Five Apparitions, with Their Invectives against Abuses Raigning, by H.C. London: W. Wright, 1593. and Robert Greene. Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit: Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592). Ed. D. Allen Carroll. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies. Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1994. Churchyard, Thomas. Churchyardes Challenge. London: John Wolfe, 1593. Cooper, Thomas, Thesaurus linguæ Romanæ and Britannicae. London: Henry Wykes, 1565. Daniel, Samuel. Delia, Contayning Certayne Sonnets: With the Complaint of Rosamond by S. Daniel. London: Simon Waterson, 1592. . Certaine Small Workes. London: Simon Waterson, 1607. Dante, Alighieri. Vita Nuoua Di Dante Alighieri. Con Xv. Canzoni Del Medesimo. E La Vita Di Esso Dante Scritta Da Giouanni Boccaccio. Florence: Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1576. Gascoigne, George. A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. Ed. G. W. Pigman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Gillespie, Alexandra. Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473-1557. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Googe, Barnabe. Eglogs Epytaphes and Sonettes. London: Raffe Newbery, 1563. Heale, Elizabeth. Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Helgerson, Richard. The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. . Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Javitch, Daniel. Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Jenkins, Harold. The Life and Work of Henry Chettle. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1934. <?page no="197"?> Authors and Editors 197 Jowett, John. “Johannes Factotum: Henry Chettle and Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 87 (1993): 453-86. King, John N. English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Krevans, Nita. “Print and the Tudor Poets.” Reconsidering the Renaissance. Ed. Mario di Cesare. Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992. 301-13. Loewenstein, Joseph. “Spenser’s Retrography: Two Episodes in Post- Petrarchan Bibliography.” Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography. Ed. Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney and David A. Richardson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. 99-130. Lucas, Scott. A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. May, Steven W. “Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical ‘Stigma of Print.’” Renaissance Papers 10 (1980): 11-18. . “Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney and - Abraham Fraunce? ” Review of English Studies. Advance Access published on 11 February 2010. Available at: http: / / res.oxfordjournals.org/ content/ early/ 2010/ 02/ - 11/ res.hgp117.full.pdf+html. Accessed on 14 January 2011. Melnikoff, Kirk and Edward Gieskes. Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. More, Thomas. The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, Sometyme Lorde Chauncellour of England, Wrytten by Him in the Englysh Tonge. London: Iohn Cawod, Iohn Waly, and Richarde Tottell, 1557. Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe. 5 vols. Ed. Ronald B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. Newton, Richard C. “Jonson and the (Re-)Invention of the Book.” Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben. Ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted Larry Pebworth. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. 31-55. . “Making Books from Leaves: Poets Become Editors.” Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe. Ed. Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986. 246-64. North, Marcy L. The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor- Stuart England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pitcher, John. “Essays, Works and Small Poems: Divulging, Publishing and Augmenting the Elizabethan Poet, Samuel Daniel.” The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality. Ed. Andrew Murphy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 1-29. <?page no="198"?> 198 Colin Burrow Pollard, A. W. and G. R. Redgrave. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475- 1640. Second edition. 3 vols. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976-1991. Reed, A. W. “The Editor of Sir Thomas More’s English Works: William Rastell.” The Library 4th Series 4 (1924): 25-49. Saunders, J. W. “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry.” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139-64. Sessions, W. A. “Surrey’s Wyatt: Autumn 1542 and the New Poet.” Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts. Ed. Peter C. Herman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. 168- 92. Sidney, Philip. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Written by Sir Philippe Sidnei. London: William Ponsonby, 1590. . The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. London: William Ponsonby, 1593. Tottel, Richard. Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes: The Elizabethan Version. Ed. Paul A. Marquis. Renaissance English Text Society. Tempe, Arizona: Renaissance English Text Society in conjunction with Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993. Watson, Thomas. Hekatompathia. London: Gabriell Cawood, 1582. . The Complete Works of Thomas Watson (1556-1592). Ed. Dana Ferrin Sutton. Lewiston, New York and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. Wilson, C. R. “Astrophil and Stella: A Tangled Editorial Web.” The Library 6th Series 1 (1979): 336-46. Wilson, Katharine. Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Woudhuysen, Henry. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Zurcher, Andrew. “Getting It Back to Front in 1590: Spenser’s Dedications, Nashe’s Insinuations, and Ralegh’s Equivocations.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38(2) (2005): 173-98. <?page no="199"?> Authorship and Alteration: Shakespeare on the Exclusion Crisis Stage and Page, 1678-1682 Emma Depledge Ten radically altered versions of Shakespeare’s plays appeared on stage between 1678 and 1682, partly in response to what is known as the Exclusion Crisis. The plays differ from earlier Shakespeare alterations in a number of important ways and mark the most intense period of Shakespeare rewriting since the playwright’s death. By separately considering the two media for which the plays were designed, the stage and the page, and by exploring the way Shakespeare as author-source was presented in the paratextual material accompanying the plays onto the stage and the page respectively, this essay suggests that reverence for Shakespeare and claims of textual ownership varied according to medium, thus offering conflicting views of Shakespeare to late seventeenthcentury audiences and readers of playbooks. These conflicting views, I contend, are intimately linked to unequal levels of stage and page censorship during, and as a direct result of, the Exclusion Crisis. The essay offers a case for seeing the Exclusion Crisis as one of the most significant points in Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife. Between 1678 and 1682, when King Charles II was at odds with Parliament over the policy to exclude his brother, James, the Duke of York, from the succession, ten radically altered versions of Shakespeare’s plays appeared on stage at the two licensed theatres in Restoration London, the Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Gardens, and the King’s Theatre, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane (see Table 1). 1 The plays were taken from 1 I use the label “alterations” throughout in order to reflect contemporary usage. Late seventeenth-century title-pages use “altered” where we would today use “adapted,” and as distinct from “revived,” which is predominantly used to denote an earlier play which has appeared on stage without the introduction of major changes. The first recorded use Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 199-213. <?page no="200"?> 200 Emma Depledge Table 1: Shakespeare Alterations of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-1682 of the term “adaptation” to denote “the alteration of a dramatic composition to suit a different audience” dates from 1790 (OED), more than a century after the Exclusion Crisis. Playwright Title-Page Attribution Title Likely Première Company “Made into a / PLAY. / By THO. SHADWELL” Timon of Athens, or The Man-Hater 1678 Duke’s “Alter’d from Mr SHAKESPEARS Works, / By Mr. Edw Ravenscroft” Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia 1678 King’s “Written By JOHN DRYDEN / Servant to his Majesty” Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late 1679 Duke’s “By Thomas Otway” The History and Fall of Caius Marius (Romeo and Juliet) 1679 Duke’s “Written By CROWN” The Misery of Civil-War (2 & 3 Henry VI) 1680 Duke’s “By N. TATE” The History of Richard II / The Sicilian Usurper 1680 King’s “Reviv’d with Alterations / By N. Tate” The History of King Lear 1681 Duke’s “Written By Mr. CROWN.” Henry the Sixth, the First Part, with the Murder of Humphrey Duke of Glocester (2 Henry VI) 1681 Duke’s “By N. Tate” The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth, or the Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus 1681 King’s “By Tho. Durfey, Gent.” The Injured Princess, or the Fatal Wager (Cymbeline) 1682 King’s <?page no="201"?> Shakespeare and the Exclusion Crisis 201 1 st Printed Printed by / for Reference to Shakespeare in Printed Dramatic Paratexts Reference to Shakespeare in Printed Readerly Paratexts 1678 By J. M. for Henry Herringman Prologue & Epilogue Yes 1687 By J. B. for J. Hindmarsh Surviving section of original prologue (quoted in Langbaine) cites Shakespeare Yes 1679 For Able Swall and Jacob Tonson Prologue Yes 1680 For Tho. Flesher Prologue No 1680 For R. Bentley and M. Magnes Prologue states that “the Divine Shakespar did not lay one stone” No dedication or address 1681 For Richard Tonson & Jacob Tonson No Yes 1681 For T. Flesher to be sold by R. Bentley & M. Magnes Prologue & Epilogue Yes 1681 For R. Bentley and M. Magnes Prologue & Epilogue Yes 1682 L. M. for Joseph Hindmarsh Prologue Yes 1682 For R. Bentley and M. Magnes No No dedication or address <?page no="202"?> 202 Emma Depledge Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, with the majority of playwrights seeking to exploit parallels between Shakespeare’s plays and the Exclusion Crisis. In his King Lear, for instance, Nahum Tate added passages to point to the parallel between the Bastard, as Edmund is called in this version, and the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Exclusionists’ chief candidate for the throne (Maguire 34). Most of the plays selected for alteration depict civil unrest, rebellion, and disobedience, enabling the (predominantly royalist) altering playwrights to demonize the Duke of York’s enemies and rival claimants to the throne while offering stark warnings about the consequences of interfering with the legal line of succession. The Exclusion Crisis takes its name from a bill introduced in Parliament by opponents of James. With Charles II failing to produce any legitimate children, the crown was due to pass to his brother, James. James’s opponents sought to bar him from the legal line of succession on the grounds of his conversion to Catholicism in the early 1670s. The first bill was introduced in 1679, but objection to James’s claim to the throne had already been mounting for a number of years. The bill was rejected on three occasions, and Charles II prorogued Parliament for the last time in March 1681, completing the remainder of his rule without Parliament. The impact of the Exclusion Crisis was considerable: the late 1670s and early 1680s saw great division in the nation. The decision to alter Shakespeare’s plays in this period was in no way inevitable, and it is important to recognize the material conditions that are likely to have made alteration of an earlier play an appealing option. Playwrights were entitled to the third night’s profit, but the run of unsuccessful plays ended before the third night. Prologues and epilogues of the Exclusion Crisis frequently bemoan diminished audience numbers, and some critics even cite the Crisis as a key factor in the financial collapse of the King’s Company and the subsequent formation of the United Company in 1682 (Owen 159). Alteration of a pre-existing play may therefore have offered a way of increasing one’s theatrical output, an important consideration if “to be assured of eating, a playwright pretty much needed to get a play successfully staged every year” (Hume 501). Shakespeare alterations of the Exclusion Crisis offer clues about Restoration playgoers’ exposure to Shakespeare and provide insights into late seventeenth-century notions of textual property. In considering these altered plays, I wish to concentrate on their theatrical and readerly paratexts: prologues and epilogues on the one hand, and dedications and prefaces on the other. I suggest that a laxity of print censorship coupled with severe theatrical censorship fostered competing views of textual property. The altering playwright’s labour is understated in the theatrical <?page no="203"?> Shakespeare and the Exclusion Crisis 203 paratexts, where it is typically suggested that Shakespeare has been revived and updated but not significantly rewritten. However, in the readerly paratexts designed for the print market, the altering playwrights go to great lengths to outline the changes they have introduced, and reclaim the plays as their own. The theatrical paratexts therefore caused audiences to hear radically altered versions of Shakespeare’s plays attributed to him, while readers of the same plays found title-pages containing only the altering playwright’s name, followed by discussion of the same playwright’s labour in altering his Shakespearean source. 2 Since the title-pages announce the location of the original performance of the alteration as a marketing strategy, the printed plays and their readerly paratexts may be seen to compete with and rewrite a past theatrical event. The distinct way in which authorship is attributed in the two media of Exclusion Crisis alterations remains largely overlooked in studies of Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife. Barbara Murray has observed about Restoration alterations in general that Shakespeare was depicted to playgoers as “an almost mythologized ‘wonder’” but as “flawed and unsophisticated” to readers (“Performance” 437), yet the media-dependent claims to textual property found in alterations of 1678-1682 require further study. I believe that the citation of Shakespeare in the theatrical prologues and epilogues has less to do with the “demand for the acknowledgement and justification of sources” (Kewes 64) than with a desire to disguise potentially inflammatory plays as “old honest” (prologue to Tate’s King Lear 5) and politically innocuous. 3 Equally, altering playwrights used prefaces and dedications not so much to make political messages more explicit (Dobson 72-73), nor to “forestall [. . . ] imputations of plagiarism” (Kewes 60), as to reclaim texts attributed to Shakespeare on stage. What follows is a reading of the ways in which Shakespeare’s authorship is presented in these texts. The essay first considers the theatrical paratexts in their oral medium, as pleas delivered by actors hoping to secure a play’s longevity on stage. It stresses the significant impact that frequent, oral references to Shakespeare are likely to have had on his authorial afterlife. This is followed by a discussion of the strategies a number of playwrights adopted in order to assert their own claims of 2 Play performances are changeable and theatrical paratexts could be modified for subsequent performance, but the intense theatrical censorship to which the Exclusion Crisis stage was subject increases the likelihood that they would have been used for at least the first three productions of a given play. 3 As Michael Dobson states, these theatrical paratexts “deploy canonization - the promotion of Shakespeare as an author supposedly above and beyond contemporary politics - as a way of creating a space of sanctuary” around their plays (73). <?page no="204"?> 204 Emma Depledge textual ownership in the printed versions of plays. My discussion corroborates the view that “the concept of the author as ‘owner’ of his or her text” did not emerge in the eighteenth century, as is sometimes suggested, but was clearly present “in the critical literature and in the commercial practice of the half-century between the Restoration [. . .] and the Copyright Statute of 1710” (Kewes 2). When the first Shakespeare alteration of the Exclusion Crisis, Thomas Shadwell’s The History of Timon of Athens, appeared on stage in 1678, it featured an epilogue informing the audience that it had been “grafted upon Shakespears Stock” (87). The audience attending the next altered play, Edward Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus or, The Rape of Lavina (1678), was told in the prologue that “Shakespeare by him reviv’d now treads the stage” (Langbaine 456). In 1679 the prologue to John Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found too Late not only made reference to Shakespeare but was delivered by an actor in the guise of Shakespeare’s ghost. It must have appeared as if Shakespeare “reviv’d” really did tread the stage when Thomas Betterton, “Representing the Ghost of Shakespear,” introduced Dryden’s radically altered Troilus and Cressida as his own (i.e. Shakespeare’s) “rough-drawn Play” (sig. b4 r ). It is hard to overstate the significance of these oral references to Shakespeare: they made the audience “explicitly aware for what was probably the first time in the late seventeenth century that a play it was about to see had been written by a man named Shakespeare” (Dugas 47). The on-stage citation of Shakespeare as author-source can be seen as one of the key ways in which alterations of the Exclusion Crisis depart from those produced before 1678. With the exception of Dryden’s prologue to The Tempest; or The Enchanted Island, produced in collaboration with William Davenant in 1667, pre-1678 alterations of Shakespeare’s plays did not make reference to Shakespeare as author-source in their theatrical paratexts. Even a knowledgeable theatregoer like Samuel Pepys, who attended almost fifty performances of Shakespeare’s plays, only once mentions Shakespeare’s name in reference to a play. The one play Pepys associates with Shakespeare, The Tempest, offers a powerful indication of the impact theatrical paratexts of 1678-1682 are likely to have had on an audience’s awareness of Shakespeare as author of his texts. Pepys refers to The Tempest in 1667, following his attendance at the Dryden and Davenant alteration. The link between Pepys’s reference in 1667 to the play he saw as “an old play of Shakespeare’s” (8.521) and the prologue’s declaration that the play “Springs up” from “old Shakespeare’s honour’d dust” (Clark 87) is apparent. Pepys shows no sign of recognizing the play as an alteration, despite the extensive changes introduced by Dryden and Davenant. Pepys’s failure to mention Shakespeare’s name in conjunction with any of his other plays at an <?page no="205"?> Shakespeare and the Exclusion Crisis 205 earlier date is thus most likely due to a lack of knowledge. Post-1678 theatregoers would not have shared such ignorance, since at least eight out of ten alterations produced during the Exclusion Crisis referred to Shakespeare in their theatrical paratexts. The example of Pepys thus suggests that prologues and epilogues had a decisive impact on what theatregoers considered or did not consider as Shakespeare before and during the Exclusion Crisis. References to Shakespeare in prologues and epilogues are usually designed to present the play as written before the events of recent history, and therefore void of any contentious political commentary. Like Hamlet, they insist that there is “no offense i’th world” (3.2.228-29), despite offering “aggressively topical and consciously emblematic readings of Shakespeare” (Wikander 342). The prologue to Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus assured audiences that “the Poet does not fear [their] Rage” because “Shakespeare by him reviv’d now treads the stage” (Langbaine 465). The playwright is said to sit down “Under [Shakespeare’s] sacred Lawrels” and, as a result, he and the play ought to be “Safe, from the blast of any Critics frown” (465). This is continued with an expression of apparent modesty: the playwright will not “proudly scorn / To own, that he but winnow’d Shakespeare’s Corn” (465). Ravenscroft has simply refined and separated; this is not a new play. Similarly, audiences attending a performance of Tate’s The History of King Lear were told that they were watching an “old honest play,” Shakespearean “flowers” which Tate had merely strung into a “garland” (5). The modest tone resurfaces when we are told that Tate “Bluntly resolved beforehand to declare” that the audience’s “entertainment should be most old fare” (5). In keeping with the modesty topos, the audience is told that even if “this heap of flowers shall chance to wear / Fresh beauty in the order they now bear,” this too is “Shakespeare’s praise” (5). As in the prologue to Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, it is implied that the play ought to be safe because it grew in “rich Shakespeare’s soil” (5). Tate’s alteration of Coriolanus features a similar prologue, “written by Sir George Raynsford,” according to which the play “may be safe to Day, / since Shakespeare gave foundation to the play” (6). After all, the playwright “only ventures to make gold from oar, / And turn to Money what lay dead before” (6), so the audience need not suspect a political agenda. The prologue to John Crowne’s Henry the Sixth, the First Part announces that the play the audience is about to see consists of “old gather’d Herbs” which “in sweet Shakespears Garden grew” (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 272). The epilogue even implies a direct relation between the play’s Shakespearean origin and the possibility that it will make it to a third night: the play may be thought by some to “want <?page no="206"?> 206 Emma Depledge Breath to run a Three-days Course,” but “a Barb that’s come of Shakespears breed” contains the kind of “Poetry [that] long rides Post”. It suggests that the playwright has merely added superficial “trappings” to a well-bred Arabian horse (“barb”) of Shakespeare’s “breed” (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 372). The theatrical paratexts promote Shakespeare by suggesting that, if an audience fails to appreciate the Shakespearean material they are watching, then the fault lies with them, not the play. To quote the prologue to Tate’s King Lear, “since in rich Shakespear’s soil it grew, / ’Twill relish yet with those whose tastes are true” (5). The prologue to Crowne’s Henry the Sixth similarly tells the audience that their “Mouthes are never out of taste” with Shakespeare (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 272). Perhaps the most spectacular example of this strategy is in Dryden’s prologue to his version of Troilus and Cressida, spoken by Shakespeare’s ghost. The ghost’s jingoistic speech addresses audiences as his “love’d Britons,” urges them to “see [their] Shakespeare Rise,” and depicts himself (i.e. Shakespeare) as “Like fruitfull Britain, rich without supply” (sig. b4 r ), thus establishing a link between national pride and appreciation of Shakespeare. 4 By having Shakespeare address the audience, the prologue distances the altering playwright from the play that is being performed. The Shakespeare character announces that the audience “shall behold / Some Master-Strokes, so manly and so bold / That he, who meant to alter found ’em such / He shook; and thought it sacrilege to touch” (sig. b4 r ). Dryden, the audience is to believe, did not dare to alter Shakespeare’s “Master-Strokes” (sig. b4 r ). The prologue’s aim to foreground Shakespeare at the expense of Dryden is made clear when it asks the audience to “Sit silent then, that my pleas’d soul may see / A judging audience once, and worthy me” (sig. b4 r ). With ten alterations staged between 1678 and 1682, theatregoers had unprecedented access to plays based on Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s name, the prologues and epilogues suggest, echoed through the theatres on a regular basis. The number of theatre productions was almost matched by that of print editions: while pre-1678 alterations were not usually printed until at least a few years after their première, nine Exclusion Crisis alterations of Shakespeare were published within a year of their first performance. The swift printing of Exclusion Crisis alterations of Shakespeare suggests that many of the playwrights turned to the print market as an addi- 4 My interest here is in the strategies used in these paratexts rather than in the overall impression one gains of Shakespeare as a writer. For more on Shakespeare and canonization, see Dobson. <?page no="207"?> Shakespeare and the Exclusion Crisis 207 tional source of income, arguably in response to the impact the Crisis had on dramatic censorship. 5 Only around eighteen plays were banned from the stage between 1660 and 1710 (Kinservik 38), but at least eight of these were suppressed between 1678 and 1682, including two Shakespeare alterations: Tate’s Richard II and Crowne’s Henry the Sixth. The punishment meted out to the King’s Company for performing Tate’s banned play was one of the most severe interventions in theatre history, with the theatre being ordered to close for ten days. 6 As Susan Owen has noted, some of the suppressed plays were originally granted a license for performance only to have it revoked, and it is hard to generalize about theatrical censorship during the Exclusion Crisis as it existed in many different forms (159). A number of agents sought to control the theatrical output, and the punitive measures ranged from the Lord Chamberlain’s emendation of lines to outright bans, imprisonments, and violent attacks on actors and playwrights (Kinservik 36). This climate of intense theatrical censorship accounts for the way a number of playwrights chose to stress their debt to Shakespeare, despite having radically altered their source texts. It also provides a stark contrast with the regulation of printed materials, as print censorship was far more lax than theatre censorship during the Exclusion Crisis (Owen 159-60). The Licensing Act regulating printed material lapsed in June 1679 as a direct result of the Exclusion Crisis. Charles II had dissolved Parliament over the succession dispute, thereby preventing new legislation, such as the Act’s renewal, from being passed. I do not wish to suggest that print censorship vanished altogether after the Act’s lapse in 1679, but it does seem to have made the task of controlling the press a great deal more difficult. Each of the plays banned from the stage between 1678 and 1682 found their way into print, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Lancashire Witches even has italic type to emphasize censored lines (Owen 159-60). A survey of paratextual references to Shakespeare (see Table 1 above) suggests a correlation between the citation of Shakespeare as author-source in theatrical paratexts and the addition of readerly paratexts in which playwrights provide further commentary on Shakespeare’s role as author-source. This supports the view that readerly paratexts functioned as a means of re-writing the earlier theatrical event. One may also identify a relationship between the absence of theatrical paratexts citing Shakespeare and a complete lack of readerly paratexts. 5 For more on earning a living from the theatre and as an author of books in the period 1660-1740, see Hume. 6 For a more detailed discussion of Tate’s play and Exclusion Crisis censorship, see Johnson. <?page no="208"?> 208 Emma Depledge For example, Crowne’s Misery of Civil War, which negates Shakespeare’s claim to the text in its prologue, and Thomas Durfey’s The Injured Princess (Cymbeline), which makes no reference to Shakespeare in its theatrical paratexts, are printed without any dedication or preface, let alone ones which challenge Shakespeare’s claim to the text. It may therefore be posited that the prime function of readerly paratexts was to assert the altering playwright’s labour in plays attributed to Shakespeare on stage. We usually have no access to prologues and epilogues unless they were printed in playbooks. As Tiffany Stern has shown, theatrical paratexts were not always attached to the play-texts in manuscript; instead, “prologues and epilogues were frequently drawn up first on separate pieces of paper from the plays they flanked” (2). The disjointed nature of theatrical paratext is exemplified by Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, which omitted the original prologue and epilogue. In the address “To the Reader,” Ravenscroft claims that they were lost and states that “to let the buyer have his penny-worths, [he furnishes them] with others which were written by [him] to other persons labours” so that “the purchaser may not repine at the author or bookseller for a hard bargain” (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 5). The concern that potential customers might complain if playbooks did not contain the original theatrical paratexts may well have been particularly great at a time when plays appeared in print so soon after their first performance. Gerard Langbaine went on to print part of what he claimed was the original prologue to Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, and did so as the conclusion to an attack on what he saw as Ravenscroft’s dishonest “boasts” that the play is a result of his “own pains.” No copies of Ravenscroft’s complete prologue have been found, but Langbaine clearly possessed one. He offers to “send [Ravenscroft] the whole” of the prologue, “if he desire it,” (465) with the tongue-in-cheek tone implying that Langbaine, like me, believes that Ravenscroft had not lost his own copy but chose to omit it from the printed version. Kewes suspects that Durfey may also have deliberately omitted theatrical paratexts from the printed version of his version of Cymbeline (71), and I believe that the theatrical paratexts used to introduce Tate’s Richard II were likely replaced at some point between the play’s suppression, its reappearance as The Tyrant of Sicily (see Johnson), and its arrival in print. Either way, these printed play-texts work to negate, or even erase, Shakespeare’s claim to textual ownership, in diametrical opposition to the prologues and epilogues of several contemporary Shakespeare alterations, which affirm it. Strikingly, the title-pages do the same: of the ten Shakespeare alterations produced from 1678 to 1682, only one mentions Shakespeare on the title-page, offering a stark contrast to the frequent repetition of his name on stage. <?page no="209"?> Shakespeare and the Exclusion Crisis 209 As mentioned above, the original theatrical paratexts were often printed with the playbooks, but were frequently prefaced by readerly paratexts which conditioned the reception of the playbook. Theatrical paratexts did not necessarily undermine claims made in readerly paratexts, not least because they were understood as “in a sense antiauthor.” As Stern argues, they were “spoken not just by utilized characters but by utilized and phoney versions of ‘the playwright’” (112). Prologues and epilogues speak of the playwright, for the playwright, but they are not spoken by the playwright. They should therefore not be seen as problematizing a playwright’s later, printed claim to textual possession. There are two ways in which playwrights attempted to reclaim textual possession by means of readerly paratexts. First, they deny Shakespeare’s claim to the altered play. Ravenscroft, for example, claims to have “been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not Originally [Shakespeare’s], but brought by a private Author to be Acted.” He then goes on to label his source-play “a heap of Rubbish” before pointing to his own labour. He claims to have found “many Large and Square Stones both usefull and Ornamental to the Fabrick, as New Modell’d” (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 5). Shakespeare’s Titus contained the stones, but Ravenscroft added his labour in order to “model” or build his own play. Similarly, Tate claims that Shakespeare “painted” his Richard in “the worst colours of history” and suggests that “the Richard of Shakespear and History” was the same, implying that Shakespeare “copied” the history and did not add his own labour to his sources. Tate, by contrast, “discover’d” “Beauties” in Shakespeare and, in a similar vein to Ravenscroft, “new-modell[ed]” them (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 196, 198). Following a different line, Crowne negates his earlier claim in the theatrical paratext according to which the play “in sweet Shakespears Garden grew” (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 272). He concedes that he “called it in the Prologue Shakespeare’s Play,” but adds that Shakespeare “has no Title to the 40th part of it” and that he uses his patron’s “Name to guide [his] Play through the Press, as [he] did Shakespeare’s to support it on the Stage.” He points to Shakespeare’s “Second Part of Henry the Sixth” as source, but adds that he “left it as soon as [he] could,” for Shakespeare’s “Volumn is all up-hill and down,” and he has “undertaken to cultivate one of the most barren places in it” (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 275). Shakespeare is thus troped as “barren” land, and the adapter-playwright as its cultivator. The second way in which playwrights reclaimed textual possession is by asking readers to conduct comparative readings between the plays <?page no="210"?> 210 Emma Depledge and the Shakespeare source in order to stress the changes the playwrights have introduced. Ravenscroft states that “the reader [. . .] will find that none in all that Authors works ever received greater alterations, or Additions,” adding that “many scenes [are] entirely new” and that the language has been “refined, [. . .] the principal characters heightened” and “the plot much encrased” (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 5). Likewise, Tate offers quotations from Shakespeare’s Richard II which he explicitly compares with his own version (Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations 197-98), and Shadwell boasts that he “can truly say” that he has “made [Timon of Athens] into a Play” (sig. a3 r ). Whereas the theatrical paratexts diminish the altering playwrights’ involvement in the creation of the play, readerly paratexts render their labour explicit. In doing so, they may be seen to articulate the “rhetoric of authorship” which developed at the end of the seventeenth century (Kewes 75). Playwrights appear to make the same point in readerly paratexts as Dryden does in his preface to Don Sebastian (1690): “’Tis the contrivance, the new turn, and new characters, which alter the property and make it [theirs]” (sig. a4 v ). With their emphasis on utilizing stones to rebuild or remodel, and on the cultivation of “barren” land, these playwrights might also be seen as early advocates of the property definition most famously associated with John Locke: the Labour of [man’s] Body, and the Work of his Hands [. . .] are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. (305-06) As Kewes has demonstrated, the troping of a source-author “as ‘nature’ to be taken possession of,” added to, “and improved upon” (126) was not exclusively associated with Shakespeare, as Dobson (31-32) seems to imply, but representative of the way contemporary “appropriators” and “commentators” considered “all prior texts” (126). Dryden and Locke’s articulation of property rights therefore offers a context in which the altering playwright’s reclamation of the plays may be better understood. In Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, Margaret Jane Kidnie has recently argued that the borderline between work and adaptation, between “Shakespeare” and “Shakespeare adaptation,” is constantly negotiated, and that the criteria by which “texts and performances are recognized - or not - as instances of a certain work” (10) are always subject to change and dependent on the context of reception. Shakespeare alterations of the Exclusion Crisis provide a powerful illustration of this mechanism. One set of paratexts, the prologues and epilogues spoken in <?page no="211"?> Shakespeare and the Exclusion Crisis 211 the theatre, suggest that Shakespeare “survives” (Kidnie 1) in these plays, whereas another set of paratexts, the prefaces and dedications written for the print publication, suggest that he does not, or at least not to the same extent. As a result of the unique constellation during the Exclusion Crisis, with its massed production of Shakespeare alterations on stage and page in very different censorship contexts for the two media, the paratexts to these plays demonstrate with exceptional clarity the contingency of authorship at a specific moment in history. Is Shakespeare the author of these plays? He is or he is not, depending on how various commercial, political, and cultural pressures impinge on the question. It is this very ambivalence which makes of the engagement with Shakespeare during the Exclusion Crisis a crucial moment in his authorial afterlife. <?page no="212"?> 212 Emma Depledge References Clark, Sandra, ed. Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. London: Dent, 1997. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Dryden, John. Don Sebastian, King of Portugal. London, 1690. ———. Troilus and Cressida, or, Truth Found Too Late. London, 1679. ——— and William Davenant. The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island. Shakespeare Made Fit. Ed. Sandra Clark. London: Everyman, 1997. 79- 186. Dugas, Don-John. Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660-1740. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Hume, Robert D. “The Economics of Culture in London, 1660-1740.” Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006): 487-533. Johnson, Odai. “Empty Houses: The Suppression of Tate’s Richard II.” Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 503-16. Kewes, Paulina. Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Kinservik, Matthew J. “Theatrical Regulation during the Restoration Period.” A Companion to Restoration Drama. Ed. Susan J. Owen. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 36-52. Langbaine, Gerard. An Account of the English Dramatic Poets. Oxford, 1691. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1690. Ed. Pater Laslett. London: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Maguire, Nancy Klein. “Nahum Tate’s King Lear: ‘the king’s blest restoration.’” The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth. Ed. Jean I. Marsden. New York: Harvester Weatsheaf, 1991. 29-42. Murray, Barbara A. “Performance and Publication of Shakespeare, 1660-1682: ‘Go see them play’d, then read them as before’.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 102 (2001): 435-49. ———, ed. Shakespeare Adaptations from the Restoration: Five Plays. Cranberry: Associated University Presses, 2005. Owen, Susan J. “Drama and Political Crisis.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 158-73. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. 11 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970- 1983. <?page no="213"?> Shakespeare and the Exclusion Crisis 213 Shadwell, Thomas. The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater. London, 1678. ———. The Lancashire Witches, and Teague o Divelly the Irish Priest. London, 1682. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Thomas Learning, 2006. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tate, Nahum. The History of King Lear. Ed. James Black. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. ———. The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth, or the Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus. Nahum Tate and the Coriolanus Tradition in English Drama With a Critical Edition of Tate’s The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth. Ed. Ruth McGugan. New York: Garland, 1987. 1-107. Wikander, Matthew H. “The Spitted Infant: Scenic Emblem and Exclusionist Politics in Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 340-58. <?page no="215"?> Portraiture, Authorship, and the Authentication of Shakespeare Julianna Bark This essay analyses some of the numerous controversies over the authenticity of visual representations of William Shakespeare, in particular the Droeshout engraving, the Stratford Bust, and the Chandos and the Cobbe portraits. It argues that what has been at stake in the many controversies over alleged Shakespeare likenesses is less the question of whether a particular image is authentic than whether that image corresponds to the needs and expectations of its proponents. For instance, during the Caroline era, Martin Droeshout’s engraved portrait of Shakespeare was adapted by William Marshall’s image of the author as a laureate poet. Similarly, during the eighteenth century, Louis-François Roubiliac’s statue of Shakespeare seemed to provide an altogether more suitable embodiment than did the swarthy and less elegant Chandos portrait. As for the newly-emerged Cobbe portrait, it reflects the image of Shakespeare as a polished gentleman, in conformity with ideas recently put forward by literary critics such as Stanley Wells. By exploring controversies over the authenticity of Shakespeare portraits, this paper demonstrates that the alleged authenticity of these likenesses is a product of fabrication, and that this fabrication contributes to enlarging the mystique that surrounds the playwright. A myriad of alleged life portraits of Shakespeare have emerged since the seventeenth century, and, as the recently discovered Cobbe portrait suggests, the search for yet unknown portraits is still ongoing. One might expect that assessment of these portraits’ authenticity depends on questions such as provenance and history of ownership, or clothing and hair styles. Yet what has really been at stake in the many controversies over alleged Shakespeare portraits, I believe, is less the question of whether a particular image is authentic than whether that image corresponds to the needs and expectations of its proponents. The aim of this essay, then, is Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 215-229. <?page no="216"?> 216 Julianna Bark to illustrate some of the ways in which the life portraits of Shakespeare that have surfaced since the mid-seventeenth century reveal more about their promoters’ perceptions of Shakespeare than they do about Shakespeare himself. As Samuel Schoenbaum put it, every portrait tends “towards oblique self-portraiture” (Lives ix). By exploring controversies over the authenticity of Shakespeare portraits, in particular the Droeshout engraving, the Stratford bust, and the Chandos and the Cobbe paintings, I argue in this essay that the art history of Shakespeare’s alleged likenesses does not rest on the inherent authenticity of portraits, but that this authenticity is itself a product of fabrication. Tradition has it that only two authentic representations of Shakespeare exist today. Both are posthumous. One is an engraving by Martin Droeshout (figure 1), 1 while the other is a bust in Shakespeare’s parish church at Stratford-upon-Avon produced by Gheerart Janssen, a plaster cast of which is illustrated here (figure 2). The claim for authenticity of these two representations rests on the fact that both are vouched for by the First Folio, published seven years after Shakespeare’s death, in 1623. The engraving appears on the title page. 2 The existence of the bust in the church is referred to in a commendatory poem by Leonard Digges, which prefaces the plays in the Folio: “when that stone is rent, / And time dissolues thy Stratford Moniment, / Here we aliue shall view thee still. This Booke, / When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke / Fresh to all Ages” (Shakespeare sig. A7r). Whilst the bust was presumably commissioned and paid for by one or more members of Shakespeare’s family (Schoenbaum, Lives 6), the Folio was edited by Shakespeare’s colleagues and friends, John Hemmings and Henry Condell. The Folio was dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery, both of whom appear to have known Shakespeare personally. Moreover, the Folio’s prefatory material boasts a commendatory poem by Ben Jonson. Both the engraving and the bust are thus vouched for by those who knew him. This remains the firmest proof of the authenticity of these two likenesses. 1 The Droeshout engraving in the First Folio exists in four different states. The first, which shows a thin moustache, no shadow on the collar and a different treatment of highlights in the hair, is by far the rarest. The second state includes darker crosshatching on the collar and jaw line as well as a broader, thicker moustache. As for the third state, it includes small highlights in the eyes, probably done to improve the worn image. A fourth state, which is found in the Fourth Folio of 1685, was greatly reworked (Cooper 50). 2 Engraved portraits typically appeared in frontispieces facing the title page, but Droeshout’s portrait of Shakespeare was placed on the title page in the first two Folio editions and did not move to the facing page until the Third Folio. <?page no="217"?> Portraiture and the Authentication of Shakespeare 217 Figure 1: Martin Droeshout the Younger. Title page of Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies, First Folio. 1623, engraving, PD 1852-6-12-441 (Hind 11). © Trustees of the British Museum. <?page no="218"?> 218 Julianna Bark Figure 2: After Gheerart Janssen the Younger. Plaster cast of William Shakespeare’s effigy in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. c. 1620, plaster, NPG 1281. © National Portrait Gallery, London. <?page no="219"?> Portraiture and the Authentication of Shakespeare 219 Whilst the Droeshout and Stratford bust are now widely acknowledged to have iconic status, this was not always the case. For all their claims to authenticity, scholars have done much to discredit the two representations and questioned their artistic merit, blaming the incompetence of the artists, the difficult medium, and the circumstances of production. George Steevens described Droeshout’s face of Shakespeare as being “as hard as if hewn out of rock” (Keevak 90), Edmond Malone called it a “miserable drawing” (209), and Schoenbaum objected to its “ungainly head too big for the torso, a mouth wandering to the right, locks which fail to balance on two sides; sans neck, and with two right shoulders. (Or is it left? )” (“Artists’ Images” 32). Recently, the engraving has been described as “grave, austere and puritanical, wearing the stiff, spread-out collar of the time that made the head look like a dish served on a platter” (Glueck). Caricatures of the Stratford bust are just as numerous; they tend to ridicule its “unintellectual expression” and “its goggle eyes and gaping mouth” (Lee 286; Schoenbaum, “Artists’ Images” 37). Stanley Wells has used the supposed artistic shortcomings of the two likenesses to advance his case for the Cobbe portrait: “Up to now, only two images have been widely accepted as genuine likenesses of Shakespeare. Both are dull. [The Cobbe] is a very fine painting” (“Lifetime Portrait”). Of course, the perception of what comprises “dullness” is not only subjective but also, in the given context, arguably immaterial. Dissatisfaction with the Droeshout engraving and Stratford bust was present from the 1640s when artists started adapting them to produce what they considered more suitable images of the author. William Marshall’s engraved frontispiece to John Benson’s 1640 edition of the Poems, for instance, tidies up the anatomical difficulties of the Droeshout by hanging a cloak on one shoulder, thus lending an air of what David Piper has called “prim and pursued elegance” to the sitter (38). Marshall invests the image with literary authority by including the laurel branch, which Shakespeare is shown to be holding with rather fierce defiance. The Stratford bust was likewise tinkered with to produce a more appealing image of Shakespeare, as exemplified by a seventeenth-century plaster cast copy of the head of the effigy at Stratford (c. 1620, London, National Portrait Gallery, NPG 185a) and a nineteenth-century lithograph of this head made by Richard James Lane (1853, London, National Portrait Gallery, NPG D21778). It is noticeable that the lithograph “corrects” what was seen in the nineteenth century as the rather ugly space between the sitter’s nose and mouth. <?page no="220"?> 220 Julianna Bark Figure 3: Attributed to John Taylor. William Shakespeare? , known as the Chandos portrait. c. 1600-10, oil on canvas, NPG 1. © National Portrait Gallery, London. <?page no="221"?> Portraiture and the Authentication of Shakespeare 221 The appearance of the first alleged life portrait of Shakespeare - the Chandos - in the early eighteenth century changed everything (figure 3). The search for such a portrait had started in the seventeenth century, since it was assumed that the Droeshout engraving was derived from a painted source (Cooper 33). Yet the Chandos - whose name derives from its previous owner, James Brydges, 3rd Duke of Chandos - did not immediately supplant the original engraving and bust. Rather, as we will see below, it became authenticated over a long period of time. The credentials of the Chandos as an authentic likeness of Shakespeare are uncertain. We know nothing of the picture’s early history between 1610 (when it was created) and the first time its existence was recorded in a written document, over a century later, in 1719. If one trusts the account of George Vertue (Myrone), the portrait may have belonged to Robert Keck in 1719, who claimed that it had descended to him from Shakespeare’s godson, Sir William Davenant, via the actor Thomas Betterton. 3 It is also to Vertue that we owe the portrait’s attribution to Shakespeare’s alleged friend, John Taylor, who was a member of the Painter-Stainers’ company (Cooper 54). This direct link to Shakespeare, although impossible to verify, has been crucial in the portrait’s authentication. The fact that there is a clear resemblance between the Chandos and the two accepted likenesses of Shakespeare provides additional reason to consider it as authentic. Another authenticating factor is that of all Shakespeare portraits, the Chandos has been the most frequently reproduced in engravings. Significantly, its earliest champions, the Tonsons, were involved in the book trade. Seeking to capitalize on this newly-discovered “authentic likeness” of Shakespeare, Jacob Tonson Sr. used the portrait in the shop sign of his publishing company. 4 An example of a Shakespeare signboard has been preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library (Pressly 288-89), but whether it is the one that belonged to the Tonsons is uncertain. Tonson and his nephew also included engraved portraits on the title-pages of a long line of Shakespeare editions. 5 The first of these, the 1709 edition by Nicholas Rowe, provides three images of Shakespeare. Two of these were engraved renderings of the Chandos: a rather austere 3 Vertue’s “notes on the history of art were purchased by Horace Walpole in 1758, who from September 1759 worked them up into what was published as his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762-71)” (Myrone). 4 According to Don-John Dugas (66), “the Tonsons’ choice of logo suggests that their Shakespeare editions were so successful that they decided Shakespeare should become the new symbol of their business. The most striking and permanent way to do this was to create a new corporate logo that drew attention to their popular brand.” 5 The Tonsons had a monopoly on the publication of Shakespeare’s plays for much of the eighteenth century (Taylor 70). For more on copyright law, see Saunders. <?page no="222"?> 222 Julianna Bark portrait made by Benjamin Arlaud and Gaspard Duchange, and a frontispiece by Michael Vandergucht (1709, NPG D25484), in which the poet, heir to the classical tradition, receives the laurels from Tragedy and Comedy, while Fame floats above, blowing her trumpet. This design was directly lifted from the 1660 Rouen edition of Corneille’s collected works, which was most likely supplied to the artist by Tonson (Taylor 76). The third image of Shakespeare in Rowe’s edition shows the Stratford bust considerably altered: the poet’s countenance has become subordinated to the architectural frame and his social status is evident in the prominent coat of arms. The use of architectural apparatus and classical iconography in both of these engravings clearly suggests Tonson’s desire to market Shakespeare’s status as a classical English writer. Like Rowe, Edmond Malone was persuaded that the Chandos represented the authentic Shakespeare, but he did something different with it. Being the first Shakespearean scholar “to take a serious, authenticating interest in Shakespeare’s appearance” (Martin 91), he decided in 1783 to seek out the original portrait, which not many people had seen since the first decade of the eighteenth century, and secured permission for a copy to be made. As he wrote to the Duke of Chandos, he wished this new copy to be a more “faithful engraving” than earlier ones (Martin 92). This copy, by the artist Ozias Humphry, was included in Malone’s 1790 edition of Shakespeare as an engraving. Although it is not a very faithful copy of Humphry’s drawing, Malone clearly intended the engraving to suggest that this was the authentic, “faithful” image of Shakespeare (de Grazia 152-54). While there is some awareness that the Chandos has not been firmly established as authentic, it is still the strongest contender for the title of authentic life portrait in the collective consciousness. Having survived the racial and anti-Semitic slurs heaped upon it by George Steevens, for whom the subject of the painting exhibited “the complexion of a Jew, or rather that of a chimney-sweeper in the jaundice” (Schoenbaum, Lives 282), and by the Victorian writer James Hain Friswell, in whom the portrait stirred xenophobic anxieties because of the sitter’s “Jewish physiognomy” (Halpern 165), the Chandos was also the only painting of six whose identification was left intact after the extensive restoration campaign conducted by the National Portrait Gallery before the “Searching for Shakespeare” exhibition in 2006. While the Flower and the Soest portraits were discovered to be nineteenth-century forgeries, the Grafton, the Sanders and the Janssen were demoted and claimed to represent gentlemen other than Shakespeare (Cooper 62-75). The evidence linking the Chandos to Shakespeare is in fact as inconclusive as it is for these other pictures, but the Chandos, it seems, will not be dismissed as easily, perhaps because it was the first portrait to have entered the National <?page no="223"?> Portraiture and the Authentication of Shakespeare 223 Portrait Gallery collection as a donation in 1856 when the museum was established (Cooper 54). The fact that it figures as “number one” in the museum inventories gives it a unique status, both in the gallery’s history but also in the public’s collective memory. Since the Chandos forms the cornerstone of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, it also symbolizes the authority of the museum as guarantor of the national cultural heritage. Debunk the Chandos and you debunk the claims to authority on which the National Portrait Gallery is assumed to rest. The author-cult of Shakespeare during the second half of the eighteenth century sanctioned the production of bardolatrous portraits, such as the marble statue by Louis-François Roubiliac (figure 4). Here Shakespeare no longer appears as a balding and pudgy middle-aged man; he has become a tall, debonair, inspired poet. This is Shakespeare as “national institution, the living classic theatre that the playwright became in the eighteenth century” (Orgel 135). Whilst the face is vaguely reminiscent of the Chandos, the statue also suggests how forcefully Shakespeare came to be appropriated by others. This is a portrait not so much of Shakespeare, but rather of the actor David Garrick who commissioned the statue and sat for it as well. 6 The monument thus constitutes an attempted appropriation of Shakespeare’s genius and fame by Garrick (McPherson). Another bardolatrous portrait of sorts made its appearance in March 2009 (figure 5). This splendid painting, which is in the family collection of the art restorer Alec Cobbe, meets our current expectations of what a good portrait is. Could there be a better representation of that authorial construct called “Sweet master Shakespeare”? Could there be a better image to mirror current popular perceptions of Shakespeare as the man who, in the year 2000, was named the “man of the millennium” by listeners of BBC4’s Today programme? The Cobbe was the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 2009. 7 Grandly called “Shakespeare Found,” the exhibition opened with a press conference and a ceremonial “unveiling” of the portrait. The image has taken the internet by storm, with the result that the Cobbe is now receiving ex- 6 Garrick housed the statue in a specially constructed Palladian temple dedicated to Shakespeare which still stands today and has been restored. The statue was transferred to the British Museum in 1823. 7 The Cobbe portrait is preserved in Newbridge House in Dublin together with the rest of the Cobbe collection. The painting may have been acquired by Thomas Cobbe during the second half of the eighteenth century. Cobbe was then being advised in his art acquisitions by Mathew Pilkington, the author of the Dictionary of Painters (1770) (see Elias). <?page no="224"?> 224 Julianna Bark Figure 4: Louis-François Roubiliac. William Shakespeare. 1758, marble, M&M 1823, 1-1, 1. © Trustees of the British Museum. <?page no="225"?> Portraiture and the Authentication of Shakespeare 225 Figure 5: Anonymous. The “Cobbe” portrait. c. 1610, Newbridge House, Dublin. Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain. <?page no="226"?> 226 Julianna Bark posure on hundreds of websites as well as on miscellaneous accessories such as shoes. 8 Published concurrently with the exhibition, a book edited by Stanley Wells, entitled Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last, embodies another effort to authenticate the portrait definitively. The claims by Wells and the book’s other contributors are chiefly based on three pieces of evidence (Bearman 484). They first show that the portrait can be dated to the early seventeenth century. Second, they argue that there are three other portraits - the Janssen, the FitzGerald, and the Ellenborough - which derive from the Cobbe. Whilst it cannot be denied that there is a clear resemblance between the Cobbe and these three portraits, it does not support the hypothesis that the Cobbe is a portrait of Shakespeare. As Katherine Duncan-Jones has convincingly argued, one of these supposed “copies” made after the Cobbe, the one called the Janssen, is more likely to be a portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury. 9 The final piece of evidence has to do with the current location and provenance of the Cobbe. Both the Cobbe and another painting, which in 2002 was identified as a representation of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, are today conserved in the Cobbe collection. Wells and his contributors argue that it follows that both of these paintings must once have belonged to Wriothesley himself. Whether or not we adhere to this argument about ownership, it seems clear that the final piece of evidence is at best inconclusive. Robert Bearman, for one, seems skeptical, arguing that Wells’s “is a bold if not controversial claim,” and adding that “somewhat frustratingly, it is not argued with the support of references by which such claims can be checked” (484). The most significant problem with Wells’s argument, then, is that it is insufficiently substantiated. Wells has admitted that he would need a document or signature to prove the Cobbe’s authenticity beyond all doubt. 10 That the Cobbe is indeed “Shakespeare Found” is not something the book with that title can actually demonstrate. Why then would Wells wish to associate his name with a claim that is at best inconclusive? The desire to be remembered by future generations as the man who discovered the only life portrait of Shakespeare may have been impossible to resist. One is reminded of A. L. Rowse and the 8 An example of such shoe wear may be found at http: / / zazzle.com.au/ (accessed 1 January 2011). 9 For more on the Janssen portrait, see Pressly 291-95 and plate 24. 10 In an interview for the online journal, The Literateur, Wells stated: “We could only have 100% assurance if we had something like an account book mentioning it, or if it was inscribed with Shakespeare’s name perhaps; if we had an account book belonging to the Earl of Southampton saying that he had commissioned this painting by such and such a painter” (Sawmill). <?page no="227"?> Portraiture and the Authentication of Shakespeare 227 various “discoveries” he made about Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Schoenbaum, Lives 761-64). Or can the ultimate motivation for the promotion of the Cobbe be located in what Marjorie Garber has called “more pragmatic issues having to do with the huge economic investment in the Shakespeare business - from publishing to tourism to Tshirt” (215)? Whatever the underlying motivations, the discovery of the Cobbe seems culturally symptomatic insofar as it follows a historical pattern of attempted authentications of alleged Shakespeare portraits. If there is one thing that Shakespeare’s portraits can teach us, it is that they reflect our need to construct the author in our own image. Some may regret that Shakespeare’s precise appearance will forever elude us, yet there is also something historically congruous about our lack of access to a visually satisfactory likeness of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare, as Patrick Cheney has recently argued, practiced “an oblique literary form of self-representation that allows the author to hide behind the veil of his fiction” (14), then it seems strangely appropriate that the portraits too give us at best oblique access to Shakespeare. <?page no="228"?> 228 Julianna Bark References Bearman, Robert. “Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last: Portraits, Poet, Patron, Poems.” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 483-87. Broch, Mark and Paul Edmondson. Shakespeare Found: A Life Portrait. Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2009. Cheney, Patrick. Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cooper, Tarnya, ed. Searching for Shakespeare. London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2006. De Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: the Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Dugas, Don-John. Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660-1740. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Shakespeare Unfound(ed)? ” The Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 2009. Available at: http: / / entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ tol/ arts_and_entertainment / -the_tls/ article5931174.ece. Accessed on 4 January 2011. Elias Jr., A. C. “Pilkington, Matthew (1701-1774).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Available at: http: / / www.oxforddnb.com/ view/ article/ 22276. Accessed on 5 December 2010. Garber, Marjorie. Profiling Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 2008. Glueck, Grace. “How Shall We Know Thee? Searching for Shakespeare’s Likeness.” The New York Times, 23 June 2006. Available at: http: / / theater.nytimes.com/ 2006/ 06/ 23/ arts/ design/ 23yale.html? fta=y. Accessed on 4 January 2011. Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare among the Moderns. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Keevak, Michael. Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Laing, Alastair and Nicholas Turner. Clerics and Connoisseurs: the Reverend Matthew Pilkington, the Cobbe Family and the Fortunes of an Irish Art Collection through Three Centuries. London: English Heritage, 2001. Lee, Sidney. A Life of William Shakespeare. London: Macmillan, 1916. Malone, Edmond. An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments Attributed to Shakespeare, etc. N. p.: Adamant Media Corporation, 2005 [1796]. Martin, Peter. Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: a Literary Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. <?page no="229"?> Portraiture and the Authentication of Shakespeare 229 McPherson, Heather. “Garrickomania: Art, Celebrity and the Imaging of Garrick.” Folger Shakespeare Library. Available at: http: / / www.folger.edu/ template.cfm? cid=1465. Accessed on 1 December 2010. Myrone, Martin. “Vertue, George (1684-1756).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Available at: http: / / www.oxforddnb.com/ view/ article/ 28252. Accessed on 26 June 2010. Orgel, Stephen. “Shakespeare Observed.” Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980): 133-41. Piper, David. The Image of the Poet: British Poets and Their Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Pressly, William, ed. A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Saunders, David. Authorship and Copyright. London: Routledge, 1992. Sawmill, I. E. “Stanley Wells on Shakespeare.” The Literateur. July 9, 2009. Available at: http: / / www.literateur.com/ archives/ 795. Accessed on 1 January 2011. Schoenbaum, Samuel. “Artists’ Images of Shakespeare.” Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986. Ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer and Roger Pringle. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988. 19-39. . Shakespeare’s Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Shakespeare, William. Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: William Jaggard, Edward Blount, John Smethwick and William Aspley, 1623. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Wells, Stanley. “Lifetime Portrait of Shakespeare Discovered.” Shakespeare Birthplace Trust website. Available at: http: / / www.shakespeare.org.uk/ index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=909&Itemid=1. Accessed on 1 December 2010. , ed. Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last: Portraits, Poet, Patron, Poems. Stratford-upon-Avon: The Cobbe Foundation and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2009. <?page no="231"?> Producing the Lector Rita Copeland Medieval grammatical curricula did not treat all authors alike: the prestige conferred on the auctor was determined by the functions that various texts served in the curriculum. This paper attempts a fine-tuned account of the progression to those classical and medieval works that represented the transition to the “literary” in its own right. What features of critical analysis characterized the approaches to those works considered advanced literary fare, such as certain kinds of stylistic analysis, attention to historical or generic concerns, or theoretical approaches to language? Ultimately what defines that highest level of auctor is the production of the skills of the lector. This essay considers four canonical surveys from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries: works by Conrad of Hirsau, Alexander Neckam, and Hugh of Trimberg, and an early humanist guide to the auctores. As these treatises suggest, the most advanced authors demand, not imitators, but readers. This is the key critical lesson exported beyond the classroom to define authorial prestige - and authorial selfconsciousness - in medieval literary culture. The lists of authors left to us by schoolmasters contain no surprises about which authors they consider to be the most “advanced,” that is, the authors who demand the highest level of preparation and so have to be encountered after the bootcamp of Donatus’ Ars minor and the Liber Catonianus or similar initiatory works. While no two curricular surveys are the same, the core ideas remain fixed: Virgil or Horace are harder than the Ecloga of Theodulus or the Dicticha Catonis. But while we have a fairly secure notion of the order in which authors would be read, there remain more questions we can ask about how they distinguished elementary from advanced fare: that is, those texts that served the acquisi- Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 231-249. <?page no="232"?> 232 Rita Copeland tion of literacy (the texts comprising the so-called Liber Catonianus 1 ) as opposed to those classical, late classical, and medieval works that represented the transition to “literature” in its own right. Medieval grammatical curricula did not treat all authors alike: the prestige conferred on the auctor was determined by the function that a text served in the curriculum. What features of critical analysis characterized the approaches to those texts considered advanced literary fare, what formal principles and historical or theoretical assumptions did they bring to the category of “advanced” authors? How are different “levels” of author marked as subjects of critical interpretation? Exactly what kinds of critical knowledge were students meant to take away from these authors? And most important, if also most difficult to assess: what kind of reader and what kind of reading does a curriculum of advanced authors assume? Here I will focus on four “reading lists” and their understandings of the “advanced” auctores: Conrad of Hirsau’s Dialogus super auctores (from no later than the middle of the twelfth century, and possibly decades earlier), Alexander Neckam’s list of authors in his Sacerdos ad altare (from around 1210), Hugh of Trimberg’s Registrum multorum auctorum (from about 1280), and a collection of epitomes of classical and medieval works, written after 1450, in London, British Library MS Cotton Titus D.XX. The assumptions that governed the “orders of reading” in curricular surveys will prove to be quite different from the approaches familiar to us from the medieval compositional treatises known as the artes poetriae, which also advocate certain authors as “exemplary” and even elevate their works to “masterpiece” status. We may be accustomed to classifying manuals of poetic composition together with curricular surveys, for good reasons: the two kinds of treatise overlap with each other in their coverage of the classical and medieval literary curriculum, so that we might view them as different forms of the same thing: introductions to the auctores. 2 But their investments in a notion of canonical “authorship” are in fact very different. If Gervase of Melkley, writing his Ars versificaria in about the year 1215, declared Bernardus Silvestris to be “a parrot in prose and a nightingale in verse” (Gräbener 1) this evaluation has a different tenor than comparable praise of an ancient or medieval author in a curricular survey. For grammatical curricula articulate another 1 The stable elements of the Liber catonianus were the Disticha Catonis, Theodulus, Avianus’ fables, Maximianus (Elegia), Statius (Achilleid), and Claudian (De raptu Proserpinae). See Woods and Copeland 380-84. 2 Perhaps influentially, Curtius (48-54) treats Eberhard the German’s Laborintus as the same kind of text as Conrad of Hirsau’s Dialogus super auctores in his discussion of “Curriculum Authors.” <?page no="233"?> Producing the Lector 233 evaluative standard for what makes an auctor. What defines the highest level of authorship is how it produces the skills of the lector. The most advanced authors demand, not imitators, but readers. From its beginnings in antiquity, grammatical teaching was both descriptive and prescriptive. It used the authors to establish good norms for reading, but also to provide models of style and grammatical usage for those learning how to write. The two were intimately linked, as we know from Servius’ commentary on Virgil, which both explores textual meaning and shows how Virgil’s style works, that is, why a phrase can be turned to good effect. When he is in prescriptive mode, Servius gives both grammatical and stylistic instruction. [At Aeneid line 2] ITALIAM ars quidem hoc exigit, ut nominibus provinciarum praepositiones addamus, civitatum numquam. Tamen plerumque perverso ordine lectum est; nam ecce hoc loco detraxit provinciae praepositionem dicens “Italiam venit” pro ad Italiam venit. 3 Tullius in Verrinis ea die Verres ad Messanam venit pro Messanam venit. Sane sciendum est usurpari ab auctoribus, ut vel addant vel detrahant praepositiones; namque ait Vergilius silvis te, Tyrrhene, feras agitare putasti pro in silvis. Ut ergo illic detraxit loco praepositionem, sic hic provinciae. Et est figura. (Thilo and Hagen 1: 7-8) italiam [‘‘<to> italy’’] The art [of grammar] requires that we add prepositions to the names of provinces, but never to those of cities. Yet we often read the reverse. For, look, here he left out the preposition with a province Italiam venit instead of ad Italiam venit ‘‘he came to Italy.’’ Tully in the Verrine orations: ‘‘on that day Verres came ad Messanam’’ instead of Messanam ‘‘to Messana.” Know that it belongs to the usage of the auctores to either add or omit prepositions. For Virgil says silvis ‘‘Did you think, Tyrrhenian, that you were hunting the wild animals in the woods [silvis]? ’’ instead of in silvis. So just as he omitted the preposition there with the word indicating a place, so he omitted it here with the province. This is a figure of speech. (Copeland and Sluiter 130-1) It is for this reason that poetry was the particular object of choice for grammatical analysis: the explanation of language could go hand in hand with stylistic notes on the auctores to instruct students about composition (Copeland and Sluiter 62-71). Even a commentary that is less fulsome than Servius’ on the Aeneid, and far less interested in grammatical usage, seems to combine the two approaches: Lactantius Placidus on the Thebaid is given to many comments on Statius’ style (the figures and tropes) 3 In editions of Servius it is conventional to italicize those passages representing the expanded “Servius Danielis” tradition. <?page no="234"?> 234 Rita Copeland and continually refers the reader back to Virgil, Horace, Cicero and other auctores to illustrate the richness of stylistic precedent on which Statius builds (Sweeney vii and passim). These objectives remained closely linked through the Middle Ages in terms of the teaching practices of grammar masters. The richest commentaries that represent higher levels of lecturing on the auctores show us how teachers continued to combine grammatical interests, literary understanding, and stylistic notes that could be applied to composition. But at some point, probably about the middle of the twelfth century, these functions also seem to have separated into more specialized strands, producing two distinctive kinds of treatises dealing with what we moderns would call the literary “canon,” one strand taking the canonical authors as objects of imitation, and the other strand focusing on the notion of a canon itself. 4 I doubt that this apparent separation of functions has more profound causes than the increasing specialization of teaching interests in the changing environment of twelfth century schools. The first of these strands is the arts of poetry, which emerged as a new preceptive genre in the middle or late twelfth century with Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria. These new arts took a consolidated approach to composition, combining practical advice on how to generate a text with examples from typically classical - and sometimes contemporary - works to illustrate stylistic strategies that a student might imitate. But for the most part they did not take it as a main object to establish norms of reading, even if their compositional teaching was predicated on a certain consensus about what should be read. Only one of the artes poetriae, Eberhard the German’s Laborintus, ventures into the curricular territory, and its exceptionalism will provide a useful point of comparison in the argument that follows. The question of curricular consensus - what makes the canon as a whole, and how should it be read - seems to become the property of the second specialized strand of grammatical treatise: surveys of curricular authors, the earliest of which, Conrad’s Dialogues super auctores, dates from the middle of the twelfth century. This second strand does not appear to be a big tradition, and the texts that I am going to discuss do not seem to have circulated extensively (nothing like the vast influence of the artes poetriae). 5 Normative canonical lists are not completely new 4 In its early uses, the term “canon” applied to a catalogue of sacred writings. Only in the eighteenth century was the term first used in philology to apply to secular literary history. See Curtius, 256n. 5 The Dialogus super auctores is known to its editor in only three manuscripts (Huygens 10- 17); Neckam’s Sacerdos ad altare survives in one copy; the Registrum multorum auctorum sur- <?page no="235"?> Producing the Lector 235 with the twelfth century: they are as old as grammatical pedagogy itself, and we find incipient versions of curricular surveys in earlier medieval accounts of schooling: for example, the Libellus scholasticus of Walter of Speyer (late tenth century), which is a poetic reminiscence of educational ascent from infancy to the higher stages of learning (ed. Vossen; see Curtius, 49). 6 But the later curricular treatises mark a decisive turn, because they are dedicated survey texts, suggesting that the literary curriculum is an autonomous and impersonal field of knowledge. These new works seem to have been responding to a certain perceived need. In this they sum up the outlooks of generations of teachers and readers about the canon as an institution in itself and about progression through the auctores. To be sure, the surveys are related to the larger medieval tradition of literary accessus ad auctores, and in some cases borrow directly from them. But they are different from the accessus in trying to grasp and structure an approach to the literary tradition as a whole rather than just to individual authors. And it is the question of the approach to the canon as a whole that I want to try to understand here. Conrad of Hirsau’s Dialogus super auctores can set the stage for us. It is the earliest of the curricular surveys, and thanks to the excellent edition by Huygens and the lucid translation of substantial sections by Minnis and Scott, probably the best known. It introduces twenty one authors from Donatus, Cato, the Latin fabulists, some of the scriptural versifiers of late antiquity, and Theodulus to a group that he calls the “Roman authors” presumably because of their shared romanitas, whether Christian or pagan (Whitbread 244): M. Veniamus nunc ad romanos auctores Aratorem, Prudentium, Tullium, Salustium, Boetium, Lucanum, Virgilium et Oratium modernorum studiis usitatos, quia veterum auctoritas multis aliis, id est historiographis, tragedis, comicis, musicis usa probatur, quibus certis ex causis moderni minime utuntur. D. Causam huius rei scire cupio. M. Teste Prisciano grammatico et nonnullis aliis multi gentilium libri christiana tempora precesserunt, in quibus antiqui studia sua contriverunt, quae non recipit nec approbat nunc ecclesia, quia facile respuitur vana et falsa doctrina ubi incipiunt clarescere divina. (Huygens 95.735-45) Master. Now we come to the Roman authors Arator, Prudentius, Tully, Sallust, Boethius, Virgil, and Horace, who are familiar in the studies of modvives in five manuscripts (Langosch 130-7); Cotton Titus D XX is the unique source of the collection of epitomes. 6 Walter refers to Virgil, the Latinized Homer, Martianus Capella, Horace, Persius, Juvenal, Boethius, Statius, Terence, and Lucan. <?page no="236"?> 236 Rita Copeland erns, for the authority of the ancients valued by many others, i.e writers of histories, tragedies, comedies, and musical works, is proven, [although] there are reasons why certain ones are read less by moderns. D. I should like to know the reason for this. M. As witnessed by Priscian the grammarian and various others, there were many books of the pagans that preceded the Christian era on which the ancients wasted their studies, and which the Church now does not recognize or approve, because where divine truths become evident, vain and false teaching is readily rejected. While at this point in the treatise Conrad’s list of “Roman” authors gives Arator, Prudentius, Tully (i.e. Cicero), Sallust, Boethius, Lucan, Virgil, and Horace (lines 735-9), the authors discussed and the actual order of treatment - not evenly distributed - are Arator, Prudentius, Tully, Sallust, Boethius, Lucan, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Juvenal, Homer (in Latinized reception), Persius, Statius, and Virgil (lines 749-1571). It is not made clear who those authors no longer much read by moderns and rejected by the Church might be: this category does not seem to fit the remaining six authors not listed but actually treated over the remaining course of the treatise, sometimes at length, i.e. Ovid, Terence, Juvenal, Homer, Persius, and Statius. The treatise as a whole is broadly didascalic, drawing from eleventhand twelfth-century predecessors, notably Bernard of Utrecht’s commentary on the Ecloga of Theodulus, to introduce critical terms for textual study, set pagan writings against Christian, and give an overview of the liberal arts and its value for Christian study. Overall the progression of the treatment is clear, from the authors considered easiest to those recognized as hardest, and of course this follows what had become a fairly standard curricular sequence. It appears that the romanitas that the Christian authors Arator and Prudentius share with the pagan authors Tully, Sallust, Boethius, Lucan, Virgil, and Horace (and in fact with most of the authors treated in the remainder of the work) accords them the higher status of “advanced authors.” But Conrad’s survey actually has relatively little to say about why or how one author is harder than the next. There are a few comments on nobility of style sprinkled throughout the work, often derived from contemporary accessus. The only indication of how the progression is gaged is some increasing attention to complexity of thought or style. There is an extended appreciation of Lucan’s high style invective and beautiful irony (110), which seems to verge on rhetorical advice (Wetherbee 125). Ultimately Virgil is recommended to the “knowing reader” who will see that the poet has mastered all the liberal arts (120.1507) and who will profit from discerning the exact nuance of Virgil’s Latinity (121.1538). Presumably Virgil’s <?page no="237"?> Producing the Lector 237 work fulfills the purpose of the technical precepts about literary study with which the treatise opens. In mastering Virgil’s poetry one becomes truly a reader. The context for Conrad’s survey is the twelfth-century monastic school, in which reading itself, even reading the secular authors, is the preparation for a spiritual vocation. So it is not surprising here to see the canonical authors graded - however ambiguously - by the quality of readers they produce. But when we turn to Alexander Neckam’s curricular list we have a much clearer set of formal and historical principles for the grouping of the auctores. Neckam’s Sacerdos ad altare is one of his major grammatical works, named for its opening phase Sacerdos ad altare accessurus (a priest who is about to approach the altar). Basically it is a storehouse of the technical words for aspects of priestly, monastic, ecclesiastical, courtly, clerical, and scribal life, written in fairly straightforward prose so as to demonstrate how the words would be used. Its most likely audience would have been the students at the abbey school of Cirencester where Neckam became abbot a few years later, although it looks back to the world of the grammar schools where Neckam had taught earlier in his life. 7 It works at a fairly advanced level, and culminates in a broad curricular survey which is encyclopedic in its scope, beginning with the literary education of grammar and then moving on to the scientific elements of the trivium, quadrivium, medicine, law, and theology. Overall the outlook is self-consciously (and rather proudly) professional, featuring Neckam’s up-to-date knowledge of the most recent additions to scientific lore. The curricular survey opens with the acquisition of literacy and moves from there to the literary canon: Postquam alphabetum didicerit et ceteris puerilibus rudimentis imbutus fuerit, Donatum et illud utile moralitatis compendium quod Catonis esse vulgus opinatur addiscat et ab Egloga Theodoli transeat ad egglogas Bucolicorum, prelectis tamen quibusdam libellis informationi rudium necessariis. 8 Deinde satiricos et ystoriographos legat, ut vitia etiam in minori etate addiscat esse fugienda et nobilia gesta eorum desideret imitari. A Thebaide iocunda transeat ad divinam Eneida, nec neggligat vatem quem Corduba genuit, qui non solum civilia bella describit sed et intestina. Juvenalis moralia dicta in archano pectoris reservet et flagitium nature summopere vitare studeat. Sermones Oratii et Epistolas legat et Poetriam et Odas cum libro Epodon. Elegias Nasonis et Ovidium Metamorfoseos audiat, sed et precipue libellum De remedio amoris familiarem habeat. Placuit tamen viris autenticis carmina amatoria cum satiris subducenda esse a manibus adolescencium, ac si eis dicatur, “Qui legitis flores et humi nascentia fraga / Frigidus, 7 On Neckam’s biography and career, see R. W. Hunt; McDonough. 8 On this passage see Copeland, “Naming.” <?page no="238"?> 238 Rita Copeland o pueri, fugite hinc, latet anguis in herba” [Virgil, Eclogues 3. 92-3]. Librum fastorum non esse legendum nonnullis placet. Statius Achilleidos etiam a viris multe gravitatis probatur. Bucolica Maronis et Georgica multe sunt utilitatis. Salustius et Tullius De oratore et Thuscanarum [sic] et De amicitia et De senectute et De fato multa commendatione digni sunt et Paradoxe. Liber inscriptus De multitudine deorum a quibusdam reprobatur. Tullius De officiis utilissimus est. Martialis cocus et Petronius multa continent in se utilia sed multa auditu indigna. Simachi breve genus dicendi admirationem parit. Solinum De mirabilibus mundi et Sydonium et Suetonium et Quintum Curtium et Trogium Pompeium et Crisippum et Titum Liphium commendo, sed Senecam ad Lucillum et De questionibus phisicis et De beneficiis relegere tibi utile censeas. Tragediam ipsius et Declamaciones legere non erit inutile. (T. Hunt 1: 269-70; cf. Haskins 90-2) After he has learned the alphabet and has been instructed in other rudimentary matters suitable for children, let him learn Donatus and that useful compendium of moralities which common opinion attributes to Cato, and let him move on from the Eclogue of Theodulus to the eclogues of the Bucolics, however having read beforehand certain little books needful for the instruction of beginners. Then let him read the satirists and historians, so that while he is young he may learn what kinds of actions are to be avoided and what noble actions of heroes he should seek to imitate. From the delightful Thebaid let him pass to the divine Aeneid; but let him not neglect the poet born in Cordova [i.e. Lucan] who described not just civil wars but internecine conflict. Let him take to heart the moral sayings of Juvenal and let him studiously shun disgrace to the greatest extent of his nature. Let him read the Satires and Epistles of Horace, and the Ars poetica and the Odes and Epodes. Let him hear the ‘‘Elegies’’ [i.e. Heroides] of Naso and the Metamorphoses of Ovid, but let him be especially familiar with the Remedia amoris. On the other hand it has pleased grown men that the song of love along with the satires be taken out of adolescent hands, as if it was said to them: ‘‘Ye who cull flowers and low-growing strawberries, away from here, lads; a chill snake lurks in the grass.’’ Some people feel that the Fasti should not be read. Men have found Statius’ Achilleid to be a most profound work. The Bucolics and Georgics of Virgilius Maro are very useful. The works of Sallust, and Tully’s De oratore and Tusculanae disputationes and De amicitia and De senectute and De fato are worthy of much commendation, along with the Paradoxa stoicorum. Some disapprove of the book called De multitudine deorum. Tully’s De officiis is most useful. Martial ‘‘Cocus’’ and Petronius contain much that is of use, but also much that is offensive to the ears. Symmachus’ brevity is admirable. I commend Solinus’ De mirabilibus mundi, and Sidonius, Suetonius, Quintus Curtius, Pompeius Trogus, Crisippus, and Titus Livius, but you may also think it worthwhile for you to reread Seneca’s Ad Lucilium [Epistulae morales] and De quaestionibus physicis and De beneficiis. It will not be useless to read his tragedy, and his Declamationes. (Copeland and Sluiter 536-7, with minor alterations) <?page no="239"?> Producing the Lector 239 Neckam’s list clarifies what he considers advanced reading, because he marks it off from what constitutes elementary study (Donatus, Cato, Theodulus). The advanced fare is “literary,” that is, the works can be described in terms of their literary affect (the “delightful” Thebaid, the “divine” Aeneid). The advanced reading is also primarily classical (which is not to say that he would not have considered Theodulus classical, but rather that a classical outlook generates the literary canon). In this way the survey looks back to the rather effete literary classicism of the Parisian and Orléannais schools of the twelfth century. The list may in fact reflect the influence of a classicizing florilegium which would provide names and material for this wide-ranging survey. It is important to note that the order of the list does not follow the order of reading: Neckam tells us that students should first read the satirists and historians, even though the satirists and the historians do not open the list. But this apparent inconsistency can be taken as a sign that an immediate pedagogical directive (the order of reading for moral instruction) has yielded to another critical purpose, the grouping of texts according to genre and form. So the satirists and historians might be read first, because they are the obvious candidates for instilling good morals. But they do not lead off the classification scheme. While the genre groupings do not resemble modern genre taxonomies, there is an obvious interest here in demonstrating how certain kinds of works belong together because of their external form, or their matter, or both. Neckam’s actual listing of authors begins with the most prestigious works: heroic poetry or epos, a classification familiar from ancient literary criticism and grammar. Thus the Thebaid (“delightful”), the Aeneid (“divine”) and the Pharsalia lead off the list. Juvenal, Horace, and Ovid follow, in contiguity with each other, perhaps loosely linked by the theme of satire (thus also perhaps stressing the satirical strains in both Horace and Ovid). In the listing of the works of Horace and Ovid there seems to be another subordinate principle: the recognition of an oeuvre that, however heterogeneous in matter and form, is unified by reference to the author’s name. Then follow the lesser works of Statius and Virgil (whose works fall so clearly into “major” and “minor” that the oeuvres can be broken up), then Sallust and Tully grouped together perhaps as prose writers, perhaps as political commentators, perhaps as both; then Martial and Petronius as satirical poets; then the long list of historians or sources of historical knowledge, and finally on his own, Seneca. Even if Neckam’s groupings are not taxonomically strict, they have a great deal to tell us about how a schoolmaster might approach the task of teaching what we call literary history. Indeed, we could go further to say that Neckam is inventing literary history here, or inventing a means for comprehending the canon in literary historical terms. The taxonomy <?page no="240"?> 240 Rita Copeland is a heuristic device which in itself teaches an approach to knowledge. The main organizational principles here are external form: verse and prose, long poem and short poem, and genre (here broadly conceived along medieval lines): fiction and history, morality and satire, political writing. The framing of the discussion indicates that these are the advanced authors, so there is no need for further insistence on their prestige. Neckam’s list is surprisingly similar to the reading list for a modern Ph.D. comprehensive exam on the American university model, designed to produce a reader who has a scientific mastery of a fixed subject. Such lists do not (deliberately) produce composers of poetry who will imitate the models before them. This is, indeed, a grammar of literary history, not a compositional rhetoric. Neckam’s list achieves a remarkable effect. The subject of the list is literary history as a whole, not serial coverage of individual authors ranging from easy to hard. Thus the authors serve a purpose, not in themselves, but in terms of their function in a scientific system the principles of which can be grasped when the canon is laid out as a whole. In some respects the value of the list is greater than the combined value of authorial prestige, because the list holds the key to everything else. The critical idea that the reader is meant to take away will be of classification itself. Hugh of Trimberg’s Registrum multorum auctorum, from about 1280, is a schoolmaster’s catalogue of incipits of poems, along with brief, informative statements about each work, in order to facilitate recognition when the student encounters the work in a collection. 9 But quite apart from recognition of the texts themselves, it also encourages learning and remembering of literary history, rather like the old college outlines series which were intended to give easily memorized historical overviews. It is not really a curricular taxonomy in the manner of Neckam’s, but rather a catalogue or a guide to reading (although it certainly assumes its own prescriptive force). But like Neckam, Hugh is very clear about which authors are to be considered advanced. The different levels of author - elementary, middling, and advancedoccupy different positions in his treatise, the structure of which he explains as follows: 9 For further discussion and sources, see Copeland and Sluiter 55-6, 550, and introduction to the selection from Registrum multorum auctorum 657-8. <?page no="241"?> Producing the Lector 241 Sic secundum ordinem locentur digniores, 350 Ut in fine sedeant ethici minores! Per maiores ethicos lectores inflati Possunt quiem fieri, per medios beati; Sunt ex hoc in medio theorici locati; Est etenim scriptum: medium tenuere beati. 355 Cumque finem occupent ethici minores, Docent huius seculi quoslibet maiores, Si laudes perpetuas querant et honores, Ut semper credant se cunctis inferiores. (Langosch 174-5) In the order of this treatise, the more advanced authors are placed first, so that the lesser ethical authors come at the end. Readers can be inspired by the greater ethical authors, and have blessed joy from the authors who come in the middle. So the theological 10 authors are placed in between, for it is written: the blessed hold to the mean. Because the lesser ethical authors come last of all, they teach the great men of this world that if they seek constant praise and honor, it is because they always believe themselves to be lesser than all. (Copeland and Sluiter 667-8) As we discover, it is the framework of the treatise, rather than what he says about each author, that most distinguishes the elementary from the advanced authors. The order of the advanced authors, those who appear in the first section, is: Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, Lucan, Statius, and “Homerus minor” or the Ilias latina; then the verse grammarians, especially the medieval verse grammars of Alexander of Villa Dei and Eberhard of Béthune who have achieved equal status with the ancient grammarians Donatus and Priscian; then Boethius and Claudian; and then the modern writers Alan of Lille, Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Walter of Chatillon, and John of Garland. These highest ethical authors seem to be the point of arrival for the oldest students, after they have passed through the authors of middling difficulty (ancient Christian writers and modern writers of Christian or other useful doctrine) and of easiest access (again ancient and modern writers on Christian or moral themes, including matter usually associated with the Cato-book). The obvious points here are that the classical pagan poets lead off the list as the ethical summit, followed by a few moderns who have risen to the standards set by the ancients. But once we leave the framework of the treatise and its divisions into advanced, middling, and 10 Treating the word theorici as theologici. Langosch (223, at line 354) notes that theoricus carries the meaning in this context of theologicus. <?page no="242"?> 242 Rita Copeland elementary, the purpose of the grouping of the advanced authors is a little less clear. Hugh’s canon of classical poets includes almost all the same names as the Roman poets mentioned in Conrad of Hirsau’s Dialogus; in fact Hugh’s modern editor, Karl Langosch, has shown how much Hugh seems to depend on Conrad’s earlier treatise for information about and choice of authors. In Conrad the selection of authors was fixed to a notion of romanitas whether pagan or Christian. But Hugh’s list is driven by a more decisive notion of a “classical” canon, with the Christian epic poets Prudentius and Arator now placed among the “middle” authors. The pedagogical calibration, from easiest to most advanced authors, is hardly new with Hugh of Trimberg, nor is placing the classical authors in the category of “most difficult.” As we have seen, Conrad of Hirsau also presents a progression of mastery and textual sophistication from the Cato-book to Virgil, the master and pupil posing increasingly difficult questions of each other as they ascend through the curricular canon. What I believe is new in Hugh’s treatise is that he reformulates levels of textual difficulty in terms of what seem to be levels of ethical preparation in the reader, not ethical challenge in the author. The “ethics” of the ethical writers are not in the writers or their works, but in the students, who must achieve a degree of intellectual and moral awareness that cannot be hurried (cf. Gillespie 150-60, 187, 224). In other words, the lesser authors are not less “ethical” than the greater authors: it is the reader who has greater or lesser capacity to benefit when confronted with a particular author. And every level is ethically complete unto itself: every reader can derive the most possible benefit from the readings appropriate to his level, because presumably the core of ethical teaching is not mutable (this is reminiscent of Augustine’s conception of the low, middle, and high styles, all of which convey the same message of conversion and pious love, but which are keyed to different audiences). But what this means for the classical authors is that they are not really part of a continuum from elementary to advanced (as is so explicit in Conrad), but rather seem to form their own ethical cluster, alongside of the middling authors (Christian authors of antiquity and the Middle Ages) and the elementary authors (the Cato-book and its like). In effect the classical authors constitute their own self-sufficient ethical canon, bringing along with them a select number of medieval writers who are regarded as classicizing in genre or form: the new grammarians who have almost superseded the ancient ones, Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and De planctu Naturae, Matthew of Vendôme’s biblical epic Tobias, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, Walter of Chatillon’s quasi-epic Alexandreis, and John of Garland’s Parisiana poetria, which is cited because of the variety of classical meters it illustrates. So it appears that the ethical <?page no="243"?> Producing the Lector 243 self-sufficiency of each of Hugh’s groups overrides the long-traditional structure of a continuum from elementary to advanced. Each of the groupings, the advanced authors, the elementary, and the middling forms its own canon, at once inviting and producing a specific kind of reader. It was perhaps in response to this subgenre of grammatical teaching, the curricular list, that a late ars poetriae, the Laborintus of Eberhard the German, includes a canon of authors along with its compositional advice to students (Faral 336-77). 11 It is not clear when Eberhard wrote the Laborintus: possibly as late as about 1280 (placing it within the immediate horizon of Hugh’s Registrum multorum auctorum), or possibly much earlier in the thirteenth century. As a prescriptive compositional rhetoric, the Laborintus follows the program of the earlier artes poetriae of Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Gervase of Melkley, and John of Garland. In its central conceit, a narrative in which the personifications Grammatica and Poesis present their respective doctrinal teachings, it borrows the fashionable literary form of the didactic allegories of the twelfth century (Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille); but its purpose is identical with that of the earlier artes poetriae. Yet unlike those earlier artes, which use curricular authors in context to exemplify certain literary techniques, the Laborintus also introduces a formal list of curricular authors. This is a free-standing catalogue, presented in the voice of the figure Poesis at the juncture between her teaching of the colores rhetorici and her final topic, meter. It is a substantial list: Cato, Theodulus, Avianus, Aesop, Maximianus, the comedies Pamphilus and the Geta of Vitalis of Blois, Statius, Ovid, Horace’s satires, Juvenal, Persius, the Architrenius, Virgil, Lucan, the Alexandreis, Claudian, Dares’ De excidio Troiae, the Ilias latina, Sidonius, the twelfth-century Solimarius of Gunther de Paris, the herbals of Macer, Marbod of Rennes, Peter Riga’s Aurora, Sedulius, Arator, Prudentius, the Anticlaudianus, the Tobias, Alexander of Villa Dei, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Eberhard of Béthune, Prosper of Aquitaine, Matthew of Vendôme, Martianus Capella, Boethius, and Bernardus Silvestris (Faral lines 599-686). The list has some interesting overlaps with the modern authors in Hugh’s survey, but the principles that underlie its organization are not comparably clear. Modern and ancient are interspersed, and the supposedly more advanced poets such as Virgil sit among the traditionally easier authors such as Claudian and Dares. But the purpose of Eberhard’s list is contextual: the authors provide the highest models of stylistic virtue for those who would themselves be proficient stylists (cf. Purcell 114-15). The brilliant Persius “verrucis animi non parcit . . . quamvis sit brevitatis 11 On the Laborintus see Purcell; Kelly; Curtius 50-1. <?page no="244"?> 244 Rita Copeland amans” (spares no fault of character . . . even though he may be fond of brevity, Faral lines 627-8); Peter Riga “legem mellifluo texit utramque stylo” (interweaves the two testaments in mellifluous style, lines 653- 4). 12 The authors are the protegés of Poesis herself, who exclaims: “Quam plures alii metri dulcedine quadam / Ducti se legi supposuere meae! ” (How many others are led to place themselves under my governance for the sake of sweet meter, lines 685-6). Thus although this may look like a curricular list, its stated function is quite different from what we see in Conrad of Hirsau, Alexander Neckam, and Hugh of Trimberg. Eberhard’s Laborintus seems to be a hybrid work, incorporating the subgenre of the list of authors in a compositional manual which subsumes the canonical list to its own preceptive purpose. The last work to be considered here is the least known of all these treatises, and is rather hard to place in terms of its genre: it is a collection of literary summaries, excerpts, and overviews that occupies the last 100 folios of British Library Cotton Titus D. XX. It forms part of a codex with other diverse works - thirteenthand fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin and English writings, including the De nominibus utensilium of Alexander Neckam - which were all broken up from other codices and rebound together by or for Robert Cotton. The collection of literary summaries is almost certainly not from England (though it was in England by the late sixteenth century): it is most likely Italian, judging by the literary references it contains, including a summary of a treatise on Roman history by the Florentine humanist Andrea Domenico Fiocco who died in 1452, and whose treatise was printed in 1475. So this collection of epitomes was made sometime in the second half of the fifteenth century. Dr. Greti Dinkova-Bruun of the Pontifical Institute has done the most extensive research on this epitome collection, and I am grateful to her for sharing her expertise with me. 13 A list of the contents of this text will give a sense of its unusual character: epitomes of allegorical mythography based on Fulgentius and others, of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis (only the first two books), of Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia, of Lucan’s Pharsalia, the story of the hero Perseus, of Peter Riga’s Aurora, of Rufus’ life of the martyr Afra, of Seneca’s tragedies, of dream theory (mentioning Macrobius and Boccac- 12 Indeed, puns on style abound throughout the catalogue, drawing attention to Eberhard’s own stylistic mastery, e.g. “Felici scribente stylo Felice Capella / Nubit Mercurio Philologia deo” (lines 679-80). 13 My account of the text and its contents draws on her forthcoming article, which she graciously showed me in typescript. We plan to collaborate on an article about the treatise, its contents, and its place in literary history. <?page no="245"?> Producing the Lector 245 cio’s De genealogia), of Martial’s epigrams, of the Argonautica, of information about the deity Hymen, of Claudian’s poetry, of Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, of Jean d’Hanville’s Architrenius; an epitome of the lives and writings of the philosophers, a similar epitome (alphabetized) of the poets (to which I will return), epitomes of a number of pious or historical works including the treatise by Fiocco and later on a summary of information about Joseph of Arimathea, and an epitome of Quintus Curtius’ account of Alexander the Great. The alphabetized epitome of the poets, “poetarum vitae et scripta,” which is only a chapter in the larger text, is itself quite a remarkable document: it lists more than fifty authors, almost all of them classical, mostly Latin but some Greek, and all of them of the “advanced authors” level according to the standards of earlier curricular surveys. At the end of this chapter (fol. 167r) the compiler mentions Isidore of Seville as a source of the names here. But there are “moderns” who make it into the list, just as a few moderns made it into the larger group of epitomes of which the list of poets is only a chapter. Alan of Lille is in the list, but it also includes Petrarch, “poet of the Florentine nation,” with a mention of his Latin epic Africa (fol. 161r); it includes Boccaccio, summarizing the whole of De genealogia gentilium (fols. 161v-162r.); and most spectacularly it includes Dante, mentioning each book of the Commedia, and drawing attention to Dante’s “vernacular speech”: “Dantes de Aledigeriis poeta Florentinus tres de Paradiso uidelicet Purgatorio et Inferno / (fol. 160v) in suo uulgari eloquio scripsit notabiles comedias” (transcription in Dinkova-Bruun note 25). This is the only vernacular work mentioned in the collection, either in the group of epitomes as a whole or in the specialized chapter on the lives and writings of the poets. The exceptionalism of Dante’s vulgar writings in this otherwise Latinate author survey is more fuel to recent arguments about Dante’s peculiar success in manufacturing his authorial status as vernacular poet, notably Albert Ascoli’s recent study of Dante and “modern” authorship. Here Dante’s “vernacular eloquence” has migrated into a proto-humanist canon. This heterogeneous collection of epitomes fits into no established genre. It is certainly no curricular survey of authors nor, as some have thought, can it really be considered a school text (cf. Smits). There is no obvious pedagogical framework here, no progression from easiest to hardest, and not even a chronological division (as we saw in Hugh of Trimberg). The schoolroom as well as literary favorites Virgil, Ovid, and Horace are gone (except for their mention in the alphabetized list of authors, the epitome within the epitome), and the only principle of selection seems to be private taste, showing a strong preference for difficult authors along with an inclination towards allegory, mythography, <?page no="246"?> 246 Rita Copeland history, philosophy, and poetic knowledge. It has no flavor of the “preview,” as in Hugh of Trimberg’s register, but might rather be described as the opposite, a distillation of important facts and ideas after the works have been read. It might best be seen as something of a private guide to educated taste, quasi-humanist in outlook. 14 Dante’s vernacular presence in this otherwise Latin canon would surely suggest that it is a record of cultivated private reading. But as such, it is not really a very distant step from the teachings of the earlier medieval schoolmasters on the advanced authors. For as I have suggested, the “advanced authors” of the classical canon are directed towards forming ideal readers, not imitative authors. In Conrad of Hirsau, that formation seems to lie (rather uncertainly) in the mastery of Latinity and the technology of reading. In Alexander Neckam’s work, the classical authors provide a grammar of literary history and literary form, illustrating the principles that go into making a taxonomy. In Hugh of Trimberg, the advanced level of the canon reflects a corresponding ethical advancement in its ideal readers, and here a select few modern authors may be admitted into the grouping of the classical canon. In terms of the cultivation of readerly tastes, these earlier texts seem to be continuous with, or to point towards, the apparent purpose of the epitome collection in Cotton Titus D.XX: a summing up of a reading program, the formation of a reader in the image of a classicized canon. The heterogeneity of the works cited in this fifteenth-century reader’s guide, the mixing of ancient and “modern” works, is simply an advancement on Hugh of Trimberg’s opening of the classical canon to modern authors. The inclusion of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in its otherwise classical list of “Poets” suggests that the category poetae, i.e. “the classics,” signifies the highest level of educated taste in the reader rather than the temporal remove of antiquity. I have presented these texts as if along a continuum, because I believe that they show us that there is much less of a difference between medieval and early humanist uses of ancient literary culture than we often assume. The latest of these texts, the compilation of epitomes, seems to bridge medieval and early modern outlooks on producing the reader. As a category in medieval grammar curricula, the “advanced authors” are not models for schoolboy compositional exercises, or indeed for imitation of any kind, but markers of a certain level of readerly skill. The criteria for authorial prestige are expressed in terms of how readers cultivate themselves through the texts, not in terms of qualities inherent in the authors. In other words, these canonical surveys decisively shift their attention away from whatever may be in the text and 14 I draw here from Dinkova-Bruun’s speculations about the possible motivations behind this work. <?page no="247"?> Producing the Lector 247 direct it to what is in the reader. And this I believe is the key critical lesson exported beyond the classroom to define authorial selfconsciousness in medieval culture. Here we might think of Chaucer’s list of authors in book 3 of the House of Fame, or rather, his visual survey of authors standing on their pillars. This is not a list of authors for imitation, but a record and representation of a compulsive reader’s formation through a time-honored canon. As in the canonical lists that precede his, Chaucer’s list represents a decidedly grammatical, not rhetorical or compositional, mode of reading, even though it occurs in his own poem, at one of its most readerly junctures. In the grammatical subgenre that I have described here, the focus is not on style or local effects or even on the individual authors, but on the authors collectively as points on a large mental or ethical map. In the early Dialogus super auctores of Conrad of Hirsau, the notion of an ethical ascent through the canon is mapped out, if only imperfectly. From the turn of the twelfth century, in Alexander Neckam’s Sacerdos ad altare, the advanced authors comprise a scheme of literary history according to taxonomic principles of genre. In Hugh of Trimberg’s Registrum multorum auctorum, the advanced authors do not so much instill ethics as require what is already a certain capacity of ethical preparation in the reader. The collection of epitomes from the fifteenth century takes this one step further to present a record of private reading that does not seem to be prescriptive or future-oriented, and in which the prestige of the authors is marked by the demonstrated discernment of the reader. And it is this role, the ethical self-cultivation of the private reader, that the classical canon would continue to play, on a much larger stage, throughout the humanist period. <?page no="248"?> 248 Rita Copeland References Ascoli, Albert Russell. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Copeland, Rita, and Ineke Sluiter, eds. Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. . “Naming, Knowing, and the Object of Language in Alexander Neckam’s Grammar Curriculum.” Journal of Medieval Latin 20 (2010): 38-57. Curtius, E. R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. W. R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, reprint 1990. Dinkova-Bruun, Greti. “Medieval Miscellanies and the Case of Manuscript British Library, Cotton Titus D.XX,” forthcoming in Lucie Doležalová and Kimberly Rivers, eds. Medieval Manuscript Miscellanies: Composition, Intention, Use (consulted in typescript). Faral, Edmond, ed. Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle. Paris: Champion, 1924. Gillespie, Vincent. “From the Twelfth Century to c. 1450.” The Cambridge Companion to Literary Criticism. Vol. 2, The Middle Ages. Ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 145-235. Gräbener, H.-J., ed. Gervase of Melkley. Ars poetica. Forschungen zur romanischen Philologie 17. Münster: Aschendorf, 1965. Haskins, Charles Homer. “A List of Textbooks from the Close of the Twelfth Century.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 20 (1909): 75-94. Reprint in Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924. 356- 76. Hunt, R. W. The Schools and the Cloister : The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam (1157-1217). Ed. and revised by Margaret Gibson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Hunt, Tony. Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England. 3 vols. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1991. Huygens, R. B. C., ed. Accessus ad auctores, Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau: Dialogues super auctores. Leiden: Brill, 1970. Kelly, Douglas. “The Scope and Treatment of Composition in the Twelfthand Thirteenth-Century Arts of Poetry.” Speculum 41 (1966): 261- 78. Langosch, Karl, ed. Das “Registrum multorum auctorum” des Hugo von Trimberg. Germanische Studien 235. Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1942. <?page no="249"?> Producing the Lector 249 McDonough, Christopher J. “Cambridge, University Library, Gg.6.42, Alexander Neckam, and the Sacerdos ad altare.” Studi medievali 46 (2005): 783-809. Minnis, A. J., and B. Scott, eds., with David Wallace. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100 c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Purcell, William M. “Eberhard the German and the Labyrinth of Learning: Grammar, Poesy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy in Laborintus.” Rhetorica 11 (1993): 95-118. Smits, Edmé R. “A Medieval Epitome of the Historia Alexandri by Quintus Curtius Rufus: MS. London BL Cotton Titus D.XX and MS. Oxford Corpus Christi College 82.” Classica et Mediaevalia 42 (1991): 279- 300. Sweeney, R. D. ed. Lactantii Placidi in Statii Thebaida commentum 1. Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner, 1997. Thilo, George and Herman Hagen, eds. Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1881-7 Vossen, Peter, ed. Der Libellus scholasticus des Walter von Speyer. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1962. Wetherbee, Winthrop. “From Antiquity to the Twelfth Century.” The Cambridge Companion to Literary Criticism. Vol. 2, The Middle Ages. Ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 99-144. Whitbread, Leslie G. “Conrad of Hirsau as Literary Critic.” Speculum 47 (1972): 235-45. Woods, Marjorie Curry, and Rita Copeland. “Classroom and Confession.” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Ed. David Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 376-406. <?page no="251"?> The Logic of Authorship in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi The paper analyses the function of the speaking voice in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde from the point of view of medieval sign theory. The idea of change is argued to be one of the most relevant in the poem and the paper shows that it can be extended to include the first-person pronoun in the text. At times the pronoun stands for the narrating voice, but can also refer to an apocryphal author who pretends to translate from a fictitious Latin source. By analysing the lines of the poem as propositions, it is possible to highlight the points where the first-person pronoun supponit pro, stands for the narrator, who is not part of the story, and those where the speaking voice becomes that of an author who uses his feigned source in an autonomous and critical way. The paper argues that the transformation occurs whenever the emphasis concerns the nature and the uses of language and whenever they become the object of a metalinguistic analysis. By pretending that the poem is the translation of an authoritative text, and by interpreting the idea of translation in terms of linguistic change, the apocryphal author emphasises the fact that authorship is a matter of re-elaboration rather than of mere imitation. Troilus and Criseyde is Chaucer’s Mutability Canto. The idea of change is one of the most important in the poem and is explored from every point of view. Criseyde’s inconstant attitude toward Troilus’s love, from the first hesitation to the final betrayal, becomes the occasion for an analysis of every possible transformation in nature, language and human behaviour, which provides the story with a multiplicity of possible interpretations. According to Aristotle’s Physics, nature is “a principle of motion and change” Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 251-263. <?page no="252"?> 252 Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi (Weisheipl 527), and this is at the basis of all considerations of transformation, both in the physical world and in man’s actions. Moreover, if we take into account the fact that two treatises included in the Aristoteles Latinus, Physics and De anima, were often studied together, it is easy to see that the ideas of motion and change could be transferred from the analysis of the physical world to that of the motus animae, and to emotions in particular. In fourteenth-century England the so-called Oxford calculators, the philosophers and mathematicians of Merton College, concentrated on the moments when motion begins and ends. Treatises de primo et ultimo instanti or propositions including such verbs as incipit or desinit considered these moments to be problematic and worthy of analysis (Courtenay 243). In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde change appears to be the leit motiv of the story: the sight of Criseyde changes Troilus’s sceptical attitude towards love, the intervention of Pandarus changes Criseyde’s disposition towards Troilus; the (ex)change of Criseyde for Antenor provides the story with its turning point for the destinies both of Troilus and Troy, since Antenor will prove to be a traitor of his country and Troy’s end is traditionally related to the death of Troilus. Finally, Diomedes’s words change once more Criseyde’s behaviour towards Troilus. Less macroscopic changes are caused by the main ones and become signs of feelings and emotions. I will only mention the change in the colour of Troilus’s face whenever he experiences strong emotions related to his love for Criseyde or to his grief for her behaviour. To the traditional pallor of the lover, described by Andreas Capellanus, Chaucer adds moments of subtle changes when Criseyde forms the object of Troilus’s remembrance or when he, before her empty palace, calls back to his mind the time they spent together. All these situations modify the emotions of the lover and the change in hue is the visible sign of this modification. The text thematises this from the very beginning, when Troilus’s “double sorwe” is explained in terms of movement: “fro wo to wele, and after out of joie”(Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde I 4). The complex structure of the poem - the fiction of the Latin text from which the story is translated - invites consideration of another way of rendering the idea of change a structural feature of the poem, that is the creation of a speaking voice that is shifting in nature, and varies from that of a storyteller - the more or less traditional narrator of a well-known story - to that of an apocryphal author who, disguised as a translator, shows how poetry, and writing in general, can be signs as well as causes of change through a modification of the world picture and of the literary tradition. The theme has been explored in a seminal work by Eugene Vance (Marvelous Signals 268-70) from the point of view of Chaucer’s idea of history. <?page no="253"?> The Logic of Authorship 253 Two essential characteristics of the poem show that the role of the speaking voice is not always the same. It can therefore be interesting to analyse the points where its function changes. The first is the alreadymentioned fiction of the Latin source. It has been noticed that the invention of the Latin - and therefore authoritative - text, and of the imaginary author Lollius, gives the poet a greater freedom “with an increasing number of possible reading conditions” (Lawton 13), a freedom that is comparable to the one the dreamer-persona enjoys when relating the dream experience (Lawton 14). To this I would like to add that the feigned source and the invented ancient author serve also another purpose: They help to create a speaking voice that is at times the external narrator of a fictitious Latin text, but becomes also a sort of character in the vernacular story when the feigned translator engages in a constant comparison between his own work and that of the imaginary author. The Latin text is therefore en abîme within the vernacular poem, and this in itself doubles the speaking voice. A second feature concerns the fact that the unhappy outcome of the story is known from the beginning and the opening lines of each book remind the audience of that. There is nothing new to be learned from the progress of the narration and readers seem to be invited to concentrate on the way the story is told rather than on the events themselves. The emphasis is therefore, as has long been recognised by many scholars (among others, Delany, Chaucer’s “House of Fame” 103 ff.; Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets 30-4; Windeatt, The Oxford Guides to Chaucer 251-4), on the development of the narrative techniques and on the way the text is built. The mutable speaking voice renders the fictitious authoritative source less dogmatic and assertive. It is then interesting to analyse some of the points where the first-person pronoun, the “I,” is used, in order to establish whether it refers to the fictitious translator or to an apocryphal author who re-elaborates the old story in an original way. As Emil Benveniste (303) and Roman Jakobson (154) have observed, the first-person pronoun has a special place in language and has a different status with respect to the other pronouns, since it refers directly to the actual situation of discourse. The only reality to which the firstperson pronoun refers is the speech act in which it appears. In terms of sign theory, the first-person pronoun is what modern linguists call an “empty sign” since it only signifies in the actual situation of discourse in which it is used, and ceases to signify when the speech act is concluded. Even if the “I” is repeated in the same message, there can be no certainty that it has the same reference. This kind of approach to the complex relationship between the first-person pronoun and its referents is an example of the way medieval logic interpreted ancient grammatical categories in order to develop an analysis of the parts of speech in terms <?page no="254"?> 254 Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi of sign theory. In the case we are considering here, the multiplex propositio, that is the ambiguous sentence (Vance, From Topic to Tale), can be analysed by means of two important concepts. The first is the concept of impositio, that is the conventional meaning attributed to a term (Pinborg 138-42; Knudsen 480). From this point of view, it can be argued that the first-person pronoun needs a new impositio whenever it becomes part of a proposition. The second is the distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic terms, that is between those terms that have meanings in their own right and those who signify only when they are joined to categorematic words. Henry of Ghent has an interesting way of explaining the difference between these important concepts of logic. Terms are said to be syncategorematic “not because they signify nothing on their own, but because they have a signification that is not definite, but indefinite, a signification whose definiteness they derive from those words that are adjoined to them” (Kretzmann 213). From this point of view, personal pronouns are believed to signify nothing unless they refer to a person who is present when they are uttered. The result is that the logicians’ interpretation of categorematic and syncategorematic terms is more flexible than the grammarians’, since it takes into account the whole proposition rather than the single word only. This approach is really a step further, because it does not require a new proposition for each situation, as the idea of impositio necessarily implies, but considers the change in meaning according to the context in which the first-person pronoun happens to find itself. If this point of view is developed and extended to all terms that are either subjects or predicates in a proposition, the idea of significatio can more profitably be replaced by that of suppositio, that is the reference of the word within the context in which it is used. This concept is based on the interpretation of the term - the element of a proposition - as a sign, that is, as a substitute for objects, and this establishes a connection between logic and semantics. Moreover, in fourteenth-century semiotics, after William of Ockham’s and John Buridan’s work, the sign is no longer an instrument to get from the visible (signifier) to the intelligible (signified), but a way to explain reality and make human knowledge possible (Biard 55). I would like to argue that these important changes in the traditional thought, and above all the interpretation of problems of knowledge in terms of linguistic ones, provide the cultural context for the problematic attitude Troilus and Criseyde shows throughout. The question now becomes: What does the “I” stand for (supponit pro)? When can we say that the reference changes and the first-person pronoun no longer indicates the narrator, but the apocryphal author who establishes a close relationship with the feigned source by amplify- <?page no="255"?> The Logic of Authorship 255 ing, reducing, commenting on the text he pretends to be translating? Sometimes the feigned source is explicitly mentioned; expressions such as “myn auctour” or “as Lollius seith” are frequent in the poem, and in this case the speaking voice is obviously that of the fictitious translator, who engages in the interpretation of the feigned Latin source (Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages 184). But generally the identity of the speaking voice is not so clear; in reflecting on its relationship with the feigned authoritative text, sometimes the speaking voice develops a sort of metalanguage that transforms the linguistic sign from referential to reflexive and the function of the narrator changes to that of an apocryphal author. Whenever this occurs, the authority of the ancient text is challenged and the idea of authority is in itself discussed (Delany, Chaucer’s “House of Fame”). If the speaking voice is that of an apocryphal author, to establish a dialogue with an audience becomes more important than if it was that of a mere translator. This is why the I/ you relationship is greatly emphasised throughout the poem and the audience is frequently directly addressed e.g. in such expressions as “er that I part fro ye” (I. 5) “have he my thonk, and myn be this travaille! ”(I. 21). An interesting example of the insistence on the act of writing, of highlighting the moment when the text is produced, can be found at the very beginning of the poem: “Thesiphone, thow help me for t’ endite / Thise woful vers that wepen as I write (I. 6-7, italics mine). Chaucer’s real source, Boccaccio’s Filostrato (I. 6), has “Il mio verso lagrimoso.” Barry Windeatt in his comment translates: “my tearful verses” and quotes Boece “Allas! , I wepyng am constreyned to bygynnen vers of sorwful matere” (I. 1; Windeatt, ed. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde 353). But Chaucer’s lines express an idea that is different in quite a subtle way. The verses are not said to cause tears in people who read them, but to weep themselves while they are being composed. Thus they are personified and declared to be the real agents of the poet for the communication of the tragedy of Troilus. The speaking voice transfers to the verses the emotions that the tragic events arouse and they become not only the vehicles, but the real protagonists of the feelings that are so strongly communicated. In this way the process of composition is emphasised and writing becomes, as it were, part of the story, something to reflect about and comment on. But here comes the second half of the verse: as I write. If verses weep and are signs of Troilus’s “double sorwe,” the opening stanza of the poem indirectly questions the role of the person who causes the lines to represent suffering so effectively. The picture now becomes clearer: the first-person pronoun, repeated six times in the first three stanzas, shows the speaking voice to be an active agent in the narrative and to take on the role of an apocryphal author. The fictitious ancient text is therefore a source not only of dispositio, but <?page no="256"?> 256 Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi of inventio as well, whereby the new work (the “translation” into the vernacular) becomes as authoritative as the feigned original. In the language of logic the first-person pronoun, supponit pro, stands for an apocryphal author. The fiction of the Latin source and of the vernacular translation implies that change, that is a re-elaboration of the ancient text, is not only acceptable but necessary. This is clearly expressed at the beginning of the second book. The insistence on the narrator’s personal inexperience in matters of love (“of no sentement I this endite”) is followed by remarks on the mutability of language: Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so, And spedde as wel in love as men now do; Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages, In sondry londes, sondry ben usages. (II. 22-28, italics mine) The two statements, the lack of experience in love matters and the remarks on language, coming as they do one after the other, suggest that the kind of experience the narrator possesses does not concern the subject of the narration, but the construction of the narrative. His experience is that of a writer who reflects about the nature of language and is aware of its characteristics, among which change plays an essential role, especially when texts are compared, as it occurs in translation. The superiority of Latin - the fact that it does not change any more - is also its limit; as Dante had argued in De vulgari eloquentia, the various vernaculars can better account for the changes to which everything existing in nature is subject, which an immutable language would be inadequate to describe (Fyler 128-9). It is because of the consciousness that language is subject to change that - a few lines below - the usual statement that the Latin source will be followed closely takes a more doubtful form: “Myn auctour shal I folwen, if I konne” (II. 49, italics mine). Change is in the nature of things. Ideas on love and the behaviour of lovers change from place to place and with time. Therefore, the close imitation of an ancient source may no longer be possible and would in any case sharply contrast with the modernity of the vernacular. I would, however, argue that this important line has a double meaning: “in forme of speche is chaunge” certainly shows a writer’s consciousness of changes in language, but it can also be interpreted in the sense that every change can only be known if it is in the form of speech, if a way can be found of putting it in words, of forming propositions out of it. This interpretation is possible because of the greater flexibility <?page no="257"?> The Logic of Authorship 257 in the construction of sentences that is typical of middle English dialects, where the respective positions of the parts of the proposition are freer than in the modern language - a freedom also enjoyed by poetry with respect to prose. But the fact remains that, according to the interpretation we chose to adopt, the word “chaunge” refers to the mutability of linguistic expressions or to the possibility of expressing change and therefore of making it known, so that people can become aware of it. The object of knowledge - Robert Holkot maintains - is not the world, but the proposition. And William of Ockham states that even mental language is a language in its own right: no communication is possible between thought and thought (Biard). Again, the analogy with dreams is striking. No direct communication of the dream experience is possible except through narration. Therefore, only words can express change, and it is the writer’s task to convey new meanings out of an old text, an idea Chaucer expressed before the composition of his longer poem, in The Parliament of Fowls: For out of olde feldes, as men seith, Cometh al this newe corn fro yer to yere; And out of olde bokes, in good feith, Cometh al this newe science that men lere. (22-5) Authorship is a question of re-elaboration, not of mere imitation. In Troilus and Criseyde the choice of what to say and what to omit is often justified by the speaking voice with the fact that he has decided to write about the love of Troilus for Criseyde and not about the war in which Troy was engaged, and sometimes he pretends to agree with his source in leaving out some details, e.g. the letters that the lovers exchanged: For ther was som epistel hem bitwene That wolde, as seyth myn auctour, wel contene Neigh half this book, of which hym liste nought write. How sholde I thanne a lyne of it endite? (III. 501-4) The “I” who agrees with the fictitious source is a voice that has taken on the function of an apocryphal author, who is anxious to give his text a structural balance. Sometimes he pretends to disagree with his feigned authority and to emphasise different aspects of the story or give different interpretations to its meanings. For example, even if he has to follow his fictitious source, he is interested in highlighting the tragic aspects of the story and is unwilling to insist too much on the episodes that do not emphasise the essentially dramatic quality of the narrative: <?page no="258"?> 258 Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi What myghte or may the sely larke seye Whan that the sperhauk hat it in his foot? I kan namore; but of this ilke tweye- To whom this tale sucre be or soot- Though that I tarie a yer, sometyme I moot After myn auctour, tellen hire gladnesse As wel as I have told hire hevynesse (III. 1191-7) The speaking voice seems reluctant to insist too much on the happy aspects of the story, which are felt to be ephemeral: certainly, they cannot be completely overlooked, and the authority must be followed, but, as an apocryphal author, he wishes to claim that his understanding of the events is different from that of his source. The apocryphal author’s pessimistic view of love is perfectly consistent with a consideration of this passion that was undergoing a deep change and was gradually replacing the traditional theory of courtly love. In fact, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Guinizelli’s Dolce Stil Novo (Sweet New Style) had gradually been replaced in Italy and in France by a more problematic idea of love, as Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry and Dante’s earlier work clearly show. The tragic and even foolish or meaningless aspects of love, which tends to destroy the noblest part of man’s soul, his reason, are emphasised by these authors, who are more inclined to see the darker side of this passion. The tragic aspects of the story of Troilus seem to be better described by this more modern interpretation of the love passion. The authorial “I” - we have seen - is necessarily dialogical. In an important stanza the apocryphal author asks his audience to do what he has done to the lines of his source: amplify, shorten, eliminate. In this way his work will continue to exist in the work of those who will come after him: For mine words, here and every part, I speke hem alle under correctioun Of yow that felyng han in loves art, And putte it al in youre discrecioun To encresse or maken diminucioun Of my langage, and that I yow biseche. But now to purpose of my rather speche. (III. 1332-7) When the turning point of the story comes, expressed in the traditional (and Boethian) image of the wheel of Fortune, emotions and feelings are once more entrusted to the instruments of writing, which alone can be the signs of this crucial transformation: <?page no="259"?> The Logic of Authorship 259 From Troilus she gan hire brighte face Awey to writhe, and tok of hym non heede, But caste hym clene out of his lady grace And on hire whiel she sette up Diomede; For which myn herte right now gynneth blede And now my penne, allas, with which I write Quaketh for drede of that I moste endite. (IV. 8-14, italics mine) When the pain is overwhelming, the pens take on themselves, so to speak, the burden of telling about it. This is strongly reminiscent of one of Guido Cavalcanti’s sonnet ( XVIII ) where the poet is so upset that he cannot express his pain, and pens and scissors become the interpreters of the poet’s voice: Noi siam le triste penne isbigotite, Le cesoiuzze e ’l coltellin dolente Ch’avemo scritte dolorosamente Quelle parole che vo’avete udite. Or vi diciam perché noi siàn partite E a voi qui di presente siàn venute: La man che ci movea dice che sente Cose dubbiose nel core apparite; Le quali hanno destrutto sì costui Ed hannol posto sì presso a la morte Ch’altro non è rimasto che sospiri Or vi preghiàn quanto possiàn più forte Che non sdegniate di tenerci noi Tanto ch’un poco di pietà vi miri. We are the sorry quills, bewildered, hurt, The penknife and the little scissors too, The petty instruments of sorrow who Were used to write the words that you have heard. Now we shall say what urged us to depart From where we were and thus come here to you: The hand that moved us spoke as if it knew Of dreadful things appearing in the heart, Which have undone him so he seems to be Standing next door to death, a man who lives With almost nothing left of him but sighs. <?page no="260"?> 260 Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi We pray you then, with all the strength we have: Do not disdain to keep us till we see At last some trace of pity in your eyes. (Trans. A. Mortimer) In Cavalcanti’s sonnet, however, the pens suppose for the lover who is too unhappy to give expression to his grief; in Chaucer they seem to guide the author’s hand and take part in the expression of his feelings and emotions. But when the tragic end of the story draws nearer, even the device of making words the messengers of grief is insufficient: we have reached the realm of the inexpressible and the speaking voice addresses the readers directly to state that he cannot be asked to write about something his mind is too exhausted even to think of. In terms of fourteenth-century logic, no proposition can be formed about anything unless a concept has first been in the mind: Thow, redere, maist thiself ful wel devine That swich a wo my wit kan nat diffyne; On ydel for to wrote it sholde I swynke, Whan that my wit is wery it to thynke. (V. 270-4) Change - and here another aspect is considered - is not only diachronic and language does not only change with time, but differences exist in the various dialects and can make communication impossible. This is why, after praising the “volgare” as more flexible than Latin, Dante had to invent the idea of the “volgare illustre,” the language of poetry, the language the apocryphal author is anxious that should not be spoilt by an unskilled scribe: And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe That thow be understonde, God I biseche! But yet to purpose of my rather speche. (V. 1793-9) Although this sort of recommendation was common in poetry (Windeatt, ed. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde 465), at the end of the poem, it emphasises the fact that the (apocryphal) author, who has by now finished his pretended translation, has not only appropriated the imagined authority of the fictitious Latin source, but has also adopted a more modern view of love and full consciousness of the changes that have occurred in the consideration of this passion. Hence the vernacular, the frequent remarks on the authorial activity, the constant comparison with <?page no="261"?> The Logic of Authorship 261 a feigned source which is re-elaborated rather than imitated. All this comes before the last part of the story is told and before the last transformation in the poem is described, when, after his death, Troilus looks down on the human world from the eighth sphere, where time does not exist and change is no longer possible. It can be argued that the eternal condition of Troilus is what the apocryphal author hopes for his book, that it will last forever and will always be understood. It is the wish to place his work beyond time and death that makes him indirectly compare the destiny of his work to the eternal existence of Troilus in the eighth sphere. It has been noticed that at the end of the poem: (. . .) the Narrator has discovered the moral and philosophical implications of his “tragedye”; and he turns to the audience who can best judge these implications. Gower and Strode he invites to consent where there is need to correct: “vouchen sauf” is a curious locution, since it implies consultation and agreement, but also taking responsibility. (Shoaf 156) The dedication to Gower and to Ralph Strode, the Oxford philosopher who had written on consequentiae and obligationes, at the end of the poem, when the story is over, shows a narrator that has now dismissed the garments of the translator, that can associate the word “book” with the authorial “I” and take full responsibility for what he feels to be his own original production. <?page no="262"?> 262 Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi References Alighieri, Dante. De vulgari eloquentia. Ed. P.V. Mengaldo. Napoli: Ricciardi, 1979. Ascoli, Albert R. Dante and the Making of the Modern Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Benveniste, Emile. Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Biard, Joel. Logique et théorie du signe au XIV e siècle. Paris: Vrin, 1989. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Filostrato. Ed. L. Surdich. Milano: Mursia, 1990. Boezio, Severino, A.M.T. De consolazione philosophiae. Ed. O. Dellera. Milano: Rizzoli, 1981. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Cavalcanti, Guido. Complete Poems. Trans. A. Mortimer. London: Oneworld Classics, 2010. Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. B. Windeatt. London: Penguin, 2003. ———. The Parliament of Fowls. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. L.D. Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. “Chaucer and Rhetoric.” The Yale Companion to Chaucer. Ed. S. Lerer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. 122- 143. Courtenay, William J. Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Delany, Sheila. Chaucer’s “House of Fame”: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972. Eco, Umberto and Costantino Marmo. On the Medieval Theory of Signs. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989. Fyler, John M. Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Holcot, Robert. In quattuor libros Sententiarum. Lyon, 1518. Jakobson, Roman. “Commutatori, categorie verbali e il verbo russo.” Saggi di linguistica generale. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976. 149-169. Knudsen, Christian. “Intentions and Impositions.” The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Ed. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 479-495. Kretzmann, Norman. “Syncategoremata, Exponibilia, Sophismata.” The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Ed. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 212-245. <?page no="263"?> The Logic of Authorship 263 Lawton, David. Chaucer’s Narrators. Woodbridge: D.S.Brewer, 1985. Minnis, Alastair J. Medieval Theory of Authorship. London: Scolar Press, 1984. ———. Magister Amoris. The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Ockham, William. Summa Logicae. Ed. P. Boehner. New York: St. Bonaventure, 1978. Oizumi, Akio. A Complete Concordance to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1991. Pinborg, Jan. Logica e semantica nel Medioevo. Torino: Boringhieri, 1984 (original edition, 1972). Rosier, Irène. La parole comme acte. Paris: Vrin, 1994. Shoaf, Richard A. Dante, Chaucer and the Currency of the Word. Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1983. Sims, D. “An Essay at the Logic of ‘Troilus and Criseyde’.” Cambridge Quarterly 4 (1969): 125-149. Stillinger, Thomas C. The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Vance, Eugene. Marvelous Signals. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ———. From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Weishepl, James A. “The Interpretation of Aristotle’s ‘Physics’ and the science of Motion.” The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Ed. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 521-536. Wetherbee, Winthrop. Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. Windeatt, Barry. The Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. <?page no="265"?> Gestures of Authorship in Medieval English Historiography: The Case of Robert Mannyng of Brunne Nicole Nyffenegger The textual presence of the authorial persona in medieval historiography is circumscribed by intraand intertextual issues of authority and power. The importance attributed to the auctores, on the one hand, necessitates constant negotiations of authority. This is done, among other strategies, by a strong emphasis on the physicality of the source as a book, as an object to be handled and controlled by the author. This move is further extended by the inscription into the work of the processes involved in its creation, such as the search for, evaluation of and selection from the source text, thus simultaneously establishing and undermining the source’s authority. On the other hand, authors, in a sort of “mise-enabyme,” empower themselves when they write about writing (for example the exchange of letters between potentates) as a powerful and empowering element within their histories. Working with different episodes from chronicles of the Brut tradition, especially Robert Mannyng’s chronicle, I will focus on these two divergent yet related gestures of authorship as they appear in medieval English historiography. 1 In the afternoon of Friday, 15 May 1338, Robert Mannyng of Brunne has a problem. He is just concluding his work of English history and is rather worried about what will happen to it once it leaves his hands. Will someone else read it, aloud or in private, and in so doing appropriate the “I” in the text for himself? Will someone call it “my book”when referring to it as a source, virtually seizing the sourcebook and usurping its 1 I want to thank the participants of the Geneva “Medieval and Early Modern Authorship” conference for the many invaluable insights and especially for the concept of “gestures of authorship” which I have adopted for this article. Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 265-276. <?page no="266"?> 266 Nicole Nyffenegger author’s authority - just as he has done with his own sources? Or will the book eventually even start to speak for itself and thus defy authorial control and authority altogether? The concluding six lines of Mannyng’s work read like an anxious attempt to reassure himself and anyone else of his authorship. In just six lines, there are six instances of the first person singular “I,” coupled three times with the verb “write: ” Now most I nede leue here of Inglis forto write, I had no more matere of kynges lif in scrite; if I had haued more, blithly I wild haf writen. What tyme I left þis lore, þe day is for to witen: Idus þat is of Maii left I to write þis ryme, B letter & Friday bi ix þat ere ede prime. (Mannyng, book II: ll. 8353-8358, my italics) Mannyng here claims that he must end writing at this stage because of a lack of sources and that he would happily have written more had he had them and he places himself and his work at a very precise moment in time when he says that he stops writing on “Friday, 15 May 1338, nine hours after prime.” 2 However, with the repetition of “I” and “write” he also states, and very markedly so, “I write.” It is this “writing I” as it appears in medieval historiography and its struggle for authorial control that I am concerned with in this article. When I refer to the “writing I,” I mean the authorial persona as a textual construct. Roland Barthes, though explicitly referring to modern authors, proposed to call this construct “scriptor” (142); for medieval authors, Lee Patterson and Paul Zumthor have used “the author’s author” (Patterson 10) and “l’homme dans le texte” (Zumthor, Essai 69) respectively. 3 While the “real,” extratextual author is now commonly denied authority and control over his work, this “writing I,” the intratextual author, definitely makes claims for authority. As an author, he does not stand alone. There are those authors before him, Latin auctores as well as vernacular predecessors, on whose authority he bases his own and whose authority he sometimes undermines in order to establish his; there are those authors who will come after him and who will hopefully consider his work authoritative enough to base their authority on his. Naturally, he does not want them to undermine his authority in order to establish theirs. The writing of history hence becomes a dynamic of appropriation and control: the author wants as much of the authority from 2 The weekday Friday, as well as the exact time 3 o’clock, are obviously chosen to match the traditional hour of Christ’s death. 3 Philip Bennett translates Zumthor’s term as “author as textual persona” (Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics 44). <?page no="267"?> Gestures of Authorship in Medieval English Historiography 267 his auctores as he can get and he wants to lose as little as possible of his own to future authors. 4 There are several strategies to achieve this aim which are employed by the vernacular historiographers I will discuss here, but which are not exclusive to them. However, as Ruth Evans has pointed out (368), the fact that historiography is one of the genres closest to the Latinate tradition does increase the authorial struggles for authority. I consequently suggest that the gestures of authorship (liberating as they are vis-à-vis the auctoritates) analysed here carry a different weight in historiography than they do in other genres. Robert Mannyng, as I will argue, may well be the best example thereof. Many of the authorship studies which include medieval historiography (most of them do not), such as the essays and textual commentaries in The Idea of the Vernacular (Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al.) have focused on the ways in which vernacular historiographers write themselves into the tradition on which they draw by appropriating the literary conventions of their auctores, especially in their prologues. While I have also begun this article by referring to an epilogue of a work, i.e. the other end of the frame, I propose, in what follows, to also investigate gestures of authorship which appear within the actual histories of England. The first strategy I want to discuss is one employed to appropriate the authority of the auctores by emphasising the materiality of the source text. Whenever the source text is referred to as a “book,” it becomes an object which can be handled by the author, an object which can be grabbed and held - and controlled. A first element of this strategy is the inscription into the work of history of the processes involved in its creation, such as the search for, the evaluation of and the selection from the source text. When La amon in his prologue famously evokes the picture of himself lovingly turning the pages of three excellent books he chooses during his extensive travels, he does several things at once: He makes himself an authority who is able to choose three books from - presumably - many books he came across on his travels, an authority also who is able to judge that these three books are “excellent: ” La amon gon liðen wide ond þas leode, and biwon þa æðela boc þa he to bisne nom. He nom þa Englisca boc þa makede Seint Beda. Anoþer he nom on Latin þe makede Seinte Albin. and þe feire Austin þe fulluht broute hider in. Boc he nom þe þridde; leide þer amidden, þa makede a Frenchis clerc, Wace wes ihoten, þe wel couþe writen; 4 Kenneth Tiller claims this to be the case for La amon’s prologue (97-126). <?page no="268"?> 268 Nicole Nyffenegger and he heom ef þare æðelen Ælienor þe wes Henries quene þes he es kinges. La amon leide þeos boc and þa leaf wende; he heom leofliche biheold liþe him beo Drihten! (La amon, proem II. 14-25) But La amon at the same time also stresses these books’ materiality when he describes how he puts them in front of himself and turns the pages. He is the one, at that moment, who holds the books in his hands and controls them. 5 Likewise, when Robert Mannyng refers to Dares the Phrygian as his source for the Trojan wars, he refers to his history as “the book that we now know”: Dares þe Freson of Troie first wrote & putt it in buke þat we now wote; he was a clerk & a gude knyght. (. . .) þat it were oure long to telle; & many wald not þerin duelle þare names alle forto here, bot þe Latyn is fayre to lere. (Mannyng, book I: ll. 145-162) Dares the Phrygian’s auctorial authority, of course, is unquestionable: His work is old, it is in Latin and Dares is allegedly an eyewitness of the Trojan wars. This is why Mannyng refers to him as his source for the Trojan wars, despite the fact that, as has been proven (book I: ll. 320-726, notes), he actually did not use his work. But Mannyng, even at the moment of presenting Dares as an auctor, starts undermining his authority: Dares’ account, he points out is “oure longe to telle,” but Mannyng grants, and he does so in a rather patronising tone, that at least “the Latin is nice.” When an author thus assumes a position from which he assesses (and simultaneously presents himself as able to assess) the quality of the other author, this author’s work and his language, he imposes his authority upon that of his source. Such remarks consequently pertain to the clinamen, an author’s “swerve away from his precursor” as defined by Harold Bloom (14). 6 However, the quote above also contains a refer- 5 See Tiller’s intriguing reading of this passage in terms of sexual violence (105f.). 6 “Clinamen, which is poetic misreading or misprision proper. (. . .) This appears as a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction the new poem moves.” <?page no="269"?> Gestures of Authorship in Medieval English Historiography 269 ence to the “buke that we now wote” which suggests that there is a physical book which Mannyng at one stage holds in his hands. Hence, while the remarks just mentioned help to appropriate the auctores’ authority, the evocation of the source as a physical object doubles the effect by visualising this appropriation. If we read references to sourcebooks in medieval historiography closely (and take them literally), then we will find that books seem to have the unpleasant potential of speaking for themselves and hence eluding the author’s control. There are many examples of books “saying,” “telling,” “narrating” something. In the chronicle which is partly attributed to Robert of Gloucester 7 for example, a book tells of Empress Maud’s death: “Þe nexte er þer after þe ampresse mold wende out of þis liue as þe boc aþ itold” (ll. 9732f.). Robert Mannyng presents a book which disagrees with what is apparently another source (“my boke tellis nay”) to then “say” the opposite: “My boke tellis nay, Godwyn did him no dere; it sais þe Quene Egyn þe blame suld scho bere” (book II: ll. 1570f.). Much more numerous than references to “speaking books” are references to the more abstract “story” (also meaning ‘history’) as speaking. Chaucer, for example, makes two such references in the Canterbury Tales (“Man of Law’s Tale” l. 969 and “Physician’s Tale” l. 161). However, Robert Mannyng seems to be more inventive than others in expressing the notion of speaking texts. The combination of the terms “stori” and “speken” which Mannyng uses twice appears in only two other middle English works, 8 and the combination of “stori” and “monen” seems to be unique to Mannyng. 9 Was he, perhaps, more aware and more afraid than other authors of the possibility of the work’s afterlife, independent from and uncontrollable by the author? The book as part and promoter of the self which Eric Jager so aptly describes in The Book of the Heart has here turned into a danger to the authorial self. 10 On yet another level, there are authoritative sources which tend to speak in an authoritative way, commanding or forbidding the author to write something. This is the case in the following example from Mannyng’s chronicle, in which the (source)book forbids the historiographer to write about the death of Robert II, duke of Normandy: 7 For simplicity’s sake, I will, in what follows, refer to it as Robert of Gloucester’s chronicle. 8 Other kinds of texts, especially books, letters, the Bible, etc, are however often referred to in combination with the word “speken.” See “speken” in the Electronic Middle English Dictionary. A search in the Middle English Corpus suggests that the “speaking story” only appears twice more in middle English literature. 9 See the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, Boolean search for stor*+mon*. 10 See also Ernst Robert Curtius’ chapter on “The Book as Symbol.” <?page no="270"?> 270 Nicole Nyffenegger At Coue is Roberd dede; þe maner of his endyng my boke it me forbede to telle þerof no þing. A hardy knyght was he, ouer all bare þe pris. (Mannyng, book II: ll. 2486ff., my italics) The authority of the book here is of course, ultimately, the authority of its author. In this example, intriguingly, the reference is not to a book but to my book. The possessive pronoun, I would like to suggest along the lines of A.C. Spearing’s concept of textual subjectivity (1ff.), makes a significant difference. It produces a pose of taking possession, as if Mannyng said: “if this book tries to order me around, I’ll just make it mine.” When a book speaks, it is a subject, the history it narrates is its direct object and the author who is informed by the book is the book’s indirect object. If the author does not want to be the book’s object, he needs to invert the roles. Consequently, whenever a historiographer relates that he has searched for and found information in a book, he firstly makes the book his grammatical object but also, secondly, evokes it as a physical object, a material book which is handled and searched by him. In an example from the Northern Cursor Mundi, the author explains that he has found a certain episode in some book: “In sum bok find I þar a wile þat ioseph fand þat was sutile” (ll. 4749f.). This effect is even more striking when the author of the sourcebook is named, as is the case in another example from Robert Mannyng’s chronicle: “In Gildas boke þus i fond þat Gurmund departed þe lond” (book I: ll. 14’151f.). The maker and original “owner” of the book, Gildas, is dispossessed and his authority is appropriated by the researcher who, at the moment of finding information in the book, is supposedly holding it in his hands. Books are not only present on this metatextual level, but also as objects within the historical events related in the chronicles. A second strategy I want to analyse in this article is the one of writing about writing (and writers) on the story level and thereby, by a sort of “mise-enabyme,” constructing and empowering the author. 11 Against the background of the examples above, in which the historiographers present themselves as searching for and finding information in their sourcebooks, it is not surprising that, when books are mentioned on the story level, they are likewise the domain of learned specialists. Literati, mostly of ecclesiastical learning, are portrayed as searching for and finding es- 11 This is along the lines suggested by Monika Otter in her discussion of 12th century historiography. See also Gabrielle Spiegel’s discussions of vernacular French historiography. <?page no="271"?> Gestures of Authorship in Medieval English Historiography 271 sential information in books. One example is the case of the exiled Briton king Cadwallader who needs help interpreting his vision and whose friend, the Breton king Alan, calls for “wise clerks” to search “all the books” in Mannyng’s version (book I: ll. 15’851f.). Robert of Gloucester’s account of this episode, in contrast, is less specific as to who does the researching in the books: “Þe king alein let þo anon in is bokes aspye” (l. 5106). Another example is that of King Edward I’s search for written proof of his right to overlordship of Scotland for which he needs the assistance of secular and ecclesiastical counsellors. In both Mannyng’s longer and his source Pierre de Langtoft’s shorter versions, the search for proof is not accomplished by the king himself but by the barons who act as the king’s counsellors and a bishop respectively (Mannyng, book II: ll. 5997-6008; Langtoft, II: 190). Here, as in many other instances, books are presented as testifying the truth. In all cases, however, that truth is not easily accessible to everyone. Even kings, as the two examples show, need the literati’s help to access that truth. Needless to say that historiographers in general and Robert Mannyng in particular (who associates himself with Cambridge University, Mannyng, book II: ll. 8225-8234) would have considered themselves literati, too. Apart from books, there is a second type of writing present on the story level: Letters. In terms of content, letters are often conceived of as a plea for liberation or as a defence of liberty as is the case with the two examples below. In what follows, however, I want to focus on the function that is attributed to the letters in the communication between potentates. A first example is the appeal of Brutus to the Greek king Pandras to liberate his enslaved people. While most chronicles mention this appeal, only few represent it as being made in the form of a letter. Wace and Robert Mannyng are among them and they present the contents of this letter in considerable length and detail which I will not discuss here. The lines immediately preceding the direct speech of the letters however show interesting differences in the two versions. While Wace (who is Mannyng’s source for this account) introduces the letter in three lines, mentioning “breif” once and neither names Brutus nor Pandras, 12 Mannyng has the following four lines: 12 “Puis ad sempres un breif fait faire./ Le rei de Grece salua/ E ces paroles li manda: (. . .).” Wace 224ff. <?page no="272"?> 272 Nicole Nyffenegger Brutus did write a brefe vnto sire Pandras, kyng & chefe. Þis is þe brefe þat he sent þat Latyn vnderstode þus ment: (. . .) (book I: II. 937-940) He mentions “brefe” twice, and, more importantly, names the sender, Brutus, and the receiver, Pandras, in close proximity to the word. Mannyng’s version enhances the notion of letter writing as an act of liberation: Brutus as the soon-to-be liberator of an enslaved people is portrayed as having the letter written before attacking and fighting Pandras. It is certainly no coincidence that Mannyng, as a “writing I,” thus commends the preeminence of the quill over the sword. But Mannyng also, in contrast to his source Wace, mentions the language of the letter, Latin, which has to be translated, by some literatus, on two narrative levels. Firstly, probably, to the Greek Pandras and secondly to the chronicle’s audience who receives the letter’s contents in English. The literatus to provide the translation in the latter case is clearly Mannyng himself, who thus underlines his central role as intermediary. A second example is the exchange of letters between the Roman emperor Lucius and King Arthur. This exchange is opened by twelve messengers bringing a letter by Lucius to Arthur in which the emperor presents the main reason why the Britons should submit to him, namely the fact that the Romans held Britain in the past. At this stage, Mannyng inserts a passage in which Arthur announces that he will write a letter back to Lucius (Book 1. ll. 11’401-11’410). Neither Mannyng’s source Wace nor his near-contemporary Robert of Gloucester mention this. In all three works however, a long speech by Arthur follows, in which the Briton king not only presents his arguments against the Roman emperor’s claims, but also sets up his own claim to overlordship of Rome, followed by a lengthy discussion among his liegemen. Both Wace and Robert of Gloucester then have Arthur send messengers back to Rome, who inform Lucius that Arthur has no intention of submitting to him and will instead attack (Wace ll. 11’059ff., Robert of Gloucester ll. 4113ff.). Mannyng, in contrast, has Arthur inform Lucius through a letter (called “charter” here): Þe chartere þei schewed þer barons & said, “Suilk ere Arthure respons.” Whan þe Romeyns had wele herd how þe messengers ansuerd, & þer chartre acorded wele vnto þer saw ilka dele, þat Arthure wild no seruise do, <?page no="273"?> Gestures of Authorship in Medieval English Historiography 273 bot haf treuage, þe letter wild so. (Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle, book I: II. 11’651-11’658) The charter is shown to the Roman barons and testifies to Arthur’s reply, it hence doubles up on what the messengers say (“the charter accorded that it was indeed so”). It underlines in a very pronounced way that Arthur will not submit himself: “þe letter wild so.” In correspondence with the speaking books mentioned above, this is in fact an example of a speaking letter. Throughout this exchange between Lucius and Arthur, Mannyng evokes letters as being not merely a reflection of the spoken word, which would make them secondary and inferior, but as being interchangeable and on a par with it. The written word, thus established as powerful and potentially empowering in turn is a reflection of the power the historiographer envisages he could have through his writing. A third and last example is the scene in which Arthur receives news of Mordred’s betrayal. His nephew, in the king’s absence, has usurped the power and married Queen Guinevere. In many chronicles, for example in Wace, the way in which this news is brought to Arthur is not specified. Arthur just “hears” the bad news: Arthur oï e de veir sot Que Modred fei ne li portot; Se terre tint, sa femme ot prise. Ne li sot gré d’icel servise; (. . .) (Wace ll. 13’031-13’034, my italics) Robert Mannyng, however, has the information brought to Arthur through letters: A day as he to mete went, out of þis lond lettres were sent; right als his trompes blewe, a messengere þat he wele knewe þe lettres in his hand laid, & tille him with mouth said þat Modrede, his sistir sonne, had don him grete tresonne, (. . .) (Mannyng, book I: ll. 13’469-13’476, my italics). The letters play a crucial role in this passage: They come from England together with the messenger who carries them and both, the messenger and the letters, bring the bad news. The letters, through their “writtenness” testify to the truth of the messenger’s elusive spoken words - oth- <?page no="274"?> 274 Nicole Nyffenegger erwise it would have sufficed to send just a messenger with an orally transmitted message. The letters are laid in Arthur’s hand and become, again in contrast to the spoken words, a physically graspable form of the bad news. The three examples discussed above all show the historiographical construction, especially by Robert Mannyng, of the written word’s power. The written word establishes power relations between potentates, it has the power to evoke fervent speeches of one potentate in the court of the other, and it has, in letters as well as in books, the power to testify the truth. Such representations of the written word as powerful and empowering, I claim, empower also the historiographer in his function as a writer. Likewise, the strategy of emphasising the source’s materiality as a book, which constructs the book’s (and consequently the auctoritates’) susceptibility to authorial control and domination, empowers the historiographer in his claim for authority. 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The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester. Rolls Series 86. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1887. 2 vols. London: Kraus Reprint 1965. Zumthor, Paul. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. . Toward a Medieval Poetics. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. Trans. Philip Bennett. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. <?page no="277"?> “By Auctorite of Experyence”: The Role of Topography in Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints Alice Spencer This paper offers a detailed analysis of the lives of native saints contained in the Abbotsford Legenda Aurea. I will focus on the relationship between the legends in question and the geographical treatise known as the Mappula Angliae, which Bokenham translated from a section of Higden’s Polychronicon. I will argue that topography serves to locate, both diachronically and synchronically, not only the saintly corpse, but also the literary authority of the hagiographical corpus. In choosing to focus to such an extent on native saints and their geographical origins, Bokenham was endeavouring to establish a specifically “English” identity for himself as poet. Bokenham’s stress on national topography serves to sustain the auctoritas of his own literary output on three counts. Firstly, as Lavezzo has demonstrated, England’s status as a “global borderland” or “angle” enabled national authors to claim an elite or “angelic” status. This elevation of geographical margins enables Bokenham to legitimise his own marginal position in the literary canon. Secondly, Higden’s condemnation of the contamination of English by French enables Bokenham to claim a greater authenticity for his own plain “Suthfolke speche” when compared to the classicising, Francophile style he associates with Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate. Finally, as Galloway has suggested, emphasis on physical geography can serve to elevate an empirical, experiential perspective over the precepts of literary auctoritas. The as-yet-unpublished legends of native saints which I will be dealing with in the current paper have only been accessible to us since 2004, when Bokenham’s long-lost magnum opus, his vast translation of Voragine’s Legenda Aurea Sanctorum was found at Abbotsford House and Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 277-292. <?page no="278"?> 278 Alice Spencer identified by Simon Horobin. The manuscript had been purchased by Sir Walter Scott in 1809, but had never been studied or attributed. Until 2004, Bokenham’s only known surviving works were the collection of vitae of female saints in the British Library Arundel 37 MS and published by the EETS with the title Legendys of Hooly Wummen, the so-called Clare Roll, a verse translation of Claudian’s Stilicho and the Mappula Angliae, a translation of the section of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon devoted to the description of Britain. The Mappula’s tantalising reference to another “englische boke” containing a translation of the Legenda Aurea together with various lives of native saints, quoted below, had provoked a good deal of speculation, but most scholars had assumed that the legendary in question was lost for good: For as moche as in the englische boke the whiche y haue compiled of legenda aurea and of oþer famous legends at the instaunce of my specialle frendis and for edificacioun and comfort of alle tho þe whiche shuld redene hit or here hit, is oftene-tyme in lyvis of seyntis, of seynt Cedde, seynt Felix, seynt Edwarde, seynt Oswalde and many oþer seyntis, of Englond mencyoun made of dyuers parties, plagis, regnis & contreis of this lande Englonde, þe whiche, but if þey be declared, byne fulle harde to knowene: Therfore, for þe more clerere undirstandynge of the seid thyngis and othur, y haue drawe owt in to englische XV chapturs þe whiche Arnulphus Cistrensis in his policronica of this landis descripcioun writethe in the laste ende of his furst boke; the which welle knowene & cowed, hit shalle byne easy ynoughe to understande alle þat is towched þer-of in the seyd legende. (6) The term topography derives from the Greek “topo-” (place) and “graphia” (writing). The “places” referred to in Bokenham’s topographical references will prove to be not only geographical, but also textual spaces, located spatially and temporally. I will argue that topographical reference functions on several different levels in the Mappula and the legends of native saints. Firstly, as Bokenham’s own words just quoted to some extent indicate, it serves to append the little-explored land of English Christian history onto the more authoritative and established mappa mundae of global salvation history. In so doing, it also eases the passage of its author into the canon. However, as work on the Arundel collection by Delany and others has already amply demonstrated, Bokenham’s deferent lip-service to canonicity is not to be taken at face value. By claiming to speak in an “authentic” English voice, Bokenham invents and situates his work within what Sanok refers to as a “transhistorical national community” (84). He seeks to assert his own literary auctoritas against that of his literary forebears (specifically Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate) by, somewhat paradoxically, claiming precedence over them. He counters their chronological primacy by presenting them <?page no="279"?> Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints 279 as deviants from an originary, spiritually pure linguistic order. Finally, he also, paradoxically again, uses the spatial / synchronic dimension to counter the precepts of literary genealogy, opposing the synchronic to the diachronic, experience to authority. Bokenham’s narration and localisation of native saints will ultimately prove to offer some fascinating insights into the complex and often contradictory strategies which he deployed in vindication of his own vernacular voice. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the above quoted passage from the Mappula is Bokenham’s stress on the unfamiliarity of “this lande Englonde” as a literary subject and setting. England is an obscure literary location - “fulle harde to knowene.” As Lavezzo, among others, has illustrated medieval maps and topographical writings tended to stress England’s geographical and historical marginality. Medieval mappae mundi typically positioned England on the furthest borders of the earth, whereas the central position was occupied by imperial Rome, in the case, for example, of the Beatus map, or by Rome, Mount Olympus and Jerusalem on the Higden map (Angels 2-3). In Book Fifteen of the Etymologies, Isidore of Seville gave the etymology of “Anglia” as “angulus,” as England stands in a corner of the world. Gaius Julius Solinus went further, referring to Britain as “nomen paene orbis alterius” (the name of almost another world) (ibid. 3). Both of these formidable authorities are cited by Higden and translated by Bokenham in “Chapter Two” of the Mappula: Ysidorus in Þe XV boke of his ethymologis will haue hit cleped Anglia of angulus, Þe wch is a Cornere for Englonde, quod he, stant in a cornere of the worlde . . . As Alfrede seithe, Englond is cleped a noÞer worlde [. . .] Solinus seithe Þat Þe margyne & Þe brynk of the see past Fraunce shulde be Þe ende of the worlde, ne were Þe yle cleped Brytayne, Þe whiche is worthy Þe name of a noÞer world: hec ille. (7) By inserting texts from this obscure “British” hagiographical tradition into the hallowed, authoritative pages of the Legenda Aurea, Bokenham is claiming a place for the “national” tradition in which he situates himself in the better-trodden literary map of the canon. The lives of Christian martyrs all hark back typologically to the passion of Christ. Thus in his Life of Seynt Thomas of Canterbury, typological parallelism enables Bokenham to link the nerve centre of British Christianity, Canterbury, with the centre-point of the Christian world, Jerusalem: <?page no="280"?> 280 Alice Spencer This glorious and gracious frende of God arrived at Sandewiche and was there received of the comoun peple with as grete ioye and gladnesse as an angel had comen doun from heven and also in euery towne from sandewiche unto Caunterbury the curates with her parissheyus received hym processionally crying and seyeng as the peple did which received criste goyng o Ierusalem a few daies before his passion. Blissed be he which is comen in the name of our lorde. (fol.23v) Through his focus on the national identity and geographical location of the native saints, Bokenham is engaged in creating what Benedict Anderson terms an “imagined community” - a “transhistorical national community,” as Sanok puts it, within which to situate his own literary output (Sanok, Her Life Historical 83). On the cohesive, nation-building function of saints, the following passage from the Life of St. Audrey is particularly telling: Within the [. . .] circuyte of a yere That this noble geme closed ben had The bright bemys therof shyne of clere That fer aboute the bemys is sprad And not oonly northumbirlonde is made glad But thurghoute al Ingelond in length and brede The fame therof did sprynge and sprede. (fol.118r) Yet if Bokenham seeks to “reinvent” national literary identity, saving native traditions from the dusty corners of literary history and geography, he also revels in the “marginality” of his own projected community. It may appear curious that an English author such as Bokenham appears so keen to emphasise the marginality and obscurity of his own nation and his own literary subject matter. Yet, as Lavezzo demonstrates, otherness and marginality frequently formed the grounds for exceptionalism and exaltation in writings on England. After quoting Isidore, Higden cites a popular Anglo Saxon myth referring to Pope Gregory the Great’s admiration for some pagan English slave boys. The relevant passage in the Mappula is missing, presumably, only as a result of damage to the manuscript. To quote Trevisa’s English translation: Other elles, after Bede in his firste booke, blessede Gregory seenge childer of Englonde to be sette furthe to be solde at Rome seide: Now truly thei may be callede Englische men (Angells or Angellysmen) [. . .] SoÞeliche aungelis, for her face schyneÞ as aungelis; for Þe nobilite of Þe lond schone in Þe children face. (II, 5-6) <?page no="281"?> Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints 281 To quote Lavezzo: While the pun does authorize the translation of the strange English into the Christian family, it also imagines the English as an elect and blessed people, whose geographic detachment is of a piece with their religious elevation above the ordinary members of the universal religious siblinghood. Setting the slave boys and their people apart from ordinary Christians - including, indeed, even Pope Gregory the Great himself - the legend extols the English as angels on the edge of the world. (Angels 11) I would argue that some interesting parallels can be drawn between the geographical and historical “angularity” or marginality of England outlined above and Bokenham’s location of himself on the margins of literary history - his repeated expressions of anxiety that he will be cast into “the angle of oblyuyoun,” as he writes in the Arundel “Prologue” to the “Life of St. Margaret”: Certeyn the auctour was an austyn frere, Whos name as now I ne wyl expresse, Ne hap that the vnwurthynesse Bothe of hys persone & eek hys name Myht make the werk to be put in blame, And so, for hate of hym and eek despyht, Perauenture fewe shuld haue delyht It to redyn, and for this chesoun Throwyn it in the angle of oblyuyoun. (32-40) Bokenham’s strange mixture of deference and defiance to what Delany refers to as the Chaucer-Gower-Lydgate triumvirate has been much documented and discussed. Delany, Price and Lawton have all demonstrated that Bokenham’s overt professions of inferiority to his poetic forebears are countered by his implicit assertions of moral and spiritual superiority, by what Price refers to as his “tactic of trumping poetic tradition with piety” (169). I will suggest that national identity plays a crucial role in Bokenham’s exaltation of his own literary “angle.” Delany opposes Bokenham’s plain style to the Chaucerian “poetics of the classicising courtier” (54). From a linguistic point of view, we should perhaps add “Francophile” to “classicising,” as I will now suggest that Bokenham’s implicit claims to literary authority rest in part on his assertion of linguistic primacy. Despite the historical primacy of Chaucer and Gower, Bokenham asserts a precedence for his own language on the grounds of its authenticity. In the penultimate chapter of the Mappula, Bokenham translates Higden’s <?page no="282"?> 282 Alice Spencer complaint on the corruption of the “firste speche,” “first natif toungis” or “modre tounge” as a consequence of the Norman Conquest: Thei hane corrupte her first natif toungis and usyn now Ine wot what straunge and pilgryms blaberynge & cheterynge, noÞynge a-cordynge on-to here firste speche. And Þis corrupcion of englysshe men yn Þer modretounge, begunne, as I seyde, wt famylyar commixtion of Danys firste & of Normannys aftir, toke grete augmentacioun & encrees aftir Þe commynge of William conquerore. (30) The English language to be found in Bokenham’s Mappula and, presumably, throughout the Abbotsford Legenda Aurea, is implicitly presented as an antidote to this linguistic corruption. This is not to say that Bokenham thinks he is writing pre-Danelaw and pre-conquest English. He is rather claiming for his purportedly “plain” vernacular the illustrious status which Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate implicitly asserted for their own aureate styles (cf. Wogan-Browne et al. 319-20). If, for Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, aureate, self-consciously literary language represented a fixed standard - a rigid linguistic system divorced from the vagaries of everyday speech in a manner somewhat recalling Saussure’s “langue” / “parole” dichotomy (ibid. 319-20), Bokenham instead sited this fixity in the uncontaminated, natural “modre tounge.” This situation of literary authority in linguistic authenticity - this rooting of authority in an originary language - is further demonstrated, although in a rather different and potentially contradictory manner, in Bokenham’s treatment of the etymology and genealogy motifs. In his Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages, Howard Bloch argues that the medieval fascination with etymology and genealogy can be seen to reflect a naturalist, as opposed to a conventionalist, theory of the origins of language, which dates back to Plato’s Cratylus. Etymologies, such as those translated and elaborated upon by Bokenham from the Legenda Aurea and from Higden’s Polychronicon, serve an authenticating function, stressing the aptness of sign to signified. Where they provide the (usually spurious) Latin or Greek origins for vernacular words, they function diachronically and can be seen to represent an attempt to trace words back to their universal, unambiguous pre-lapsarian roots. Genealogies essentially provide the same diachronically-oriented authentication for historical individuals. In tracing linguistic and human lineages back through time, Bokenham can be said to be engaged in an act of diachronically-founded self-authorisation, presenting himself as reclaiming and even redeeming the geographical setting and the language which he has inherited in a corrupted form from his literary forebears. Herein, of course, Bokenham rather contra- <?page no="283"?> Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints 283 dicts his assertions of a pristine, originary status for the common “mother tongue,” appealing instead to the more orthodox and implicitly patriarchical authority of Latin. The Mappula Angliae, like its source in Higden’s Polychronicon, is a text replete with etymological expositions of place names. The only one of the vitae to cite the Mappula is the Life of Seynt Wenefride which, in its opening stanzas, refers etymologically curious readers back to the Polychronicon: At the westende of Brytayne the most Lyth a Province, a ful fayre cuntre Wich aftyr Policronicas lore Sittyth o the gret Ottyan see Wich is distinct in to partys three Wyth dyuers watrys & ful of hillys & valys And in oure Vulgare now ys clepyd Walys But how thys name cam of Gualesia Kyng Ebrankys doughter wich ther was quen As yt of Cambro was fyrste clepyt Cambria Wer of the comodytes wich in that cuntry been As bestys and fouys hony & been And many other thyngus here spekyn ny y Wich seyd Policronica declaryth opynly. (fol.214v) Elsewhere in the Abbotsford manuscript, Bokenham’s fascination with etymologies comes to the fore most clearly in the lives of non-native saints which he translated from the Legenda Aurea. Bokenham translates and elaborates considerably upon eighteen of Voragine’s etymological prologues. While this means that Bokenham only translated a relatively small proportion of the prologues (for something like fifteen percent of the total number of legends translated from Voragine), we should not forget that the near-contemporary and local translator of the Gilte Legende omitted all of the etymologies. Moreover, in the lives of Margaret, Agnes and Anselm, Bokenham provides an elaborate translation of the etymological preface from Voragine even though he does not use the Legenda as his source for the main body of the vita. Interestingly, Bokenham also appends a Legenda-style etymological exposition to his life of the English St. Felix: <?page no="284"?> 284 Alice Spencer The first man that taught cristis feith to the peple of EstInglonde was oon clepid felix the which was born in the boundys of Burgundye. And worthily was this man clepid felix which is asmoche to seyn in englissh as happy or gracious for he was gracious and fortunate bothen in the sight of god and of man and al the werkys which he wrought were graciously begunnen and graciously brought to an ende. (fol.72r) Brief genealogical backgrounds for the saints and / or the monarchs under whom they lived abound in the legends. Thus, for example, Bokenham begins The Life of Seynt Dunstan by telling us that “this holy and blissid man seynt Dunstan was brought forth of wuch fadir and modir in this worlde which afterward he shuld mow seen for her uertus amonge the queres of angels in that other worlde” (fol.109r). The Life of Seynt Audre dedicates two stanzas early on in the poem to a description of Audrey’s family “pedegrue” preserved at Ely. Moreover, I would argue that genealogy is a somewhat less vexed issue in the lives of native saints than it is elsewhere. Virgin martyr legends frequently involve the rejection of a pagan father. Whereas genealogical expositions may be introduced in order to root the legend historically, there is thus frequently a certain tension between fallen human lineages and the more holy paternity of spiritual counsellors or, indeed, the divine genealogy of the Trinity. In Bokenham’s legends of native saints, by contrast, although biological fathers are frequently superseded by spiritual father figures, the figure of the rejected or, indeed, tyrannical pagan father who appears in the lives of Margaret and Christine is absent. Thus, although Winifred’s father Tyfid is largely upstaged by her spiritual guide and counsellor Beuno throughout the main body of the legend, his genealogy is nonetheless accompanied by praise for his virtuous Christian living. Similarly, although Wilfred, Audrey’s spiritual teacher, appears to have defied Annas by encouraging Audrey not to consummate her marriage, Annas’ treatment is sympathetic and he is again praised for his Christian virtue. The etymology and genealogy motifs share a preoccupation with original, incorruptible purity, which is also reflected in Bokenham’s stress on the incorruptibility of the corpora of native saints. Thus, in Chapter Five of the Mappula Angliae he writes: Hit is to be considered devoutely how moche cleere brightnes of goddis mercyfulle pite hathe syngulerly illumined & iradied Þe peple of Ynglond from the bygynnynge of the feithe recevid, Þat no-wheere of no peple in oo prouynce be foundyne so many seyntis bodies liynge hool aftur hur dethe, incorrupt & hauynge Þe examplary of finalle incorrupcioun, as byne in Yngelond. (11) <?page no="285"?> Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints 285 Two of Bokenham’s longest verse lives - the lives of Winifred and Audrey deal with incorruptible female bodies. Winifred is restored to life after being decapitated by her would-be rapist, Caradog. Winifred is remarkable in surviving decapitation, a “violation of physical integrity” which, as Delany points out in the passage quoted below, represents the definitive coup de grâce for many saints: Considering the vast ingenuity of torture and its lethal apparatuses, it is curious that decapitation accounts for so large a proportion of martyrs’ deaths. Take two samples closest to hand: five of Bokenham’s ten martyrs die of decapitation, and the same proportion holds for the South English Legendary in which, by my count, seventeen martyrs are decapitated and another seventeen die by various other means - burning, stoning, crucifixion, stabbing, hewing to pieces, roasting, drawing by horses - even though these other means have failed with those who are finally decapitated. It is as if this violation of physical integrity, unlike any other, is universally acceptable to God as a cause of death. (71) Audrey, instead, manages to preserve her virginity despite being married twice, definitive proof of which is presented in the form of her incorruptible corpse after death. The trope of the incorrupt, virginal female body as figuring forth a transhistorical spiritual and national identity had a long history before Bokenham (cf., for example, Brown 69-85, Sanok 99-105). In Bokenham’s case, it is not hard to equate this image of the pristine female body with the purity he asserts for the “modre tonge” in which he writes. This association of an incorrupt national language with an incorrupt female body points to the central role played by gender in Bokenham’s self-authorising strategies. Although the fact that all of the so-called Legendys of Hooly Wummen probably also appeared in the mixed-gender Abbotsford manuscript (cf. Horobin, “A Manuscript” 140) undermines Delany’s assertions of the primacy of gender in that text - her reading of the text as a kind of literary City of Ladies - I would argue that gender nonetheless emerges as a key motif throughout the Abbotsford Legenda. The fact that Audrey and Winifred are the only native saints to have their lives versified and that these two vitae are among the longest in the collection is surely no coincidence. The elite yet marginal linguistic community in which Bokenham situates his own textual output can in certain respects be seen to be gendered feminine. The legendary as a whole reveals a significant tendency to foreground the mother figure, together with recurrent references to fertility, childbirth and prenatal miracles. This is scarcely surprising, considering Bokenham’s readership. We know from the various addresses and accounts of commissions in- <?page no="286"?> 286 Alice Spencer cluded in the Arundel manuscript (although largely omitted in the Abbotsford - cf. Horobin “A Manuscript” 142-44) that Bokenham’s network of patrons was predominantly female. Horobin presents a convincing argument that the Abbotsford Legenda Aurea may have been presented to Cecily Neville, wife of Richard, Duke of York. 1 Furthermore, Hilles has underlined the importance of female fertility and matrilineage to Yorkist succession (201). Yet to this we should surely add the feminine “modre tonge” of Bokenham’s literary corpus, which comes to be aligned to the sacred female corpora of whom he writes. Unlike Voragine, Bokenham begins his Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury by including the apocryphal narrative of Thomas’ mother, a Saracen princess who followed his father back from the Crusades, which is almost as long as the treatment of Thomas himself. As anticipated by Delany, Bokenham includes a Life of St. Monica, mother of the founding father of his order. In addition to the already mentioned Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury, both the Life of St. Dunstan and the Life of St. Clare refer to pre-natal miracles witnessed by the mother. Finally the legends of St. Margaret, St. Nicholas of Tolentino and St. Anne (assuming it was in the collection) are very much concerned with female fertility. As we have already seen, Bokenham’s sacralisation of the physical spaces in which his legends occur is closely linked to the legitimisation of the language in which they are written. To this we should now add that the autochthonous functions which Bokenham attributes to physical, geographical spaces are mirrored in the spatial distributions of his texts. While Delany’s assertion to the effect that the so-called Legendys of Hooly Wummen were linked within a complex and meticulously planned structure designed to associate the textual corpus with the female body has been undermined with the discovery of the Abbotsford manuscript, I would argue that numerological and, specifically, Trinitarian structures are recurrent at the level of the individual legends. I have already pointed to the centrality of the trinity motif elsewhere in Bokenham’s legends, arguing that it unites and concretises the complex mesh of temporal and spatial axes within which Bokenham is seeking to locate his own authorial output (“Etymology” 329-34). Diachronically, the Father-Son / Word - Word made flesh lineage forms the foundation for Bokenham’s assertions of authority through linguistic primacy and authenticity. The eternally and universally present Holy Spirit unites and dissolves the synchronic and diachronic trajectories. I have already demonstrated how Bokenham tends to expand upon and foreground 1 Horobin refers to Cecily Neville’s will of 1495, wherein she bequeathes “the boke of Legenda Aurea in velem” to her grand-daughter Bridget” (Horobin, “A Manuscript” 150-1). <?page no="287"?> Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints 287 any tripartite structures he finds in Voragine’s introductory etymological passages and how Trinitarian structures and references abound throughout his oeuvre in general. With specific reference to the lives of native saints, we might consider the Life of Seynt Audre, which is divided into three sections clearly signalled by authorial interpolations: the vita, the translation of the relics and post-mortem miracles and the envoy, which refers to the resurrection and the Apocalypse (fols.117v-120r). Somewhat more intriguingly, the Life of Seynt Thomas of Canterburye contains the following reference to another lost Bokenham text, a more extended life of Beckett, in which the significance of the number three is repeatedly underlined: Of which hate and dissention how thre thyngis were the first originall cause and what thise thre thyngis weren of the parleamentis also of charyngdon and Northampton and what was doon there and of blissid thomis troubelous exile vii ere in fraunce and of his grievous persecucion in the mean tyme forasmoche as the matier is longe and diffuse and may nat be declared ner tolde shortely I oversitt it in this werk and wil oonly declaren the processe and circumstaunce of his passion which was the fine and ende of his longe persecution. And who so wil han notes and knowleche of these seid min boke which I compiled and translated oute of latyn into englissh of seynt Thomas life in especial which is distinct into thre parties and the parties into chapitres he shal mown fynde bothe that is seid and that eke which is left diffusely and plenerly aftir the sympilnesse of my rude witte tolde and declared. (fol.23v) My focus thus far has been on how Bokenham seeks to overcome his historical disadvantages as a literary latecomer by stressing his own authenticity - laying claim to a kind of historical precedence over his predecessors. In layman’s terms, so far I have been examining how Bokenham seeks to beat his literary forebears at their own game, redefining the diachronic axes along which literary genealogies and hierarchies have been formed. However, I will now suggest that Bokenham’s topographical emphasis also serves to counteract the verticalist, diachronic principles on which literary auctoritas is based. His emphasis on physical, spatial realities in the here and now introduces a horizontalist trajectory which disrupts and undermines traditional hierarchies. Writing on Higden’s Polychronicon, Bokenham’s source for the Mappula, Galloway argues that: <?page no="288"?> 288 Alice Spencer [Higden’s writings] bespeak present-looking, rather than past-looking collectivity [. . .] Like the personal voice of fourteenth-century vernacular “public poetry” that Anne Middleton has described, the dissenting personal voice of fourteenth-century monastic Latin chronicles is another trope for a collective contemporary English voice, capable of addressing a “common” audience “now” whose limits are implicitly national. (In Lavezzo, Medieval English Nation 64) He goes on to assert that “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is a compiler very much in Higden’s vein” (ibid. 69), and that Higden’s focus on natural sites and phenomena enables him to adopt an empirical, critical attitude towards authorities. Bokenham’s experientialist leanings certainly come to the fore in both the Mappula and the lives of native saints. In the lives of native saints, Bokenham repeatedly calls on his readers to visit the pilgrimage sites referred to and experience them for themselves. Such is the case with his description of Audrey’s “pedegrue” at Ely: This nobyl kyng and his worthy queen, Ioyned togider in perfite charite As the lawe of marriage wolde it shuld bene. Bitwix hem of issue had fair plentee, The pedegrue of whom, who so list to see, At Ely in the munkys bothe in picture He it fynd mow shal, and in scripture. (fol.117v) In the Life of Seynt Wenefride, Bokenham grounds his description of the miraculous properties of Winifred’s Well not on an authoritative text, but on the oral, anecdotal testimony of his host at Holywell: Of this laste balade y haue no euydence, But oonly relacyoun of men in that cuntre, To whom me semyth shuld be youyn credence Of alle swyche thyngys as ther doon be. For whan y was there myn hoost told me That yt soth was wythowte drede, For himself had seyin yt doon in dede. (fol.217r) Perhaps most interestingly, in the passage from the Mappula already quoted on the abundance of incorrupt saintly bodies, Bokenham concludes by interpolating a further example - that of Joan of Acre (the subject of the dialogue at the grave in the Clare Roll) - which, in a paradigm which dramatically dissolves the Wife’s famous binarism, is justified “by auctoryte of experyence”: <?page no="289"?> Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints 289 & y dar boldly by auctoryte of experyence addyne her-to kynge Edwardis doughtre Þe furst aftir Þe conqueste, Dame Jone of Acris, whos body lithe hool & incorrupt in Þe frires queere of Clare one Þe sowthe side, for whome oure lordis grace booth of old tyme & newe hathe shewid Þer many gret miracles and specially in III thynges, as in tothe-ache, peyne in Þe bake, & also of Þe acces. (11) To conclude, in this paper I have sought to investigate how Bokenham deploys the topographical localisation of native saints in an attempt to locate his own authority temporally and spatially. More particularly, I have sought to illustrate the role played by Bokenham’s narration and localisation of native saints in vindicating his own vernacular voice. Topography functions both diachronically and synchronically, as Bokenham, somewhat paradoxically, at once lays claim to a diachronicallyrooted authority founded on authenticity / precedence and to a synchronically-rooted authority opposed to the superficial hierarchies of literary history. <?page no="290"?> 290 Alice Spencer References Manuscripts: Advocates Library, Abbotsford MS British Library, Arundel 37 MS Ashton, Gail. The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography. New York: Routledge, 2000. Barney, Stephen A., W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof, trans. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bishop, Kathleen, ed. Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Bloom Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1997. Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Brownlees, Nicholas, Gabriella Del Lungo and John Denton, eds. The Language of Public and Private Communication in a Historical Perspective. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Delany, Sheila. Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints and Society in Fifteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans G.C. Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. De Voragine, Jacobus. Legenda Aurea: Vulgo Historia Lombardica Dicta. Ed. T.H. Graesse. Osnabrück: Otto Zeller Verlag, 1890. Doyle, A. Ian. “Publication by Members of the Religious Orders.” Book Publication and Publishing in Britain: 1375-1475. Ed. Griffiths and Pearsall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 109-23. Edwards, Anthony S.G. “The Transmission and Audience of Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen.” Late Medieval Religious Texts and their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A.I. Doyle. Ed. A. Minnis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 157-67. <?page no="291"?> Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints 291 Flügel, Ewald, ed. “Eine Mittelenglische Claudian-Übersetzung (1445).” Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 28 (1905): 255-99 and 421-38. Galloway, Andrew. “Latin England.” Imagining a Medieval English Nation. Ed. Kathy Lavezzo. Medieval Cultures 37. Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004. 41-93. Gellrich, Jesse M. The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language, Theory, Mythology, and Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Griffiths, Jeremy and Derek Pearsall, eds. Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Hilles, Carroll. “Gender and Politics in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendary.” New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 189-212. Horobin, Simon. “The Angle of Oblivioun: A Lost Medieval Manuscript Discovered in Walter Scott’s Collection.” Times Literary Supplement 11 November (2005): 12-13. . “Politics, Patronage, and Piety in the Works of Osbern Bokenham.” Speculum 82 (2007): 132-64. . “A Manuscript Found in the Library of Abbotsford House and the Lost Legendary of Osbern Bokenham.” English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 14 (2008): 132-62. Horstmann, Carl, ed. “Mappula Angliae von Osbern Bokenham.” Englische Studien 10 (1887): 1-34. Johnson, Ian. “Tales of a True Translator: Medieval Literary Theory, Anecdote and Autobiography in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen.” Ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans. The Medieval Translator 4. Exeter: The University of Exeter Press, 1994. 104-24. Kemp, Theresa. D. “The Lingua Materna and the Conflict Over Vernacular Religious Discourse in Fifteenth Century England.” Philological Quarterly 78 (1999): 233-57. Lavezzo, Kathy. Angels on the Edge of the World: the Geography of English Identity from Aelfric to Chaucer. New York: Cornell University Press, 2006. , ed. Imagining a Medieval English Nation. Medieval Cultures 37. Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004. Lawton, David. “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century.” ELH 54.4 (1987): 761-99. Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and His Readers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Lindsay, Wallace M., ed. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. Price, Paul. “Trumping Chaucer: Osbern Bokenham’s Katherine.” The Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001): 158-83. <?page no="292"?> 292 Alice Spencer Ryan, William G., trans. Jacobus de Voragine: The Golden Legend - Readings on the Saints. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Sanok, Catherine. Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Serjeantson, Mary S. ed. Legendys of Hooly Wummen by Osbern Bokenham. London: EETS os 206, 1938. Spencer, Alice. “Etymology, Genealogy and Hagiographical Auctoritas in the Works of Osbern Bokenham: Redeeming the Public Voice of English Poetry.” Ed. N. Brownlees, G. Del Lungo and J. Denton. The Language of Public and Private Communication in a Historical Perspective. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 323- 43. . “Osbern Bokenham Reads the ‘Prologue’ to the Legend of Good Women: The Life of St. Margaret.” Standing in the Shadow of the Master? Chaucerian Influences and Interpretations. Ed. K. Bishop. Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 160-203. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280-1520. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. <?page no="293"?> Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology: A Crisis of Medieval Authority? Alastair Minnis A comprehensive history of medieval concepts of “the author” and textual authority must resist the urge to segregate “secular” and “sacred” literary theory. For their relationship was enduring and reciprocal. Crucial theoretical issues were developed within Biblical exegesis before passing into secular poetics. Conversely, discourses characteristic of secular poetics (frequently classified under ethics) often had a considerable impact on Biblical exegesis. Within a system of textual classification formalized in the thirteenth century, the poetic, affective and imaginative nature of certain forms of Biblical writing were recognized and justified. But this raised a troubling question: was theology moving too close to poetics, the “queen of the sciences” being reduced to the level of an unreliable servant? Furthermore, despite affirmation of the solidity of the “literal sense” of Scripture, from which logical argument could safely be drawn, theology could hardly derive support from the certainties of syllogistic demonstration - particularly since the Bible’s rich array of literary devices threatened to ally it with rhetoric and poetics, the lowest forms of logic. Theology’s difficulty was poetry’s gain, however, as when innovative trecento writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio exploited the connections between Biblical style and poetic fiction to claim greater prestige for secular literature. In May 2005, the medieval volume of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism was published, edited by Ian Johnson and myself. The general brief for this history was to produce an account of western literary criticism which would deal with both literary theory and critical practice. Such fields of knowledge as history of ideas, linguistics, philosophy and theology were deemed related but not essential, to be drawn upon when Medieval and Early Modern Authorship. SPELL : Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 25. Ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne. Tübingen: Narr, 2011. 293-308. <?page no="294"?> 294 Alastair Minnis necessary but not forming part of the central core of the enterprise. This remit had one highly regrettable consequence for the medieval volume: the almost total exclusion of Biblical exegesis. Given the limited amount of space allowed to cover some thousand years of “secular” textual commentary and controversy, and the vast amount of exposition of scriptural authors which has also survived from that period, this decision - purely a practical one - was inevitable. But much was lost in the process - as I hope to show, by describing certain interconnections of the secular and the sacred within late-medieval auctor-theory. Ideological attempts to exclude Biblical exegesis from the history of medieval literary criticism - and several have been attempted in recent times - must be resisted, for various reasons. In the first instance, it should be noted that many crucial theoretical issues enjoyed full development, or indeed achieved initial definition, within medieval discussion of Biblical authorship and authority, whence they passed into secular poetics. Far from theological thinking being essentially antithetical to literary criticism (as sometimes has been assumed or claimed), on many occasions it served as a major stimulus to it. The converse was also true. Interpretative techniques and terminology characteristic of secular poetics and theory of figurative language often had a considerable impact on Biblical exegesis. But that trend brought with it major anxieties - problems concerning the assimilation and reconciliation of diverse sources of authority, at the very least, and at worst, a crisis of authority. Put simply, the crucial issue may be explained as follows. Poetic, figurative and imaginative styles of writing were the stock-in-trade of the (classical) poets - and the poetae were, at worst, branded as liars, and at best believed to have contributed to the sphere of ethical knowledge and practice. Ethice subponitur, “this [text] pertains to ethics,” is a cliché of the medieval accessus or prefatory introductions to a wide range of authors, ranging from the vatic Virgil to the subversive praeceptor amoris, Ovid (Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship 23-27). Even worse, poetics (with “imaginative representation” as its epistemologically problematic purpose) was deemed to be the lowest part of logic (Minnis and Scott 279-84). So, then, was theologia, the queen of the sciences, 1 at risk of being demeaned by association with these inferior, subordinate sources of information? The great Franciscan schoolman St Bonaventure (c. 1217-74) wrote a treatise entitled De reductione artium ad theologiam, wherein it is argued that the arts (by which he means the liberal arts together with the mechanical arts) all return to 1 Here, and throughout this paper, I use “science” to translate the Latin term scientia, meaning simply a body of knowledge - in contrast with the main contemporary use of the term as designating experimental science. <?page no="295"?> Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology 295 theology, as their ultimate source; that is to say, “all knowledge is led back to the deepest wisdom of the Scriptures which is elaborated in the form of theology” (On the Reduction 1). But in Bonaventure’s time the question could be asked, was theology in danger of being reduced, drawn back, to one of her subject disciplines? The scale and scope of the problem are well illustrated by a type of textual classification formalized in the early thirteenth century by Bonaventure’s teacher - Alexander of Hales, an Englishman who became a doctor of theology at the university of Paris around 1220-21. Alexander is credited with a major historical “first”: he used Peter Lombard’s Sentences rather than the Bible as the basic text for his theology lectures, instituting a practice that was to continue for several centuries; even Martin Luther dutifully wrote a commentary on the Sentences. St Francis of Assisi died in 1226; some ten years later (in 1236) the innovative English schoolman joined the order he had founded. Alexander kept his chair at the University of Paris; indeed, he was succeeded by a distinguished series of his brother-Franciscans. Franciscanism had well and truly arrived at the university, made its accommodations with academe - for better or worse. The work for which Alexander is best known is his Summa theologica, though it must be emphasized that this was only begun by him, and continued by his confrères. We can probably credit Alexander himself with a fine formulation of the stylistic “modes” (modi or formae tractandi or procedendi) of sacred Scripture, wherein his Parisian training in the arts was put to excellent use, which enjoyed considerable influence through the sixteenth century and beyond. In this “Alexandran” tradition the different styles and didactic modes deployed in the various books of the Bible were itemized and described at considerable length, with the “poetic,” “affective” and “imaginative” nature of certain types of writing being recognized and justified (Minnis and Scott 200; Chenu, La Théologie comme science; Köpf, Die Anfänge der theologischen Wissenschaftstheorie). Accounts of the various modi or formae tractandi of sacred Scripture such as the comprehensive and standard-setting one found in the Summa Alexandri (as henceforth I shall call it) frequently appear within treatments of the larger question, “is theology a science? ” Reading these mannered, and indeed monumental, discussions nowadays, one could be forgiven for thinking that their authors are engaging in indulgent displays of intellectual prowess, posing and elaborating questions to which they already have tried and tested answers. But that would be far from the truth. The academic environment in which they were produced was neither serene nor staid. Recently-recovered works of Aristotle (mainly his treatises on natural science) were being treated with considerable suspicion as potentially subversive of key tenets of Christian belief, and <?page no="296"?> 296 Alastair Minnis the teaching of certain doctrines was banned, or at least curtailed, in a series of condemnations issued in the years 1210, 1270, and 1277. The last of these (the result of an inquiry carried out by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, on instructions from Pope John XXI ) has provoked much scholarly attention, not least because some of the 219 “erroneous” propositions may have been culled from works by that most celebrated of all schoolmen, the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). The extent to which these injunctions actually inhibited the study of Aristotle has been questioned, and certainly Aquinas’s career suffered little if at all. What is quite clear, however, is the state of intellectual challenge and change which prevailed at the major universities of the day, particularly at the University of Paris, whose preeminence in the study of theology was unchallenged during the period Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure and Aquinas studied there. Here, then, is the context in which thirteenth-century responses to the question utrum theologia sit scientia? should be read - along with the concomitant descriptions of the Biblical modi tractandi. The fact that sacred Scripture proceeds in a way which “is poetic or historical or parabolical” does not cause any problem of verification or undermine its “scientific” credentials, declares the Summa Alexandri. For holy Writ is true in terms of experience and disposition (affectus) rather than investigation and intellect, and certain in respect of that knowledge which is transmitted “through God’s spirit” rather than that which is transmitted merely though the “human spirit” (Minnis and Scott 217). The modi deployed in sacred Scripture are totally appropriate because the Bible operates through the inculcation of a pious disposition or affect (affectus pietatis) in men (Minnis and Scott 214). That is to say, the experience of reading or hearing Biblical texts moves human beings to behave in a pious manner, thanks to the way in which their wills have been disposed. In sharp contrast, the lesser sciences, the human branches of knowledge, are concerned only with educating the intellect. Therefore they must proceed through analysis, definition and inference - the standard methods of logic, in other words. One of the most striking features of the Summa Alexandri’s defence of the multiplex modus of holy Scripture is its insistence that a wide range of literary devices and didactic techniques is necessary to reach out to all of those individual souls who are living lives beset with temporal contingency and regional particularity. (The underlying rhetorical valance of such theory is, I trust, quite obvious - a style must be chosen with awareness of the capacities and needs of a given listener or listeners, and the more listeners there are the more styles are needed.) People lived and live in different time-periods, and within those periods there are further differences. Some are slow in matters relating to faith, while oth- <?page no="297"?> Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology 297 ers rebel against good morality; some live their lives in prosperity, others in adversity. And so forth. Evidently, humankind is manifold - and therefore the Biblical mode which addresses such an audience must be manifold. This doctrine was elaborated with great eloquence by St Bonaventure, in an account (written in the period 1254-57) which makes quite clear its implications for theory of authorship: Among all the many kinds of wisdom which are contained in (. . .) Holy Scripture, there is one common way of proceeding: by authority. Grouped within it are the narrative, perceptive, prohibitive, exhortatory, instructive, threatening, promising, supplicating, and laudatory modes. All these modes come within the scope of that one mode, proceeding by authority, and quite rightly so. This doctrine exists in order that we should become good and be redeemed, and this is not achieved by deliberation alone, but rather by a disposition of the will. Therefore, Holy Scripture had to be handed down to us in whatever way would dispose us best [to goodness]. Our affections (affectus) are moved more strongly by examples than by arguments, by promises than by logical reasonings, by devotions than by definitions. Scripture, therefore, had to avoid the mode of proceeding by definition, division, and inferring to prove the properties of some subject, as do the other sciences. It had rather to adapt its own modes to the various dispositions of men’s minds which incline those minds differently. Thus, if a man is not moved to heed precepts and prohibitions, he may at least be moved by the examples narrated; if someone is not moved by these, he may be moved by the benefits which are pointed out to him; and if he is not moved by these, he may be moved by wise warnings, by promises which ring true, by terrifying threats; and thus be stirred to devotion and praise of God, and therefore receive grace which will guide him to the practice of virtuous works. These narrative modes cannot proceed by way of certainty based on reasoning, because particular facts do not admit of formal proof. Therefore, lest Scripture should seem doubtful, and consequently should have less power to move [our affectus], instead of certainty based on reasoning God has provided it with certainty based on authority, which is so great that it rises high above the most acute human mind. (Breviloquium, Prologue, 5 in Minnis and Scott 235-6) These accounts in the Summa Alexandri and Bonaventure’s Breviloquium seem to up-end the traditional hierarchy of knowledge, as elaborated by Islamic and Christian commentators on Aristotle’s Organon (i.e. the corpus of logical texts), by giving affective poetics and rhetoric pride of place. The Rhetoric and the Poetics were deemed the seventh and eighth parts of this collection respectively, far inferior to the Prior and Posterior Analytics which are concerned with syllogisms that proceed from true <?page no="298"?> 298 Alastair Minnis and necessary premises (as in metaphysics; Minnis and Scott 279-81). What, then, do rhetoric and poetics offer? The former seeks to persuade and employs the enthymeme and the exemplum; the latter has imaginative representation as its purpose and the imaginative syllogism as its characteristic device. “Poetic logic produces a certain weak attraction which merely inclines someone to desire something or to avoid something” (Minnis and Scott 313). In other words, it offers the weakest, most problematic, form of argumentation. Hardly a ringing recommendation of the scientific credentials of rhetoric and poetry, which have, as their stock and trade, those very devices which (as the above citations have shown) were listed in the context of discussions which established theology as the queen of the sciences. Why not, then, simply denigrate the higher texts within the Organon’s hierarchy by noting that they serve those merely human sciences which proceed by “definition, division, and inferring,” and elevate the humble Rhetoric and Poetics, just as Christ Himself had elevated the poor and the lowly? After all, had not Christ and the Apostles preached to people from all walks of life through language which was demotic, widely understood and common or “broad” (grossus), making excellent use of affective, figurative, metaphorical and indeed poetic methods, in many cases originating (or at least adopting) those modi which the schoolmen were identifying as the Bible’s distinctive, and therefore prestigious, formae tractandi (Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship 136-8)? Moreover, in the very recent past St Francis of Assisi had preached in a similar fashion, and, as we have seen, some of his brothers had gone to school to provide elaborate academic defences of that same nonintellectual methodology (without, however, making direct reference to their founder in this context). But, in the event, no theologian (to the best of my knowledge) was prepared to go that far. There was insufficient impetus to call in question a system of argumentation which had been in place for many centuries - and which, after all, could be put to good use in the deployment of Biblical material within scholastic debate. Here one may recall St. Thomas Aquinas’s well-known focus on the literal sense of Scripture as the point from which argument could be drawn - and when he said “argument,” of course he meant, “strictly logical argument” (Minnis and Scott 242). Behind that maneuver one may detect a desire to accommodate the matter of holy Writ to the methodology of logic, thereby avoiding any possible conflict between different sources of authority. But any such attempt to make the Bible seem more logic-friendly was inevitably disrupted by the obstinate fact that some literal senses were more friendly to logic than others. Nevertheless, both the range and the prestige of the literary sense increased remarkably. Double, triple and even <?page no="299"?> Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology 299 quadruple literal senses were identified (Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship 79-81). Furthermore, the “parabolic” sense was deemed a part of the literal sense - an extraordinary act of appropriation of an array of figurative language which in previous centuries had been classified within allegorical interpretation. Thus the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyre (c. 1270-1349), whose debt to St Thomas is well known, could argue that the Song of Songs features a “parabolic literal sense,” being about Christ and the Church, rather than a historical literal sense, which would produce a - quite unacceptable - reading in terms of Solomon’s love for the queen of Sheba (Dove 129-30, 145). However, one could hardly draw a strictly logical argument from that type of literal sense. The massive expansion which the literal sense was enjoying did not necessarily enhance its logical credentials - indeed, it could threaten to undermine them, by affirming the extent to which the Bible was permeated with those “poetical or historical or parabolical” modes which had been described so impressively in the Summa Alexandri. But let me not stray too far from my central point here. Which is that there was no appetite for an assault on logic’s formidable powerbase. No-one called for its position in scholastic classification and classroom procedure to be ceded to poetics, so that the scriptural modi might better be understood or valued more highly. Other means of understanding and valuing were found. Whether by accident or design (it is hard to tell which), in this instance medieval scholars managed to think in compartments, thereby preventing these different systems of valuation from coming into direct confrontation. Poetry and figurative language continued to be demoted within the Organon’s hierarchy, even as they were promoted within theologians’ accounts of the multiplex modus of Scripture. True, occasionally a discussion of the branches of logic will include a positive-sounding explanation of how poetic persuasion can guide a man in the right moral direction, its effectiveness being due to the fact that “everyone has most trust in his own instinctive estimations and relies particularly on his own imaginations” (Minnis and Scott 309; here I quote an anonymous schoolman who is commenting on the Averroistic version of Aristotle’s Poetics, a work beyond the scope of the present paper). But, on the other hand, we can also find remarks like this as already quoted above, p. 298): “poetic logic produces a certain weak attraction which merely inclines someone to desire something or to avoid something”. It might therefore be suggested that this situation inhibited the development of any poetics which bore the stamp of its lowly position within logic’s rigid hierarchy - and hence, inevitably, curbed the possible use of such theory within scriptural exegesis. So much for the fraught relationship between poetics and logic (or, to be more accurate, between poetics and the traditionally superior parts <?page no="300"?> 300 Alastair Minnis of logic), and its consequences for theology. We may now move to consider the difficulties caused by the troublingly close relationship between theology and ethics. From the twelfth century onwards, it was routinely claimed (in the accessus and elsewhere) that poetry serves a moral end and may be classified within ethics. But the understanding of ethics underwent considerable change in the later Middle Ages, primarily due to the impact of recently rediscovered texts by Aristotle, particularly (of course) the Nicomachean Ethics. As Aristotle “writes in the second book of the Ethics, we undertake moral study not for the sake of abstract contemplation, nor to gain knowledge [in an intellectual sense], but in order that we may become good” (Minnis and Scott 249; cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ii.2 [1103b, 26-28]). Thus the Augustinian Hermit Giles of Rome draws on Aristotle at the beginning of his highly popular De regimine principum (c. 1285), proceeding to explain that: (. . .) the end (finis) in this science [i.e. ethics] 2 is not to gain knowledge concerning its own matter, but [moral] activity (opus); it is not truth but goodness. Since subtle arguments, therefore, are more effective in illuminating the intellect, while those that are superficial and broad (superficiales vero et grosse) are more effective in stirring and firing the affections (affectus), in the speculative sciences, where the main aim is the illumination of the intellect, one must proceed by way of proof and in a subtle manner, but in moral matters (in negocio morali), where the goal is an upright will and that we should become good, one must proceed by way of persuasion and the use of figures (persuasive et figuraliter). (Minnis and Scott 249) This Aristotelian justification of ethics serves well Giles’ purpose of introducing a treatise wherein a “broad and figurative” mode of procedure is used. But it bears an intriguing resemblance to Bonaventure’s justification of the modus procedendi of sacred Scripture, as quoted earlier. This is not coincidental, since Bonaventure clearly had in mind the very same passage of Aristotle’s Ethics that is cited explicitly by Giles of Rome in his account of the modus procedendi followed in the instruction of princes (and of humankind in general). All of these texts seem to share a belief in the importance of the correct disposition of the will, the intellect alone being insufficient in the promotion of virtuous behaviour. Further evidence of Bonaventure’s debt to Aristotle is afforded by his assertion that “particular facts do not admit of formal proof,” from which the theologian infers that Scripture’s narrative modes, being concerned with particular facts, are not susceptible of such proof, it being 2 Ethics as applied here in the education of princes. Giles’ treatise also offers instruction in other branches of practical philosophy (economics or family-management and politics) as understood within medieval Aristotelianism. <?page no="301"?> Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology 301 impossible to gain “certainty based on reasoning” in such a case (see p. 297 above). This derives from Aristotle’s statement in book ii, chapter 2 of the Ethics that “things pertaining to actions (. . .) do not have anything fixed about them,” and thus are uncertain (and hence unprovable) in scientific terms. (In other words, moral issues cannot be solved by the application of syllogistic logic -to revert to the terms of the earlier part of this paper.) Indeed, Giles of Rome includes that very same passage in his introduction to De regimine principum, noting that “the subject-matter of morals (. . .) concerns individual matters, matters which, as is shown in the Ethics, book ii, are very uncertain because of the variability of their nature” (Minnis and Scott 248; cf. Aristotle, ii.2 [1104a, 1-2]). It would seem, then, that both the Bible and Aristotelian ethics have as their goal moral action, making men good, which is achieved through the correct disposition of the human will rather than the illumination of the intellect. May it be concluded, then, that the ends (and the means to those ends) of ethics and theology are the same, indeed that the Bible may be deemed an ethical book, judged to fall within the scope of morals and classified under “practical” (as opposed to “theoretical”) philosophy as defined by Aristotle? Or, in other words, that the Bible “pertains to ethics,” just like all those lesser texts which served the curricula of medieval grammar schools? Quite a lot for the queen of the sciences to swallow, surely, despite the sugar put on the pill by Aristotle’s powerful celebration of ethics. Such an anxiety may be discerned in Bonaventure’s Breviloquium, in the passage quoted on p. 297 above. He addresses it by emphasizing where ultimate and true authority lies, in a bold stroke referring all the narrative modes of the Bible back to its ultimate auctor, God. Holy Scripture has “one common way of proceeding: by authority.” And grouped within this multiple modus are all the specific, individual narrative modes. “All these modes come within the scope of that one mode, proceeding by authority,” Bonaventure says, and quite rightly so - the implication being that, no matter how those modes are employed by other (merely human) authors, no matter how humble they may be in other hands and in other contexts, in holy Scripture they are under divine control, at the disposal of God. And therefore their prestige - in the Bible at least - is unquestionable. Bonaventure’s solution, then, is to appeal to unique authorship, rather than seek to valorize the specific modes themselves. That way, a decorous distance is maintained between ethics and theology. Another way of maintaining that distance was to assert that, while theology and ethics may well share certain means and ends, theology has crucially distinctive, indeed unique, features which take it far beyond ethics in particular and practical philosophy in general. That is how <?page no="302"?> 302 Alastair Minnis Bonaventure solves the problem in one of the quaestiones which comprise the prologue to his Sentences commentary, “whether this book of theology has contemplation as its aim, or that we should become good; in other words, is it a speculative or practical science? ” (Minnis and Scott 226-8). He begins by challenging this binary approach to the problem. The intellect should be considered in three ways, he argues. First, it may be considered in itself. As such, it is truly speculative and concerned only with “speculative knowledge.” Secondly, if it is considered inasmuch as “it is extended to achieve some actual task,” to have a certain activity (opus) performed, then it is concerned with us becoming good, “and this is practical or moral knowledge.” However, the third or “middle” way (a happy mean indeed) sees the intellect as extending itself to move the affections, thereby operating within a conditio (condition, situation, compact, relationship) “which lies between the purely speculative and the practical, and which embraces both. This condition is called wisdom, and it expresses both cognition and affection.” And here is where theology belongs. It has a double raison d’être, existing “for the purpose of contemplation and also that we may become good, but principally that we may become good.” For “become good” we should read “love God and be saved,” as is evident from what Bonaventure says next. He affirms the superiority of the science of theology over the merely human sciences (those branches of knowledge which, we may recall, are characterized and confined by their modus procedendi of definition, division, and inference) by the somewhat tart remark that the geometrical “knowledge that a diagonal is asymmetrical with a side does not move anyone to love.” However, the knowledge that “Christ died for us” certainly does move “a man to love” - “unless he is a hardened sinner,” of course. “Therefore,” Bonaventure continues, “it must be conceded that this science [of theology] exists in order that we should become good.” But, to state the obvious, this is “becoming good” in a sense more comprehensive, elevated and rewarding (in both this life and the next) than that presupposed in the Nicomachean Ethics. And we have gone far beyond the categories of the Organon. A particularly interesting reflex of this thinking may be found in a passage in Giles of Rome’s commentary on the Song of Songs. The end or finis of this particular sacred book, Giles explains, is also the end of sacred doctrine as a whole - namely, love (Minnis and Scott 246). But love is concerned with activity (opus). So should it therefore be called a practical science? (We may recall the way in which, in his De regimine principum prologue as quoted above, Giles - following Aristotle - designated activity (opus) as the appropriate subject of ethical instruction). That designation would hardly seem to befit the supreme science of theology. And so Giles explains that anyone who talks in that way should “correct <?page no="303"?> Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology 303 his language,” i.e. he should speak in a more precise and accurate manner (Minnis and Scott 247). “A practical science is principally directed towards exterior action,” which is why the “political sciences are called practical, and polities, that is, goodness, is dependent on our actions.” The second book of the Nicomachean Ethics is cited once again: “according to the Philosopher, we become good because we perform good actions,” and like actions beget like habitus or settled moral dispositions. In marked contrast, “spiritual goodness is not dependent upon exterior actions but rather upon the condition and works of charity.” It is this latter kind of goodness to which Holy Scripture is directed, and therefore it “should not be called practical.” Rather, it should have its own special name, described as affective and concerned with love. Thus the supreme science is rescued from the threat of being reduced to practical philosophy, just because their respective ends have much in common and they share certain means to those ends. Giles has made quite clear the extent to which he believes that the science of theology differs from the negocio morale discussed in De regimine principum. And yet, the apparent similarities between theology and ethical poetics could be exploited to great effect by innovative literary theorists of trecento Italy, including Francis Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, as they laboured to elevate the status of poetry. “Poetry is not at all inimical to theology,” Petrarch declares. “I would almost say that theology is poetry written about God. When Christ is called, now a lion, now a lamb, and again a worm, what is that if not poetic? You will find a thousand more instances in Holy Scripture (. . .).” He goes on to argue that the Saviour’s parables in the Gospel employ discourse wherein the meaning differs from the normal sense of the words, “to which we give the more usual name of allegory,” a device regularly used by the poets (Letters on Familiar Matters x. 4; tr. Minnis and Scott 413). A fuller version of this argument is offered in Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, where it is emphasized that many literary devices - including pure fiction - are shared by secular and scriptural authors (see especially Minnis and Scott 422-26). All of these claims concerning stylistic confluence are made in light of an unequivocal affirmation of the unique, because divinely inspired, authorship of the Bible. Of all the thirteenth-century theologians I have read, the one who seems to anticipate this position most fully is Roger Bacon (c. 1220-c. 1292), who claimed that Scripture and moral philosophy often relied on the same kind of poetical argument, and, to prove it, pointed to many parallels between the poetical modes used by secular writers and those found in the Bible (Gillespie 170). But Bacon was just one among many schoolmen who furthered the tradition of describing the multiplex modus of holy Scripture (to revert once again to the discourse of the Summa <?page no="304"?> 304 Alastair Minnis Alexandri) in ways which highlighted its affective, imaginative, figurative and even fictive properties. That tradition was pervasive and highly influential; Boccaccio draws on it to great effect in constructing a comprehensive relationship between poetry and theology, which powerfully serves the cause of poetry. Of course, as he freely admits in his Trattatello in laude di Dante, “the holy and the secular writings do not (. . .) have a common end (fine; cf. the Latin term finis) in view.” All that the poets can show us is “how we may, by behaving virtuously, achieve that end (fine) which they, not knowing the true God aright, believed to be the supreme salvation” (Minnis and Scott 494-5). In other words (though Boccaccio does not actually put it like this), their poetry pertains to ethics, and its end is limited by the pagans’ ignorance of revealed Christian truth. But these (very real) differences do not drive a firm wedge between poetry and theology; the lesser end of poetry is certainly not antithetical to the greater end of theology. And there is no doubt that they “share a common mode of treatment” (modo del trattare; cf. the technical Latin term modus tractandi; Minnis and Scott 495). Petrarch argued in like manner. “I would almost say that theology is poetry written about God,” he told his brother Gherardo (Minnis and Scott 413), and in his short treatise in praise of Dante he threw caution to the winds by declaring that “theology is . . . poetry” (Minnis and Scott 498). Albertino Mussato (d.1329) claimed that poetry was a divine science because it was inspired by God, while Coluccio Salutati (d. 1406) developed the theory of the poeta theologus (Minnis and Scott 390). Not everyone approved of this method of dignifying poetry, however, as is made abundantly clear by the vigorous reaction of Girolamo Savonarola (d.1498), who sought to make a bonfire of such vanities. It cannot be argued, Savonarola declared, that just because poetry and theology both use metaphors, therefore poetry is nothing else than theology. Offering a more stringent version of the distinction which Thomas Aquinas had made between metaphor in poetry and metaphor in theology (Minnis and Scott 240), he asserts that it is one thing “to use metaphors because of necessity and the magnitude of the subject,” as in the Bible, and quite “another to use them for pleasure and weakness of truth,” as in pagan poetry (Hardison, The Enduring Monument 7). That reference to poetry’s “weakness of truth” recalls the classification of poetry as the lowest part of logic, as discussed above. Savonarola makes the extent of his denigration even more clear by claiming that, if the poet did not veil and obscure his deficient subject-matter with attractive likenesses, its weakness would be apparent to all (Minnis, “Fifteenth- Century Versions” 169-70). Savonarola also finds fault with poetry because its characteristic mode of procedure involves single, particular <?page no="305"?> Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology 305 things, which are subject to great variation - and hence the poet’s arguments are unreliable (Minnis, “Fifteenth-Century Versions” 168-69). Here he probably had in mind the worrisome similarities between theology and ethics, that Aristotelian practical science which deals with individual cases, is sensitive to complex human particularity, and cannot attain demonstrative certainty - all of which are distinctive features of holy Writ, according to the Summa Alexandri and Bonaventure’s Breviloquium. Apparently Savonarola wished to eliminate the possibility of any such comparison. In the process he parted company with the compelling thirteenth-century ways of addressing the issue which were illustrated above. Here, then, was the trouble with theology, the reason why its authority as a body of knowledge was potentially in crisis. The fact that it shared certain styles and methods of literary procedure with the writings of the poets, who habitually were branded as liars, obliged generation after generation of medieval theologians to defend the epistemological and moral credentials of their subject and the “scientific” basis of its knowledge. The tradition that poetry “pertained to ethics” offered some help. But this could hardly be accepted (indeed, I know of no explicit medieval address of the matter) because it threatened to replace one problem with another. For, if the difference between poetry and theology were reduced significantly, the status of the higher science would be questioned, the spectre raised of theology being reduced to ethics, a branch of merely practical philosophy. (But what was troublesome for theology was good news for poetics. For such a reduction of difference between them was asserted and exploited for the greater glory of poetry in trecento literary theory, as argued above.) If, on the other hand, one wished to emphasize the more ratiocinative and intellectual aspects of theology, then that tended to push theology towards comparison with the higher logical sciences (which had as their characteristic modus procedendi the processes of definition, division, and inference). But, while this was a more elevated position within the classifying system of the Organon (the same system that placed poetics at the very bottom of its epistemological hierarchy), it was insufficiently elevated for the supreme science of theology, which had sources of knowledge that even the cleverest of pagan thinkers knew nothing about, the revealed and immutable truths of Christianity. Such pearls could not, should not, be cast before swine. And yet - during his earthly ministry the Son of God, Jesus Christ Himself, had preached with humble and homely parables, thereby rendering his message accessible to all, even the most lowly. In the early 1220s St Francis of Assisi had emulated that radical ministry, with great success. <?page no="306"?> 306 Alastair Minnis Little wonder, then, that late-medieval thinkers should return, again and again, to confront the poetic qualities of scriptural style. They could appeal to the unique (because divinely inspired) authorship of the Bible, and emphasize the more comprehensive and infinitely more important end of theology (which seeks our salvation rather than mere moral goodness). But whatever they did, the problem of how the Bible should be classified in relation to the arts and sciences would not go away. Nor could it go away. For the debate was fundamentally about substance rather than style. About what separated Christianity from the Roman paganism which it replaced. Whether its core appeal was to the many or the few. If its language was fundamentally exclusive or inclusive, élitist or demotic. In sum, investigation of the fraught relationship between poetry and theology in late-medieval thought leads to engagement with the true nature of medieval Christianity as constructed in the era of the great schoolmen, how its purpose and appeal as a universal church was then understood. And here we confront an ongoing negotiation of authority, a perpetual quest for authorization. <?page no="307"?> Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology 307 References Bonaventure, St. On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology. Trans. with introduction and commentary by Zachary Hayes. St Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute, 1996. Chenu, M.-D. La Théologie comme science au XIIIe siècle. Third edition, Bibliothèque Thomiste 33. Paris: Vrin, 1969. Dove, Mary. “Literal Senses in the Song of Songs.” Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture. Ed. Philip D.W. Krey and Lesley Smith. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000. 129-46 Gillespie, Vincent. “The Study of Classical Authors: From the Twelfth Century to c. 1450.” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages. Ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 145-235. Hackett, Jeremiah. “Roger Bacon on Rhetoric and Poetics.” Ed. Jeremiah Hackett. Roger Bacon and the Sciences. Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997. 133-49. Hardison, O. B. The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1962. . “Towards a History of Medieval Literary Criticism.” Mediaevalia et humanistica 7 (1976): 1-12. Köpf, Ulrich. Die Anfänge der theologischen Wissenschaftstheorie im 13. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 49. Tübingen: Mohr, 1974. Minnis, Alastair. “Fifteenth Century Versions of Literalism: Girolamo Savonarola and Alfonso de Madrigal.” Neue Richtungen in der hoch-und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese. Ed. Robert Lerner. Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Kolloquien 32. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. 163- 80. . Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009 [Reissued second edition, with a new introductory essay]. and A.B. Scott with David Wallace, eds. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100-c.1375: The Commentary Tradition. Second revised edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, rpt. 2001. and Ian Johnson, eds. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ocker, Christopher. Biblical Poetics Before Humanism and the Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Turner, Denys. Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1995. <?page no="308"?> 308 Alastair Minnis Witt, Ronald G. “Coluccio Salutati and the Conception of the Poeta Theologus in the Fourteenth Century.” Renaissance Quarterly 30. 4 (1977): 538-63. <?page no="309"?> Notes on Contributors JULIANNA BARK is currently working as a research assistant in the English Department of the University of Geneva. She is writing a doctoral thesis on printed portraits of literary authors in early modern England, and their relationship to perceptions of authorship in that period. She holds a licence ès lettres in English, Art History and Photography from the University of Geneva, as well as an MA and PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Art at New York University. JOHN BLAKELEY is a senior lecturer in English Literature at University College Plymouth St Mark and St John. His main research interest lies in the commercialisation of literature in the late-Elizabethan period. He has published on Robert Greene and is currently writing about Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays. He is also interested in adaptations of early modern drama to film and cinematic representations of the Renaissance. He has published in Shakespeare Bulletin and is now researching the Shakespeare and Renaissance films of Derek Jarman. GUILLEMETTE BOLENS is Professor of English Literature at the University of Geneva, where she teaches medieval literature with a focus on the history of the body and kinesis. Her essays have appeared in Poetics Today, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, European Joyce Studies, and Oral Tradition, and she received the Latsis Award and the Hélène and Victor Barbour Award for her book La Logique du corps articulaire: Les articulations du corps humain dans la littérature occidentale (2001/ 2007). Her book Le Style des gestes: Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire was published in 2008, and its English translation is forthcoming at the Johns Hopkins University Press. COLIN BURROW is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (1993), Edmund Spenser (1996) and the editor of The Complete Sonnets and Poems for the Oxford Shakespeare (2002), Metaphysical Poetry (2006), of the Poems for the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Complete Works of Ben Jonson, and of a collection of essays on manuscript miscellanies forthcoming in English Manuscript Studies. He has published many articles on early modern literature, chiefly on aspects of classical reception, and reviews regu- <?page no="310"?> 310 Notes on Contributors larly on a range of topics in The London Review of Books. He is presently working on Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity for the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, on a book on the theory and practice of literary imitation, and on the Elizabethan volume of the Oxford English Literary History. PATRICK CHENEY is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has written five books on early modern authorship, including, most recently, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (2008) and Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (2009). Future plans include writing a book on “English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime.” HELEN COOPER is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Magdalene College. She has written extensively on medieval literature and its afterlife, in particular in Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (1978); The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (1983); Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (1989); The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (2004); and Shakespeare and the Medieval World (2010). RITA COPELAND is Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her fields of interest include medieval literature, classical traditions in the Middle Ages, the history of rhetoric and especially medieval rhetoric, the history of literary theory, the history of education, and intellectual history. Books: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (1991/ 95); ed., Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (1996); Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Middle Ages (2001); with Ineke Sluiter, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (2009); ed., with Christopher Cannon and Nicolette Zeeman, Medieval Grammar and the Literary Arts (special issue of New Medieval Literatures), 2009; ed., with Peter Struck, The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (2010). She is cofounder and co-editor of the journal New Medieval Literatures, and coeditor, with Jill Ross, of Toronto Series in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric. Her current project is The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature vol. 1, The Middle Ages. STEFANIA D’AGATA D’OTTAVI is Professor of English at the Università per Stranieri di Siena, where she also teaches “History of the English Language.” She has worked on Thomas More, Shakespeare, Blake, Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy, but is now focusing on the study of Medieval literature. Her publications include a book on the mise en <?page no="311"?> Notes on Contributors 311 abyme in Chaucer’s dream poems (Il sogno e il libro, 1992), the first Italian verse translation of the B-version of Piers Plowman, and essays on the Medieval theatre and on the Canterbury Tales. She is mainly interested in the relationship between late-Medieval philosophy (especially logic) and the literature of the time and is currently working on a book devoted to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. EMMA DEPLEDGE is currently employed as a research assistant at the University of Geneva, where she teaches Renaissance and Restoration literature. She is completing a doctoral thesis entitled “Shakespeare Alterations of the Exclusion Crisis: Politics, Rape, and Authorship.” Her PhD research explores the impact the Crisis had on Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife, and the way in which new or altered scenes of rape were inserted into Shakespeare plays in order to provide commentary on the events of the late 1670s and 1680s. ROBERT R. EDWARDS is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of The Flight from Desire (2006), Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (2002), The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in Chaucer’s Early Narrative (1989), Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative (1989), and The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama (1977). He has edited John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (2001) and selections from Troy Book (1998) and The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli (1987). He is the editor or co-editor of essay collections on medieval narrative and medieval marriage and sexuality. His research focuses on intertextuality in medieval English, Latin, and Romance literature. LUKAS ERNE is Professor of English at the University of Geneva. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators (2008), Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003), and Beyond “The Spanish Tragedy”: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (2001), and the editor of The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (2007) and, with M. J. Kidnie, Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama (2004). He is currently working on a book called Shakespeare and the Book Trade. NEIL FORSYTH is “professeur honoraire” at the University of Lausanne. He has written a narrative history of the devil entitled The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (1989) and he is the author of The Satanic Epic (2003). His most recent book is John Milton: A Biography (2008). One of his essays, “Shakespeare the Illusionist,” is about to reappear in <?page no="312"?> 312 Notes on Contributors a new edition of Macbeth. A Festschrift in his honour, After Satan, has just been published. JOHANN GREGORY is completing a PhD on Troilus and Cressida at Cardiff University, where he teaches on a medieval and Renaissance literature course. His research interests lie in how Shakespeare represented ideas about literature on the stage. Recent publications include an article on paratexts and matters of taste in Shakespeare and a co-authored article on audience in Assuming Gender, with reviews in Cahiers Élisabéthains, English Studies, Notes and Queries and Shakespeare. He created and manages the blog Cardiff Shakespeare. STEPHEN BOYD HEQUEMBOURG is a graduate student at Harvard University where he studies and teaches Milton and seventeenth-century literature. His work focuses broadly on the intersections of literature and philosophy, and more particularly on figurations of mind-body interactions. His dissertation, Monism and Metaphor in the Seventeenth Century, explores the rhetoric of materialism in such writers as Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton. LYNN S. MESKILL is lecturer in English Literature and Translation at University Paris-Diderot, Paris 7. She holds a BA in Classics from Princeton University and MA and PhD degrees in English from the University of Virginia. She is author of Ben Jonson and Envy (2009). She has published articles on Jonson, Shakespeare, and Milton in ELH, Cahiers Elisabéthains, and HLQ. ALASTAIR MINNIS is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale University. He is an author or editor of twenty-two books, his most recent monographs being Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (2007) and Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (2009). His latest book, an essay collection edited with Rosalynn Voaden, is Med i eval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c.1100-c.1500 (2010). Characteristically, Professor Minnis’s research methodology brings together reading strategies from literary criticism and the history of ideas, and an interest in medieval philosophy and theology has informed much of his work. NICOLE NYFFENEGGER is a senior lecturer at the University of Bern. She is co-editor of Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters (2011) and is about to publish a monograph on authorship and historiography entitled Authorising History. Her present research foci include Orientalism and <?page no="313"?> Notes on Contributors 313 identity construction, body discourses and gendered spaces. She is currently working on her Habilitation project on human skin as text. ALICE SPENCER holds a doctorate from Turin University, where she now teaches. Her first book, Dialogues of Love and Government, was published in 2007. She has recently published articles on Bokenham, Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibee,” Usk, and The Assembly of Ladies. She is currently working on a second monograph, dealing with the works of Osbern Bokenham. <?page no="315"?> Index of Names Aesop, 243 Alan of Lille, 241-243, 245 Alexander of Hales, 295-296 Alexander of Villa Dei, 241, 243 Alexander the Great, 245 Alighieri, Pietro, 67n Alwes, Derek, 164 Amyot, Jacques, 78, 84 Anderson, Benedict, 280 Appian, 84, 87 Aquinas, Thomas, St, 296, 298- 299, 304 Arator, 236, 242-243 Ariosto, Ludovico, 117-118, 142, 190 Aristotle, 18, 55, 145, 148-149, 251, 295-297, 299-302 Arlaud, Benjamin, 222 Ascham, Roger, 139n Ascoli, Albert, 67-68, 245 Auberlen, Eckhard, 166n, 170- 171 Auerbach, Erich, 138, 149 Augustine, St, 138, 242 Avianus, 232n, 243 Ayers, Philip J., 78, 85 Bacon, Roger, 303 Baldwin, William, 182-183, 185, 187, 194 Barrett, Elizabeth, 45 Barthes, Roland, 25, 111, 120, 134, 142, 266 Bearman, Robert, 226 Beckett, Thomas, 287 Bede, 30-32, 32n, 56 Bednarz, James P., 94, 100n, 101, 101n, 102n Bennett, Andrew, 119n, 137- 138, 142, 155 Bennett, Philip, 266n Benson, John, 219 Benveniste, Emil, 253 Bernard, St, 142 Bernardus Silvestris, 232, 243- 244 Berthelette, Thomas, 11-13, 20, 24 Betterton, Thomas, 204, 221 Bevington, David, 97, 97n, 98, 98n, 150n Blake, William, 118 Bloch, Howard, 282 Bloom, Harold, 15, 36, 142- 143, 153, 268 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 23, 38, 55n, 65, 67, 182, 184, 244- 246, 255, 293, 303-304 Boethius, 63, 235n, 236, 241, 243 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 117 Boitani, Piero, 138, 142 Bokenham, Osbern, 23, 56, 277-289 Bonaventure, St, 12, 294-297, 300-302, 305 Borges, Jorge Luis, 45 Boutcher, Warren, 165, 170n Bridgewater, Earl of, 113 Brink, Jean R., 191 <?page no="316"?> 316 Index of Names Bruster, Douglas, 103 Brydges, James, (3rd) Duke of Chandos, 221-222 Bunyan, John, 113-114 Burbage, Richard, 19, 167, 171 Burghley, William Cecil, Lord, 164 Buridan, John, 254 Burke, Edmund, 138, 144 Burke, Sean, 111, 120 Burnet, Gilbert, 129 Burnet, Thomas, 144 Burrow, Colin, 161n Butterfield, Ardis, 55n Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 108 Caedmon, 30-32 Caesar, Julius, 75, 77 Cain, Tom, 101n Caligula, 133 Campbell, Gordon, 112n Campbell, Oscar James, 97 Capellanus, Andreas, 252 Cassius Dio, 77-78, 85-87 Cato, 235, 239, 243 Cavalcanti, Guido, 67n, 258- 260 Cawood, John, 178 Caxton, William, 11, 14, 41, 94, 182 Cefalu, Paul, 138 Chaloner, Thomas, 182 Chapman, George, 96n, 141, 143, 150-151 Charles II, 199, 202, 207 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11, 14-18, 20, 22-25, 29, 32-33, 35-47, 51, 53-54, 55n, 56-58, 61, 63-69, 94, 137-138, 142, 177, 182, 247, 251-252, 255, 257, 260, 269, 277-278, 281- 282 Cheney, Patrick, 16-17, 54n, 83, 101, 138, 139n, 151n, 161n, 170, 170n, 227 Chestre, Thomas, 35 Chettle, Henry, 191-192 Christine de Pisan, 63 Churchyard, Thomas, 175, 185- 186, 188, 193, 195 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 30, 234, 236, 239 Claudian, 77, 232n, 241, 243, 245, 278 Cobbe, Alec, 223 Cobbe, Thomas, 223n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 113, 115-116, 138 Condell, Henry, 216 Conrad of Hirsau, 22, 231-232, 234-237, 242, 244, 246-247 Cooper, Thomas, 179 Copeland, Rita, 232n, 237n, 240n Corneille, Pierre, 222 Corns, Thomas, 112n Cotton, Robert, 244 Cowley, Abraham, 43 Cromwell, Oliver, 131 Crowley, Robert, 182 Crowne, John, 205-209 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 151, 232n, 234n, 243n, 269n Cynewulf, 31 Dabbs, Thomas, 20 Daniel, Samuel, 175, 192-195 Danson, Thomas, 131-135 Dante, 37-38, 39n, 41, 55, 55n, 67-69, 138, 142-143, 155, 177, 188, 245-246, 256, 258, 260, 304 Danter, John, 19, 167, 192 Dares the Phrygian, 243, 268 Davenant, William, 204, 221 <?page no="317"?> Index of Names 317 Day, Angel, 139 Dekker, Thomas, 100, 100n Delany, Sheila, 278, 281, 285- 286 Demosthenes, 148 Denys, John, 141 Derby, Countess of, 113 Derrida, Jacques, 138 Deschamps, Eustache, 54, 54n, 63 Dickens, Charles, 164n Digges, Leonard, 216 Dinkova-Bruun, Greti, 244, 246n Dobson, Michael, 20-21, 203n, 206n, 210 Dolven, Jeff, 95 Dominik, William, 68n Donaldson, Ian, 81, 103 Donatus, 63n, 231, 235, 239, 241 Donne, John, 120, 144n Douglas, Gavin, 41 Drakakis, John, 151 Drayton, Michael, 151 Droeshout, Martin, 215-217, 219 Dryden, John, 29, 41, 43-46, 204, 206, 210 Duchange, Gaspard, 222 Dugas, Don-John, 221n Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 164n, 226 Durfey, Thomas, 208 Dutton, Richard, 77, 95n Eberhard of Béthune, 241, 243 Eberhard the German, 232n, 234, 243-244 Eco, Umberto, 46 Edward VI, 45 Eliot, T. S., 46, 76, 88, 120 Elizabeth I, Queen, 19, 166, 181 Epicurus, 30 Erne, Lukas, 93, 95 Etherege, George, 128 Euripides, 146 Evans, Ruth, 267 Fallon, Stephen, 113 Ferrers, George, 182 Ferry, Anne, 117 Finch, John Alban, 116n Fiocco, Andrea Domenico, 244-245 Fleming, John, 65 Fletcher, Angus, 151 Fletcher, John, 35 Ford, John, 18, 150 Foucault, Michel, 24, 76, 98, 108, 111, 120 Fowler, Alastair, 119, 119n Francesco da Buti, 68 Francis of Assisi, St, 295, 298, 305 Fraunce, Abraham, 192 Freud, Sigmund, 138 Friswell, James Hain, 222 Froissart, Jean, 38, 64 Frye, Northrop, 151 Fulgentius, 244 Furness, Horace Howard, 87 Galloway, Andrew, 277 Garber, Marjorie, 227 Garrick, David, 223, 223n Gascoigne, George, 19, 162, 180, 187 Gaunt, John of, 39, 42 Gawain-Poet, 33 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 40 Gervase of Melkley, 232, 243 Gieskes, Edward, 170n Giles of Rome, 300-303 Gill, Stephen, 119n Gillespie, Alexandra, 24 Glatzer, Paula, 166, 167n, 169n <?page no="318"?> 318 Index of Names Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 108, 110 Golding, Arthur, 78, 150 Googe, Barnabe, 180, 187-188 Gower, John, 11-18, 20, 23-24, 34-35, 51, 53, 56-65, 69, 138, 261, 277-278, 281-282 Greenblatt, Stephen, 54n Greene, Robert, 19, 25, 140n, 162, 176, 189, 191-192 Greene, Thomas, 54n Griffiths, Jane, 139n Grimald, Nicholas, 179-180 Guido da Pisa, 55n, 68 Guillaume de Lorris, 38 Guinizelli, Guido, 258 Gunther de Paris, 243 Gurr, Andrew, 100n Hackett, Helen, 120n Hall, John, 140, 149 Halpern, Richard, 138 Hamilton, A. C., 150n Hardie, Philip, 150 Harington, John, Sir, 190, 195 Harley, Edward, Sir, 135 Hartman, Geoffrey, 119n Harvey, Gabriel, 154 Hazlitt, William, 77 Helgerson, Richard, 18-20, 43, 54n, 111n, 139n, 161-164, 166, 176, 181 Hemmings, John, 216 Henry IV, 63 Henry VIII, 12-13, 179 Henry of Ghent, 254 Henslowe, Philip, 191 Herbert, George, 30 Herford, C. H., 83, 88 Herford, John, 177 Herodotus, 30 Hertz, Neil, 146n Hesiod, 117 Heywood, John, 193 Higden, Ranulf, 277-283, 287- 288 Hilles, Carroll, 286 Hobbes, Thomas, 112 Hoccleve, Thomas, 35, 37 Holbein, Hans, 177 Holkot, Robert, 257 Hollander, John, 116n Hollander, Robert, 55n Homer, 17, 30, 46, 67, 107-111, 114, 116-118, 142, 144, 235n, 236 Honigmann, E. A. J., 78, 84 Horace, 18, 30, 37, 67, 68, 97, 97n, 100n, 110, 145, 148- 150, 176, 231, 234, 235n, 236, 239, 241, 243, 245 Horne, R. H., 45 Horobin, Simon, 278, 286, 286n Howard, Henry, 20 Howe, John, 131-135 Hugh of Trimberg, 231-232, 240, 242-247 Hume, Robert D., 207n Humphry, Ozias, 222 Hunt, R. W., 237n Hutson, Lorna, 163 Huygens, R. B. C., 235 Isidore of Seville, 245, 279-280 Jager, Eric, 269 Jakobson, Roman, 253 James, Duke of York, 199, 202 James I, King, 140n Janssen, Gheerart, 216, 218 Jean de Hanville, 245 Jean de Meun, 38 John XXI, Pope, 296 John of Garland, 241-243 Johnson, Ian, 293 Johnson, Odai, 207n <?page no="319"?> Index of Names 319 Johnson, Samuel, 45, 114n Jonson, Ben, 16-19, 37, 75-86, 88-89, 93-94, 97-104, 111, 138, 166, 172, 175-176, 181, 189, 194-195, 216 Joyce, James, 29, 45-47 Juvenal, 16, 77, 235n, 236, 239, 241, 243 Kant, Emmanuel, 138-139, 144, 147, 152, 152n Kastan, David Scott, 165n Keats, John, 45, 108, 114, 114n, 116n Keck, Robert, 221 Keilen, Sean, 95 Keller, Wolfram R., 104n Kelly, Douglas, 243n Kemp, William, 19, 167, 171 Kewes, Paulina, 208, 210 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 210 Kyd, Thomas, 18, 150 Lacan, Jacques, 138 Lactantius Placidus, 233 Lake, D. J., 167n Lamb, Charles, 116n Landino, Cristoforo, 25 Lane, Richard James, 219 Langbaine, Gerard, 208 Langland, William, 55 Langosch, Karl, 241n, 242 Lavezzo, Kathy, 277, 279-281 Lawes, Henry, 113 Lawton, David, 281 La mon, 16, 34, 56, 267-268 Leedham-Green, Elisabeth, 141 Leigh Hunt, James Henry, 45 Leishman, J. B., 166n, 167n Leland, John, 177-178 Lerer, Seth, 20 Lesser, Zachary, 83 Lewalski, Barbara, 113 Lewis, C. S., 11, 45 Liebler, Naomi Conn, 151 Lipking, Lawrence, 89 Livy, 38 Locke, John, 210 Lodge, Thomas, 19, 162 Loewenstein, Joseph, 16, 191 Logan, John, 141n Lombard, Peter, 295 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 36 Longinus, 137, 140-150, 153 Lucan, 67, 68n, 85, 235n, 236, 241, 243-244 Lucian, 117 Lucretius, 30, 150 Luther, Martin, 295 Lydgate, John, 23-25, 35-36, 41, 139, 181, 277-278, 281-282 Lyly, John, 19, 162, 189 Lyotard, Jean-François, 138, 144-145, 152n Macaulay, G. C., 58-59, 61n Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 108, 110 Macer, 243 Machan, Tim William, 12 Machaut, Guillaume de, 38, 63- 65 Macrobius, 244 Malone, Edmond, 109, 109n, 185, 219, 222 Mannyng, Robert, 22-23, 56, 265-274 Marbod of Rennes, 243 Mardock, James D., 101 Marie de France, 34 Marlowe, Christopher, 20, 138, 149-151, 154-155, 164, 170 Marprelate, Martin, 189 Marsh, Thomas, 185 Marshall, William, 215, 219 Marston, John, 97 Martial, 239, 245 a <?page no="320"?> 320 Index of Names Martianus Capella, 235n, 243- 244 Marvell, Andrew, 17-18, 125- 135 Mary, Queen of Scots, 178 Masson, David, 112n Matthew of Vendôme, 234, 241-243 Maximianus, 232n, 243 May, Steven W., 192 McDonough, Christopher J., 237n McGann, Jerome, 76 McKenzie, D. F., 76 Meecham-Jones, Simon, 60n Meskill, Lynn S., 102 Middleton, Anne, 288 Middleton, Thomas, 150 Milton, John, 17-18, 25, 43, 107, 111-119, 125-128, 132- 133, 137-138, 142-143, 149, 155 Minnis, A. J., 25, 54, 60n, 66n, 235 Monmouth, Duke of, 202 Montaigne, Michel de, 141n Montgomery, Earl of, 216 Montrose, Louis, 54n, 163 Moore, Thomas, 108 More, Alexander, 132-133 More, Thomas, 20, 175, 178- 181, 193 Morra, Irene, 104n Murray, Barbara, 203 Mussato, Albertino, 304 Nagy, Gregory, 108n Nashe, Thomas, 25, 162n, 186, 189, 191-192 Neckham, Alexander, 231-232, 234n, 237, 237n, 239-240, 244, 246-247 Neville, Cecily, 286, 286n Newlyn, Lucy, 115 Newton, Richard C., 189 Newton, Thomas, 139n Nicholas of Lyre, 299 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 108, 138 Norbrook, David, 138 North, Marcy L., 188 North, Thomas, 77-78, 81, 84, 88 Ockham, William of, 254, 257 Orm, 34 Ormond, Duchess of, 44 Orrery, Earl of, 44 Oton de Granson, 38, 55n Otter, Monika, 270n Overbury, Thomas, Sir, 226 Ovid, 14, 33, 35n, 39n, 40-41, 44, 57-58, 61, 66-67, 68n, 78, 95, 97, 150, 170n, 236, 239, 241, 243, 245, 294 Owen, Susan J., 207 Paglia, Camille, 149 Parker, Martin, 128 Parker, Matthew, 139, 139n Parker, Samuel, 125-134 Paster, Gail Kern, 148n Patterson, Annabel, 83-84, 132 Patterson, Lee, 266 Paul, St, 142 Pechter, Edward, 163n Peck, Russell A., 61n Pecock, Reginald, 56 Pembroke, Countess of, 192- 194 Pembroke, Earl of, 216 Pepys, Samuel, 204-205 Persius, 77, 235n, 236, 241, 243 Peter of Riga, 243-244 Peters, Julie Stone, 102 Petrarch, Francis, 23, 35, 38-39, 142, 177, 180, 184, 188, 245- 246, 293, 303-304 <?page no="321"?> Index of Names 321 Petronius, 239 Pierre de Langtoft, 271 Pilkington, Matthew, 223n Pindar, 108n Piper, David, 219 Plato, 95, 144-145, 148, 282 Plutarch, 16, 75, 77-78, 81, 84, 86-88 Ponsonby, William, 191 Pope, Alexander, 44 Portus, Franciscus, 141 Pound, Ezra, 120 Pressly, William, 226n Price, Paul, 281 Priscian, 241 Prosper of Aquitaine, 243 Prudentius, 236, 242-243 Purcell, William M., 243n Puttenham, George, 25, 147 Quintus Curtius, 245 Rastell, William, 178-180, 182, 193 Ravenscroft, Edward, 204-205, 208-210 Richard II, 58 Richard, Duke of York, 286 Ricks, Christopher, 116n Riggs, David, 164 Robert II, Duke of Normandy, 269 Robert of Gloucester, 269, 269n, 271-272 Robortello, Franciscus, 140 Roet, Payne, 42 Rolle, Richard, 56 Rotelande, Hue de, (Rhuddlan), 34 Roubiliac, Louis-François, 215, 223-224 Rowe, Katherine, 148n Rowe, Nicholas, 221-222 Rowse, A. L., 226 Rufus, 244 Sackville, Thomas, 175, 183- 185, 187-189, 195 Sallust, 236, 239 Salmasius, Claudius, 126, 128 Salutati, Coluccio, 304 Sanford, Hugh, 194 Sanok, Catherine, 278, 280 Sappho, 144, 148 Saunders, David, 221n Saussure, Ferdinand de, 282 Savonarola, Girolamo, 304-305 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 25 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 216, 219 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 148n Scott, A. B., 235 Scott, Charlotte, 103 Scott, Walter, Sir, 278 Sedley, David, 138, 141n, 143, 144n Sedulius, 243 Segars, Francis, 183 Seneca, 77-78, 85-86, 239, 244 Serafino dei Ciminelli, 188 Servius, 233, 233n Shadwell, Thomas, 204, 207, 210 Shakespeare, William, 12, 15- 21, 25, 34-35, 43, 46, 75, 77- 78, 81, 83-89, 93-104, 109- 110, 114, 120, 137-138, 143, 149-151, 153-155, 166-167, 172, 199-200, 202-211, 215- 216, 218-219, 221-223, 226- 227 Shapiro, James, 109 Shaw, Philip, 137-139, 142-143, 145, 148n, 155 Shirley, John, 36 Sidney, Henry, Sir, 164-165 Sidney, Philip, Sir, 18-19, 25, 43, 111n, 120, 140n, 147, 149, 162, 164, 164n, 171, 175-176, 179, 192-193 <?page no="322"?> 322 Index of Names Sidonius, 243 Simmons, Samuel, 112 Simpson, Percy, 83, 88 Singleton, Charles S., 69n Skelton, John, 24, 138, 139n Sluiter, Ineke, 240n Smith, Nigel, 17 Solinus, Gaius Julius, 279 Sophocles, 188 Spearing, A. C., 36, 270 Speed, John, 42 Speght, Thomas, 14 Spencer, T. J. B., 86-87 Spenser, Edmund, 16-17, 19, 24-25, 42-44, 111, 119, 137- 138, 140n, 142-143, 149, 150n, 151-155, 163, 170, 172, 176, 184, 188, 190-191, 193, 195 Spevack, Martin, 84 Spiegel, Gabrielle, 270n Stallybrass, Peter, 83 Statius, 39n, 40, 67n, 68, 68n, 232n, 233-234, 235n, 236, 239, 241, 243 Steevens, George, 219, 222 Stern, Tiffany, 100-101, 208- 209 Stowe, John, 14 Strode, Ralph, 58, 261 Suetonius, 63n, 77-78 Surigo, Stephen, 41 Surrey, Earl of, 20, 138, 139n, 150, 175, 177, 179-180, 183- 186, 189, 195 Swynford, Katherine, 42 Tacitus, 16, 75, 77-78, 81, 85-86 Tasso, Torquato, 113 Tate, Nahum, 202-203, 205-210 Taylor, Gary, 20-21 Taylor, John, 220-221 Tempier, Stephen, Bishop of Paris, 296 Terence, 235n, 236 Theobald, Lewis, 87 Theocritus, 30 Theodulus, 231, 232n, 235-236, 239, 243 Thomas of Britain, 34 Thomas of Hales, 34 Thynne, William, 14 Tiller, Kenneth, 267n, 268n Tonson, Jacob, Sr., 221-222 Tottel, Richard, 20, 178-184, 187, 192 Toye, Robert, 177 Toynbee, Paget, 54n, 55n Trevisa, John, 280 Tribble, Evelyn, 83, 89 Tully, see Cicero, Marcus Tullius Turberville, George, 180 Turner, Francis, 127-130 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 14 Urry, John, 14, 44 Usk, Thomas, 32n, 56 Utrecht, Bernard of, 236 Vance, Eugene, 252 Vandergucht, Michael, 222 Velleius Paterculus, 77 Vertue, George, 221 Vickers, Brian, 141, 143 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 128 Vinsauf, Geoffrey of, 40, 68, 242-243 Virgil, 17, 30, 33, 39-42, 58-59, 63n, 65-68, 77, 97, 142, 150, 176, 179, 183, 231, 233, 235n, 236-237, 239, 241- 243, 245, 294 Vitalis of Blois, 243 <?page no="323"?> Index of Names 323 Voragine, Jacob, 277, 283, 286- 287 Wace, 34, 56, 271-273 Walker, Greg, 139n Walker, Jonathan, 165 Wall, Wendy, 138 Walpole, Horace, 221n Walter of Chatillon, 241-242 Walter of Speyer, 235, 235n Waly, John, 178 Watson, Thomas, 188 Wayland, John, 181-182, 185, 192-193 Webster, John, 150 Weimann, Robert, 103 Weinberg, Bernard, 140 Wells, Stanley, 21, 215, 219, 226, 226n Wetherbee, Winthrop, 39n, 65, 67 Wilkins, George, 12 Wimsatt, James, I., 55n Windeatt, Barry, 39n, 65, 255 Wolf, Friedrich August, 108, 110 Wolfe, Reyner, 177 Woodhouse, Richard, 114n Woods, Marjorie Curry, 232n Wordsworth, William, 17, 45, 107-108, 109n, 114-117, 119, 119n Wotton, Henry, Sir, 113 Woudhuysen, Henry, 192 Wriothesley, Henry, (3rd) Earl of Southampton, 226, 226n Wyatt, Thomas, Sir, 11, 20, 138, 139n, 175, 177-180, 195 Yeager, Robert, F., 58 Žižek, Slavoj, 138 Zumthor, Paul, 266, 266n <?page no="325"?> A Note from the General Editor SPELL 19, Cultures in Contact (2007), included an article entitled “Difference and Hybridity in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia,” by Prof. Susanne Pichler of the University of Innsbruck. It has recently come to our attention that this article reproduces, without attribution, substantial portions of the text of an article entitled “Herald of Hybridity: The Emancipation of Difference in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia,” published by Prof. Berthold Schoene of Manchester Metropolitan University in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1.1 (1998), 109-28. We deeply regret this incident and extend our apologies both to Prof. Schoene and to the International Journal of Cultural Studies.
