Challenging Humanism: Essays in Honor of Dominic Baker-Smith

Challenging Humanism: Essays in Honor of Dominic Baker-Smith

Ton Hoenselaars Arthur F. Kinney Editors

Newark: University of Delaware Press

Challenging Humanism

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Challenging Humanism Essays in Honor of Dominic Baker-Smith

Edited by

Ton Hoenselaars and Arthur F. Kinney

Newark: University of Delaware Press

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䉷 2005 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-920-1/05 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law, and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press).

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Challenging humanism : essays in honor of Dominic Baker-Smith / edited by Ton Hoenselaars and Arthur F. Kinney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87413-920-1 (alk. paper) 1. Humanism. I. Baker-Smith, Dominic. II. Hoenselaars, A. J., 1956– III. Kinney, Arthur F., 1933– B821.C455 2005 144—dc22 2005009988

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Contents List of Illustrations Foreword Ton Hoenselaars Introduction Arthur F. Kinney Utopia’s First Readers Arthur F. Kinney Taking More Seriously: Humanism, Cultural Criticism, and the Possibility of a Past Andrew D. Weiner Thomas More at Epigrams: Humanism or Humanisms? Elizabeth McCutcheon Melanchthon, Latomus, Ramus: Teachers of Careful Reading Kees Meerhoff Christian Humanism in John Rolland’s Court of Venus Roderick J. Lyall In Praise of Dancing: A Paradoxical Encomium by Hendrik Laurensz. Spiegel (1549–1612) Marijke Spies Early Texts of Donne’s ‘‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’’: Manuscripts and Their Omissions, and the Provenance of the Earliest Translation, by Constantijn Huygens (1633) Richard Todd Sidney’s Critique of Humanism in the New Arcadia Donald Stump Shakespeare, Henri IV, and the Tyranny of Royal Style Victor Skretkowicz Bacon’s Spenser W. A. Sessions Humanism in Hard Times: The Second Earl of Leicester (1595–1677) and His Commonplace Books, 1630–60 Germaine Warkentin

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Making World War with Literature John Neubauer Recycling the Renaissance in World War II: E. W. & M. M. Robson Review Laurence Olivier’s Henry V Ton Hoenselaars Of Music and Silence: The Harmonies of Thomas Whythorne and Rose Tremain Helen Wilcox Dominic Baker-Smith: A Bibliography List of Contributors Index

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Illustrations 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Map of Utopia (1516) Map of Utopia (1518) The Utopian alphabet Abraham Ortelius, Utopiae Typus The Renaissance book-wheel Title page of Francis Bacon, Instauratio magna Carolus Magnvs Redivivus (1592) A sample of Whythorne’s ‘‘orthografye’’ and handwriting Woodcut of Whythorne made for his Songes (1571)

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Challenging Humanism A Foreword Ton Hoenselaars

DURING THE MID-1590s, ANTHONY MUNDAY, HENRY CHETTLE, THOMAS Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare worked together on what was to remain a relatively obscure play, Sir Thomas More. This biographical history play about the life and death of Thomas More shows the major events of his career, focusing mainly on the period from 1517 to 1535. First, we see how Thomas More as Sheriff of London quenches the Ill May Day riots against the foreign inhabitants of London by pacifying the Londoners with his remarkable skills as a public speaker. Next, after managing successfully to combat this early modern instance of inner city violence, More rises to become lord chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. Soon he experiences the occupational hazard, as Henry VIII declares himself the head of the Anglican Church. More refuses to support the king’s opening move in the political phase of the English Reformation and marks the occasion by resigning his post. In response, the king sends More to the Tower of London and sentences his one-time lord chancellor to death by beheading. One scene in the play, positioned in the pivotal third act, helps us to gain a special insight into the early modern perception of Henrician humanism. The scene shows the first meeting between the play’s hero Thomas More and the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus, who happens to be accompanied by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The meeting comes as no surprise. The audience has been prepared for it earlier, in a short scene (2.1) where More also plans a practical joke on Erasmus. Here, More asks his servant Randall to dress up as More, and in that disguise to welcome Erasmus to the City of London. The interesting point would be to see if Erasmus could tell the fake More from the real More. As More says to Randall: I’ll see if great Erasmus can distinguish Merit and outward ceremony.1

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In the event, Erasmus is not fooled by More’s practical joke. On stage, we witness Randall, dressed up as Thomas More, while More himself, the audience knows, is secretly observing the proceedings in the wings. When Erasmus enters and sees Randall-as-More, he asks the Earl of Surrey: ‘‘Is that Sir Thomas More?’’ (3.1.138), a question he will repeat nearly verbatim a number of lines later (3.1.163). Matters are resolved when the ‘real’ Thomas More emerges from his hiding place and stops the charade. More tells Randall to stop his act with the words: ‘‘Fool, painted barbarism, retire thyself / Into thy first creation’’ (3.1.173–74), and apologizes to Erasmus for this practical joke which, as he explains, again, really served to show that often people respect others who dress up extravagantly, and treat as fools learned men who dress in simple garb. There is some relevance to the academic merriment enjoyed here by the model courtier, translator, and creative sonneteer Henry Howard, the machiavellian though apologetic schemer Thomas More, as well as the protopacifist and praiser of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus. There is a profound challenge inherent in these three men’s jollity, as the sartorial twist to the scheme interrogates the ideal of the courtier, the notion of the Machiavel, and, last but not least, the image of the humanist scholar. The scene challenges the virtue of the social graces propagated by Castiglione, rehearses with modesty the machiavellian skills applied by those who (as Polonius puts it) ‘‘of wisdom and of reach’’ may ‘‘by indirections find directions out,’’ and presents as pivotal the issue regarding the true scholar’s ability to distinguish social display from individual worth. As More explains to Surrey and Erasmus, what he arranged was really a playful exercise, with the pedagogical aim to discover if Erasmus could distinguish between ‘‘merit’’ and ‘‘outward ceremony,’’ and with the intention to exhibit how far respect Waits often on the ceremonious train Of base illiterate wealth, whilst men of schools, Shrouded in poverty, are counted fools. (3.1.175–78)

More’s practical joke, as his didactic justification of it brings to view, emerges from a need implicit in humanism itself to test or challenge the very values that have long been considered the mainstay of the scholarly enterprise. In a similar way, the late twentieth-century challenge that has inspired scholars like those represented in this collection to rewrite the history of humanism was also inherent in the

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historical movement itself, part of its recognized instruments as well as goals. Equally, historians’ and critics’ current challenge of the ideological constructs that have tended to obscure what may still be reclaimed from the early modern past and its aftermath, is both a continuation of the original quest and the ultimate justification of their own current venture. Erasmus’s repeated question in the pivotal act of the play—‘‘Is this Sir Thomas More?’’—echoes throughout the challenging first chapter of Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Erasmus’s skepticism and his preparedness to reconsider the subject position are also characteristic of the essays of this liber amicorum, presented as a tribute to the inspiring personality and work of Dominic Baker-Smith.2 They acknowledge the perpetual challenges inherent in humanism: those recognized by the movement at the time, but also those perceived by later generations, or those put forward by revisionist critics, historians, and readers with a more or less presentist orientation in recent decades. Arthur F. Kinney discusses More’s Utopia and its great variety of contemporary readers. He approaches Utopia as a book whose structure was designed to invite many readings and to confirm none. This explains how, throughout the sixteenth century, the text could already elicit such an impressive range of different as well as differing responses from humanist scholars, politicians, rhetoricians, and travelers. In his analysis of the contemporary reading practice of authors like Guillaume Bude´, Peter Giles, and Richard Hakluyt, Kinney illustrates how the continuing interpretive uncertainties vis-a`-vis More’s landmark text may really be situated in the period itself, and the challenge that we as modern readers perceive inherent in Tudor humanism. Andrew Weiner, too, writes on Sir Thomas More and the different ways to read his Utopia. Weiner’s perspective, however, is mainly a methodological one, as he describes in detail the challenging views that current historians may bring to More. It concentrates on Stephen Greenblatt’s contextual, New Historicist reading of More’s Utopia on the one hand, and, on the other, explores Quentin Skinner’s alternative approach to this seminal text which honors its linguistic status and grants new critical space to authorial intentionality. The latter methodology provides one of the few means of countering the constraints on our readings and knowledge of earlier periods in history. ‘‘Objectivity,’’ says Weiner, ‘‘may be a chimera, but unless we are willing to try to encounter the historical other as other, we condemn ourselves only to seeing ourselves reflected everywhere we look.’’

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Elizabeth McCutcheon reassesses More’s Epigrammata. Her reading of the Epigrams and the critical studies of them reveals the need to think seriously in terms of humanisms plural rather than a single humanism that would ignore the apparent inconsistencies, contradictions, and failures. At the heart of the humanist enterprise was a serious crisis, and this is captured in the Epigrammata themselves, which allege, question, and subvert all at the same time. To More the epigram was not a closed form, but an open-ended reflection on the challenges inherent in the humanism that warrants, if anything, an acknowledgment of the movements’s pluralism. Kees Meerhoff presents a comparative survey of the careers of Philip Melanchton, B. Latomus, and Peter Ramus, who were all important authors of textbooks and commentaries, and deeply influenced by the founding fathers of Northern humanism, Agricola and Erasmus. Meerhoff illustrates how these writers—who differed considerably in age and circumstances but were closely linked together by personal correspondence and personal contact—had many things in common. His painstaking and well-informed contextualization of these three humanists brings into focus their shared interests in rhetoric and logic, their involvement with commentary, as well as their pursuit of the integration of disciplines. Roderick J. Lyall studies John Rolland’s Court of Venus (1575). He challenges its date of publication, arguing that it may well date from a good deal earlier than 1548. Lyall then recontextualizes Rolland’s poem in the 1540s and argues that its maker was really in the vanguard of those who transmitted the materials and, to a degree, the values of continental Christian humanism into Scotland. Marijke Spies writes about a paradoxical encomium by the Dutch poet Hendrik Laurensz. Spiegel (1549–1612), explaining its roots in Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum. The paradox—defined there as ‘‘the proof of a true thesis which is nevertheless at odds with generally accepted opinion’’—represented the ideal rhetorical type of challenge. As the most Socratic way of argumentation, it was also considered the best means to achieve insight into truth. Following a meticulous rhetorical analysis of Spiegel’s Praise of Dancing, Spies provides a discussion of the ambivalent moral stance on the dance in its contemporary cultural, political, and religious contexts, in a way that has cross-European relevance for an appreciation of entertainment and morality during the 1570s and 1580s. Richard Todd, too, takes us to the European continent as he illustrates the relevance for a reliable edition of John Donne’s ‘‘Good Friday’’ of Constantijn Huygens’s Dutch translation of the poem, dating from 1633. In bibliographical terms, the contemporary

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Dutch text has marked consequences for the precise collation of the poem. As a translation, Huygens’ rendering of ‘‘Good Friday’’ may also be looked upon as a personal dialogue with the English poet, since we witness a Dutchman of the period adjusting the original poem to his own confessional beliefs. Like a number of other contributors, Donald Stump is alert to the subtly shifting face of humanism during the early modern period. Stump, for example, argues that the revised version of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia represents a sustained and systematic critique of the very humanist ideals that critics have seen as central to Sidney’s view of the world. Comparing the two versions of Arcadia in terms of the way they represent such topics as education, counsel, rhetoric, and ethics, Stump convincingly identifies in the New Arcadia a considerably less optimistic perception of humanism that has its roots in Protestantism. Sidney’s changing views, it is Stump’s belief, may be explained in the light of his increasing preoccupation with religion during the early 1580s. Victor Skretkowicz explores the connection between Shakespeare and the Continental Renaissance by tracing the impact of the French King Henri IV on Shakespeare’s growing preference— captured in The Rape of Lucrece and developed in the plays written during the reign of the French king, between 1595 and 1609—to represent popularly and constitutionally limited monarchy as this had been advocated in the New Arcadia by Sidney, whose role as the spokesperson of the English monarchomachist Shakespeare may have wanted to take over. Shakespeare adopted not just the political views, but also developed for his tyrants ‘‘a peculiarly detached, formal royal style’’ whose roots may also have been continental. Finally, with Cymbeline, written around the time of the assassination of Henri IV in 1609, this rhetorical style would have shifted in accordance with Shakespeare’s interest in reforming papal tyranny and asserting British independence. Like Skretkowicz, W. A. Sessions focuses on the reigns of both Elizabeth I and James I. In his essay, he addresses the problem of writing the nation along Protestant lines and illustrates how first Edmund Spenser took up this challenge and how, in his footsteps, Francis Bacon more or less adopted his model to frame the mythological structures that were to serve as the basis of his impressive and influential scheme of science and technology. If, Sessions argues, Bacon launched a vision of modern science and technology through his texts, this phenomenon cannot be understood and assessed properly without acknowledging the mediation of Spenser and his trans-

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formation of the old popular Arthurian myths and legends into a new collective mythology. In an essay that aptly complements Sessions’s trenchant observations about Spenser and Bacon, Germaine Warkentin writes about the commonplace books of Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester (1595–1677), and enhances our knowledge of the genre as a whole. In a rich and detailed account of the materials (which cover the period from 1630 to 1660), Warkentin sharply delineates the international tensions of the age as she evokes a period during which the commonplace book tradition as the encyclopedic mode of humanist learning was slowly being challenged and eroded by a powerful new tradition of science that propagated practical education and specialization. This collection concludes with a number of essays that begin their consideration of humanism in the near past and the present, before returning to European humanism’s early modern roots. John Neubauer addresses the issue of early twentieth-century literature and art, devoting special attention to Ernest Psichari and his 1913 novel L’Appel des armes which, as its title indicates, advocated the war that came to be known as the Great War for Civilization, and which most of us remember as the First World War. Curiously, Psichari belongs to those who, from within the traditional bulwark of culture, ‘‘propagated a virile, adventure-seeking, and martial spirit’’ and ‘‘attacked traditional humanism and aestheticism.’’ War’s uneasy alliance with humanism is also central to the essay by Ton Hoenselaars, which looks at a unique Second World War appropriation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry produced by the British film critics E. W. and M. M. Robson. Rewriting the work of Sidney—who represented ‘‘the profound humanism which was the predominant current in Elizabethan England’’—the Robsons sought to produce a neo-Renaissance poetics for the film industry, and to act as its guide in mobilizing the ‘‘moving image’’ in its fight against European fascism. The continuing popularity of Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V (1944) has now eclipsed the Robsons’ strongly worded disapproval. In this collection’s final contribution, Helen Wilcox compares the autobiographical Book of Songs and Sonetts (1576) by Thomas Whythorne and Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence (1999), a historical novel which recounts the fortunes of a fictional English lutenist at the court of the seventeenth-century Danish king, Christian IV. Assessing musical culture from the Renaissance humanist perspective and evaluating the extent of its continuing presence in our modern cul-

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ture, Wilcox’s essay appropriately ends a collection that remembers its beginnings throughout. The essays in this book honoring the academic achievement of Dominic Baker-Smith, are, nearly as a matter of course, international in subject matter and author. Also, in a gesture that acknowledges Baker-Smith’s inspiration as a teacher and scholar, these contributions concentrate on the Tudor period with its newly classical orientation as well as its afterlives, devoting attention to Renaissance traditions and to the later redefinition of humanism under the pressure of profound religious and political changes, and two world wars. In view of the pedagogically motivated disguise trick in Sir Thomas More, the challenge which these essays acknowledge in the history of humanism would seem to mark their greatest debt to the tradition.

Notes 1. Sir Thomas More: A Play by Anthony Munday and Others, rev. Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, The Revels Plays (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990), 2.1.40–41. Further references to this edition of the play are given after quotations in the text. 2. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘At the Table of the Great: More’s Self-Fashioning and Self-Cancellation,’’ in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 11–73.

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Introduction Arthur F. Kinney

SHORTLY BEFORE HE LEFT HIS BELOVED CAMBRIDGE FOR HIS FIRST UNIVERsity appointment, Dominic Baker-Smith invited his future wife Veronica to join him in New Zealand; he had been offered a job, he told her, in Saskatoon. By the time of his inaugural lecture as the new chair of English at University College, Cardiff, on June 1, 1978, he had a clearer sense of geography, recalling ‘‘the winter-gripped prairies of Saskatchewan.’’ ‘‘I was standing in the Great Hall of Saskatoon,’’ he told the audience in Cardiff, ‘‘and I can remember watching this manly figure stride onto the platform to deliver an enthralling lecture on the Vikings in Greenland. It was a memorable performance and I do not wish to detract from it in any way when I say that its impact was considerably heightened by the prospect of walking home through the Arctic night in a temperature of minussixty. Certainly the thought of the skeleton of the last Viking in Greenland haunted me for a long time.’’ So did travel, as a theme and trope fundamental to humanism. For Dominic, humanists in the early Tudor years of England kept alive the fires of learning that burned in the formative period of Western civilization: he traced humanism as a movement of the mind back to its antique roots. It was the lynchpin between Plato and Raphael Hythlodaeus in More’s Utopia that was the subject of the Cardiff lecture, ‘‘Thomas More and Plato’s Voyage.’’ Plato could only claim a journey to Italy and Egypt and his ill-fated voyage to found a philosophical state in Syracuse. Such limited travel experience scarcely rivals Ulysses’ ten years of wandering, unless we begin to sense that this platonic style of travel goes outside space and time. This would explain why Raphael journeys to an island which is literally called ‘‘Nowhere.’’ Above all, for Raphael as for Plato, the most important feature of travel is its power to detach the mind from the pressures of normal life and focus it on essential forms. Travel to the Americas as described in Vespucci’s Mundus Novus, travel to the ancient world made possible in imagination by the salvage operation of humanism, travel to a realm of pure ideas 18

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supported by a revived platonic philosophy: all these could serve to sharpen awareness of the discrepancy between individual aspirations and institutional facts. An evident nostalgia for the ancient world revealed in so many humanist authors from Petrarch onwards lends the force of myth to their private dissatisfaction with contemporary life. So the renaissance movement ‘‘ad fonts’’ is much more than an academic exercise, it is often a strenuous journey in search of authenticity and of ideal forms. Indeed, the two authors to whom Dominic would devote most of his unusually distinguished scholarly career, Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, he remarked, turned to ‘‘Epictetus, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, and above all Plato.’’ For Dominic, renovatio or renascientia suggested not a backward movement but rather a source of inspiration and example that could be found also in what he called ‘‘the realm of intelligibles,’’ in the pre-Constantinian Church, and (more humbly) in Nature itself. The key texts twinned in the Cardiff lecture were Plato’s allegory of the cave drawn from the Republic and the Utopia—both visionary descriptions of alterity which could release persons imprisoned in their own stale lives and thoughts by showing them what might be rather than what was. For Plato, it was a matter of unbearable light; for More, it was Raphael’s unbearable insistence that a communal society harmonizing intellect and will was the inevitable consequence of rational conduct. According to Plato’s Epistle VII, Socrates’s Syracuse where the philosopher would be king was aborted, collapsing before what Plato calls μυθεν, brute folly. Hytholadaeus shares this view, declining to counsel rulers who govern societies of self-interest. But for Dominic, Plato would not have the last word: Cicero would, and his advancement of dialogic form as the basis for all rhetoric. ‘‘More is too good a pupil of Cicero,’’ he told those at Cardiff, ‘‘to make his dialogue work to an absolute conclusion. [W]e can only feel our way towards probabilities.’’ Rhetoric opened the way to poetic, and the traveling mind to a mind of inquiry. On April 11, 1983, Dominic gave his second inaugural lecture, this time as chair of English at the University of Amsterdam (importing with him, writes one of our contributors, a home that was ‘‘the geographical equivalent of a time-capsule, a corner of a foreign city that was forever England’’). ‘‘On the Use of History’’ was a title he borrowed from his predecessor in the Amsterdam chair, Gerard Vossius, who had delivered his talk in January 1632: a true humanist act of imitation. ‘‘As an Englishman who has made a particular study of humanism and its great Dutch exponents my first intention is to honour the learned and humane tradition, one of the glories of the

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Netherlands, which Vossius represents.’’ Dominic’s thoughts had only deepened. ‘‘Humanism fought to establish historical studies in opposition to the abstract concerns of the scholastics,’’ he noted in Amsterdam, ‘‘and it had no doubts about access to the accumulated wisdom of the Past.’’ Cicero was again at the heart of humanism with his ideal orator, a master of encyclopedic learning who ordered his speeches and his whole corpus not by system but by the concern with moral action. ‘‘Imagination and dialogue are, after all, inseparable,’’ Dominic went on; ‘‘we project possibilities onto the unknown and adapt to the response we encounter.’’ For him this understanding brought together Vossius, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense, and his own understanding: The literary text occupies a special place in our response to history: it leads us back to the point of genesis while remaining active at the point of reception. The social controls and formal resources of a work create the possibility of expression, but in order to achieve it the work must transcend the sum of its inherited parts. To read a literary text we must be alert to codes and conventions, to the originating context, but there remains an element beyond the inherited where we respond to the persuasion of the text. As readers we enter a dialogue in which our own familiar terms both contribute to the experience and are themselves modified. Interpretation of the text can no more be final than it can be separated from interpretation of ourselves. Literary history (as opposed to the history of literature) can never achieve finality; each reading of a text, each fusion of horizons, generates a new significance. Thus the interpreter is held firmly in the confines of probability, the world of rhetoric and the human will.

He ended by quoting Gadamer: ‘‘ ‘all encounter with the language of art is an encounter with a still unfinished process and is itself part of this process.’ ’’ Over the years I have known Dominic, such rigorous thought was almost always belied by the serenity of his manner, his courteousness, his affability. Like his subject St. Thomas More, his sense of humor often took a turn into self-irony. Once he recalled to me the desperation he felt when he and Veronica, at the last moment, took down from the walls and off from the shelves of their home in Amsterdam all signs of their Catholic faith upon learning that their tenant was anti-Catholic; and then hurriedly replaced them all again when he learned that the tenant was a devout Catholic after all. He relaxed—often in an old rectory in Suffolk back in East Anglia—by horse riding, becoming proficient at 26-mile rides involving many jumps. When his beloved horse broke his leg, Dominic took the in-

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surance money to go on an African horseback safari, riding the horse Robert Redford rode in the film Out of Africa. A lover of music, he was often in attendance at the Concertgebouw, living just around the corner from the concert hall and the Van Gogh Museum. For a brief period, Dominic ran the Sir Thomas Browne Institute at the University of Leiden, following Jan van Dorsten’s untimely and unexpected death. This would be the occasion of my most cherished memory of Dominic. Jan and I had begun to organize a quatercentenary conference on the life and legend of Sir Philip Sidney to be held at Leiden in 1986, three years after Dominic’s inaugural lecture at Amsterdam, and Dominic took up the task in 1985 following Jan’s death. I joined him to help once again through the summer months of 1986, having last been at Leiden for the spring term of 1984. The splendid international tribute was to be held in Zutphen where Sidney had died, having fallen in battle at the outskirts of the town. Zutphen had been preparing for over a year: they had isolated the location of Sidney’s fall in battle and had mounted a special exhibit in the local museum. But then Dominic was notified that a Marxist group would attempt to close down the conference because a major speaker was from South Africa, then home to apartheid. The mayor and town aldermen of Zutphen had second thoughts. Fearing severe damage to the town, they voted not to hold the conference there, and Dominic found the campus of Leiden closed to him, too, eventually relocating the conference at a church four blocks from the University. Subsequently, the mayor, fearing the cost of the loss of business, overrode the council and agreed to Zutphen as its site; Dominic moved the conference back; and the aldermen outvoted the mayor. The conference returned, with only a day or two to go, to the Leiden church and Dominic bused overseas speakers from Zutphen to Leiden. In an attempt to forestall further trouble, he called a press conference, explaining that the speaker was an enemy of apartheid—Sidney and the conference, after all, were characterized by humanism—and the evening before his talk television and newspapers throughout the Netherlands ran the story; plainclothed policemen were hired to circulate and observe. It was to no avail. When I went to open the church the next day—we had moved the speaker to the earliest slot in the morning, but Dominic was exhausted from making and supervising arrangements—a group of rioters, mostly boys in their late teens, pulled into the street, blocked both ends and, about fifty in number, descended on the church, still locked as I waited for the key. Eventually police were called by the institute staff member bringing the key and noting the situation, the rioters were all arrested and taken off, and the confer-

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ence delegates held for two hours in a hotel some blocks from the church. The conference resumed, with the South African scholar, after lunch. For academics, it was an especially harrowing experience, covered that evening on the front page of the Amsterdam newspaper. Later, an eminent British scholar, himself awarded a war decoration, wrote Dominic that ‘‘men had won the Military Cross for less.’’ Dominic’s chief scholarly concern—humanism—had been put to the test, nearly causing an international incident: clearly, humanism had much to teach through experience as well as through research. In time, Dominic would be decorated himself—made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to English teaching in The Netherlands. In ‘‘Counsel and Caprice,’’ his farewell address as chair at Amsterdam, delivered on September 9, 1998, two decades after his lecture at Cardiff, Dominic returned to humanism and to the lessons of Seneca as employed in the Tudor court. Whether or not the fated Sidney conference at Leiden was still on his mind, Dominic would talk there about Seneca’s need for stoicism, his passion for the art of persuasion rather than coercion, and his pragmatism. Seneca’s humanist lesson to the likes of Erasmus and More, Dominic commented, was his practice of ‘‘invoking general principles to meet particular needs’’ rather than ‘‘establishing a formal system.’’ It was flexibility of action through the imaginative and practical use of rhetoric. This appeal to principle, rather than to system, Dominic remarks, ‘‘helped his later reception by a Christian readership.’’ He taught the symbiosis of wise sayings and wise deeds. Dominic was giving to Seneca the values of humanism not only Erasmus and More but he too had come to know, not only in libraries, research institutes such as the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto (where he pursued work on the large international edition of the works of Erasmus), and societies such as the Society for Renaissance Studies in England of which he was a founding member—but on the streets of Leiden and the sanctuary of its church. Perhaps Dominic never saw a greater challenge to humanism than the near-riot in Leiden. But humanism has faced challenges from More’s time until our own, challenges brutal and subtle, recognized and unremarked. The very basis (and faith) of humanism, as well as responses to it across the centuries, are the subject of the essays that follow, inspired by and dedicated to one of the twentieth century’s leading humanist scholars.

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Utopia’s First Readers Arthur F. Kinney

I I Suppose you are assembled here, supposing to reape the fruite of my travayles: and to be playne, I meane presently to presente you with a Comedie called Supposes: the verye name wherof may peraduenture drive into every of your heades a sundry Suppose, to suppose, the meaning of our supposes. Some percase will suppose we meane to occupie your eares with sophisticall handling of subtill Suppositions. Some other wil suppose we go about to discipher unto you some queint conceiptes, which hitherto haue bene onely supposed as it were in shadowes; and some I see smyling as though they supposed we would trouble you with the vaine suppose of some wanton Suppose. But vnderstand, this our Suppose in nothing else but a mystaking or imagination of one thing for an other. For you shall see the master supposed for the seruant, the seruant for the master: the freeman for a slaue, and the bondslaue for a freeman: the stranger for a well knowen friend, and the familiar for a stranger. But what? I suppose that euen already you suppose me very fonde, that haue so simply disclosed vnto you the subtilties of these our Supposes: where otherwise in deede I suppose you shoulde haue hearde almoste the laste of our Supposes, before you coulde haue supposed anye of them arighte.1

George Gascoigne’s self-consciously playful ‘‘Prologue or argument’’ to his translation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi, which he published in his Hundreth Sundrie Flowres of 1573, proposes that the meaning of his work is polyvalent and that any meaning rests not only in the author’s intention but in the reader’s response. It may even be possible that a reader can hold in suspension several readings simultaneously. Gascoigne’s witty invitation has a more concrete reality in the Renaissance book wheel which allowed a reader to read one text or several, and collate meanings as possible interpretations. In this way, books themselves became propositions, one possible statement among many, contextualized by the other texts on the wheel, and it follows that a book that was most open to the most possible readings 23

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would be read or consulted more often and might be relevant, in changing ways, for a far longer time. I want to argue that we may find just such a case in Thomas More’s Utopia to which a series of meanings could be applied throughout the sixteenth century. Humanists could read the book as a discussion of the best form of government and as a book of counsel for princes; rhetoricians could read the book for its poetic strategies; travelers could read the book as a voyage of discovery; and even skeptics could see in the book the relativity of knowledge and of understanding. No one reading was ever fixed or final. Readers reading More’s Utopia throughout the Tudor period came to possess it in different ways: the man for all seasons, as William Roper called him, had written a book for all seasons.

II Let us start at the beginning. The Utopia was written and first read in conjunction with its immediate predecessor, the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus, composed, Erasmus tells us, in More’s house in Chelsea. Erasmus saw the similarity clearly enough and made something of it; he claims in a letter to Ulrich von Hutten that More wrote Utopia at first in the same way Erasmus wrote his praise of Folly: he began with a wise and witty declamation, a monologic praise of wisdom which, on the surface at least, would satisfy even a petulant Martin Dorp.2 This oration ultimately became the many-layered book 2 of Utopia, weaving its many meanings by approaching and diverging from shared humanist texts of antiquity. More’s narrator, like Erasmus’s Folly, begins by telling of himself and then continues to expound (despite apparent inconsistencies) on the virtues of the Utopian way of life; and where Folly ended by discussing the holiness of Christian fools, Hythlodaeus, as More’s narrator, concludes with a visionary republic drawn from Plato and the prayers of Christ’s apostles.3 Both ground themselves in memorable prosopopeias: Folly who is by turns rational and irrational; Raphael Hythlodaeus who projects both his names in his oration—he can be revelatory, a messenger from God; or a retailer of nonsense. The orations of each protagonist imperceptibly weave wisdom and folly without making any apparent distinctions; both draw on antique pagan and sacred sources by way of rhetorical imitation, forcing readers to take upon themselves the burden of determining when their remarks are traditional or revolutionary, acceptable or objectionable, forcing readers to measure any divergence from the texts

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and ideas that initially inspire them. Both Folly and Hythlodaeus combine hyperbole with litotes, sweeping generalizations with particularized anecdotes. Both move through various social and political levels, through varied professions and generations, in an attempt to seem comprehensive when in fact they select carefully the targets of their attention. Erasmus sets up this doubling perspective from the start, with his very title: Encomium Moriae means In Praise of Folly; it also means In Praise of [Thomas] More. Openly it equates the two; actually, Folly is forever questioning the relationship by implication. More follows suit, an imitator further imitating. Utopia—his own neologistic trope taken from the Greek topia or place—adds the prefix u (meaning No, meaning No Place) which More himself makes reflexive in his first letter to Peter Giles in the paragena which accompany the text: ‘‘I thinke nothing could fall out of my mind’’ (40).4 But Greek u is homologous with eu (Good, or Good Place). Guillaume Bude´ joins in by adding still a third prefix in a letter to Thomas Lupset: ‘‘Udepotia’’ or ‘‘Never-land.’’5 And as with the Encomium Moriae, where Folly invites us to a game only to involve us, to turn up our own portraits on her face cards, so in Utopia, as Hythlodaeus proceeds, his thoughts turn to war, slavery, and imperialism. It must have seemed serious to its early readers despite its frequent jocularity—as when soft gold is used to make chains for prisoners or when baby chicks follow the motherly human who artificially incubated them—until we (or they) realize what Gascoigne might tell us: both Enconium Moriae but especially Utopia are conjectural. For early readers, knowing the foundational texts or seeing the jokes, both Encomium Moriae and Utopia are supposes. Unlike Gascoigne, however, and even unlike Erasmus, More’s Utopia had far more readers of far more editions in far more languages, ensuring its popularity—its very centrality in Western thought and literature—throughout the sixteenth century and well beyond. Why was that? To ask why, I think, also asks how. I want to propose that a major reason for its wide readership is a direct result of the wide range of appeal it had to its first generations of readers in some fairly likely supposes of my own.

III Our first witness is Niccolo` Machiavelli. On December 10, 1513— from his farm outside Florence after suffering from torture and incarceration—he wrote his friend Francesco Vettori:

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Partitomi del bosco, io me ne vo a una fonte, a di quivi in un mio uccellare. Ho un libro sotto, o Dante a Petrarca, o un di questi poeti minori, come Tibullo, Ovvidio e simili: leggo quelle loro amorose passioni e quelli loro amori, ricordomi de’ mia, godomi un pezzo in questo pensiero. Transferiscomi poi in su la strada nell’osteria, parlo con quelli che passono, dimando delle nuove de’ paesi loro, intendo varie cose, e noto varii gusti e diverse fantasie d’uomini. . . . Venuta la sera, mi ritorno in casa, et entro nel mio scrittoio; et in su l’uscio me spoglio quella veste cotidiana, piena di fango e di loto, a mi metto panni reali e curiali; e rivestito condecentemente entro nelle antique corti degli antiqui uomini, dove, da loro ricevuto amorevolemente, mi pasco di quel cibo, che solum e` mio, a che io nacqui per lui; dove io non mi vergogno parlare con loro, e domandarli della ragione delle loro azioni; e quelli per loro umanita` mi rispondono; e non sento per 4 ore di tempo alcuna noia, sdimentico ogni affanno, non temo la poverta`, non mi sbigottisce la morte: tutto mi trasferisco in loro. Leaving the wood, I go to a spring, and from there to my bird-snare. I have a book with me, either Dante or [Petrarch] or one of the lesser poets like Tibulus, Ovid, and the like; I read about their amorous passions and about their loves, I remember my own, and I revel for a moment in this thought. I then move on up the road to the inn, I speak with those who pass, and I ask them for news of their area; I learn many things and note the different and diverse tastes and ways of thinking of men. When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I trouble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them.6

PETRARCH HAD WRITTEN TO VERGIL, PRAISING HIS NEAR-CHRISTIAN VIRtue and to Cicero reporting his surprise at his messy involvement in the world of politics, but Machiavelli supposes his pagan teachers actually present in his room; and talks with them. What ensues is a dialogue—a passing between them, back and forth—so that a shared horizon of expectations constructs meaning. The ideas of past humanist authorities are fragmented, parcelled out, and reemergent in supposed conversations. Later in this same letter Machiavelli will outline his restoration of past ideas and exempla in Il Principe: moments of cohesive thought reassembling and rearrang-

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ing works and words from the revered past. Such matter employed by such means is thoroughly humanist in scope and practice, Il Principe like Utopia structurally realizing a demonstrative oration in full dress. In 1553 Thomas Wilson would, following Agricola, define for English humanists such an arrangement: it is ‘‘a meane wherby we do praise, or dispraise thynges, as vertue, vice, tounes, citees, castles, woddes, waters, hilles, and mountaines,’’ supposes so confirmed by proofs bringing honesty, profit, and execution that the work would ‘‘teache men the truth of it.’’ The classical scholar turns sage: ‘‘the Logician shewes hymselfe.’’ These directions from Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique are transparent, visible in the six places of logic to which More turns to fashion Utopia through Hythlodaeus’s presentation to Peter Giles, John Clement, and the More-persona within the text and to us outside it: definition, causes, parts, effects, things adjoining, and contraries. ‘‘I do not se[e] otherwise,’’ Wilson writes ‘‘but that these [places] of Logique must first be mynded ere thother can well be had.’’7 Utopia II in its transparency hews to this line, at once constituting a model humanist text and diverging from that model in the Encomium Moriae. The first humanist readers of Utopia would discern that where Folly asks only that we commend her performance, Hythlodaeus asks us to believe in the soundness of his arguments, logical in the sequence of thoughts and sensible in the application of principles. We can ascertain humanists among More’s first readers for the Utopia, and not only because he sent them copies, encouraged them to circulate his work, and to recognize its form from that of the oration. His method is also outwardly humanist. Derived from John Cheke and Johannes Sturm, it anticipates Roger Ascham’s Schoolmaster, which instructs that ancient wisdom is the groundplot of argumentation by way of imitatio. Ascham provides the following example: 1. Tully retaineth thus much of the matter, these sentences, these words. 2. This and that he leaveth out, which he doth wittily to this end and purpose. 3. This he addeth here. 4. This he diminisheth here. 5. This he ordereth thus, with placing that here, not there. 6. This he altereth and changeth either in property of words, in form of sentence, in substance of the matter, or in one or other convenient circumstance of the author’s present purpose,

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and adds, ‘‘In these few rude English words are wrapped up all the necessary tools and instruments wherewith true imitation is rightly wrought withal in any tongue.’’8 This revival of classical learning and classical texts as models is ‘‘celebratory’’ for Elizabeth Eisenstein,9 while Edward Surtz, S. J., lists those most prominently in the shadows of Utopia: ‘‘Plato and Plutarch among the Greeks and Cicero and Seneca among the Latins.’’10 In addition, ‘‘Lucian contributes to the comic tone, and he is supplemented by Tacitus, with his reflections as decadent contemporary society’’ (clvi). The poem at the start of the 1518 Utopia signals to readers More’s referential use of Plato: ‘‘Alone of all lands, without the aid of abstract philosophy, I have represented for mortals the philosophical city’’ (4:19), and More-persona reminds Hythlodaeus of this in Peter Giles’s garden setting of book 1: ‘‘ ‘Your favorite author, Plato, is of opinion that commonwealths will finally be happy only if either philosophers become kings or kings turn to philosophy’ ’’ (87). To such an end, says Plato’s Socrates in More’s source, the Republic, true navigators make true visionaries (488D), perhaps the initial inspiration of Hythlodaeus. Indeed, the land of Utopia which Hythlodaeus describes in Utopia II shares much with Plato’s republic: both have republican governments ensuring a strong central authority; both have a rigid class system for the peace and well-being of all. Both emphasize the role of reason to restrain and direct impulses. Both also create a stratified nation of faceless citizens. The premium Plato places on education—with its regulated readings, its aesthetics of morality, and its use of literature as self-fulfilling propaganda— corresponds nearly enough to the portrait Hythlodaeus shares with More-persona and Giles of Utopia. Mealtime readings and leisure time activities perpetuate the state’s influence. What is often forgotten, however, is that the Republic is not simply Socrates’ declamation praising the ideal state but an inherent dialogue in which Socrates, especially in books 8 and 9, advances the possibility of the moral degeneration and corruption of man. In defending imperfect societies—the timarchy, which creates a split community that encourages the use of force and relies on an evil lack of intelligence; the democracy, which harbors anarchy and eternal class struggle; and the tyranny, which frees man’s criminal instincts—Socrates realizes the full possibilities of the Foundation Myth, which makes humanity at various stages of perfection (and imperfection) analogous to the earth’s metals. This double edge of Socrates’ understanding of man and his institutions is more dramatic and explicit than Hythlodaeus’s fatuous report on Utopia, but it is just this obviousness of the pattern that allows More to work

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largely through insinuation. But Hythlodaeus’s literal-mindedness—not possible with those humanists who formed the supposed earliest readers—easily forgets that, for Socrates, Glaucon and Adeimantus are merely stalking horses. Unlike Hythlodaeus, Socrates combines unrealized propositions along with actualized discourse, the split becoming apparent by book 10 when his theory of art is discovered to be twice removed from reality: the imitation not of fact but of imitation. The imagination projects, but neither validates nor realizes, the ideal republic in human history. Hythlodaeus misses all this, as More’s humanist readers would not: like the Encomium Moriae, the Utopia rests on a learned joke; and it is the joke that turns analysis and revelation into a suppose. Plato’s descriptions of imperfect societies artfully refer to Lycurgus’s Sparta among other actual governments—an allusion Jerome Busleyden for one recognized11—but it is now difficult to tell whether this reference, or the communism shared by Sparta and Plato’s ideal republic, or the reference to Solon (with whom Plato compares and contrasts Lycurgus as the other great lawmaker) in the Timeaus recalled Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus to More initially. But Plutarch frequently supplies the content as Plato supplies the form for Hythlodaeus’s presentation in Utopia II. For instance, Plutarch is the referential humanist text when Hythlodaeus, unwittingly, draws on many of Lycurgus’s innovations, such as his institution of a senate, or Council of Elders . . . by making the power of the senate a sort of ballast for the ship of state and putting her on a steady keel, it achieved the safest and the most orderly arrangement, since the twenty-eight senators always took the side of the kings when it was a question of curbing democracy, and, on the other hand, always strengthened the people to withstand the encroachments of tyranny. (5.6–7)12 He persuaded his fellow-citizens to make one parcel of all their territory and divide it up anew, and to live with one another on a basis of entire uniformity and equality. (8.2) Next, he undertook to divide up their movable property also, in order that every vestige of unevenness and inequality might be removed; and when he saw that they could not bear to have it taken from them directly, he took another course, and overcame their avarice by political devices. In the first place, he withdrew all gold and silver money from currency, and ordained the use of iron money only. (9.1–2) With a view to attack luxury still more and remove the thirst for wealth, he introduced his third and most exquisite political device, namely, the

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institution of common messes, so that they might eat with one another in companies, of common and specified foods, and not take their meals at home, reclining on costly coaches at costly tables, delivering themselves into the hands of servants and cooks to be fattened in the dark, like voracious animals. (10.1) For one of the noble and blessed privileges which Lycurgus provided for his fellow-citizens, was abundance of leisure. (24.2) He did not permit them to live abroad at their pleasure and wander in strange lands, assuming foreign habits and imitating the lives of peoples who were without training and lived under different forms of government. (27.3) [Lycurgus] trained his follow-citizens to have neither the wish nor the ability to live for themselves; but like bees they were to make themselves always integral parts of the whole community, clustering together about their leader. (25.3)

Senators are elected for life (26.3). Lycurgus drives away visitors (27.3–4). Lawsuits vanish (24.4). Burials are simple and free of superstition (27.1–2). Plutarch’s approval is unalloyed. But there is another side to all this. Boys are separated from girls in Sparta and subjected to stern discipline by older men; they practice sodomy to relieve themselves (17.1); they turn effeminate (22.1). Lycurgus’s society is widely known for its simplicity, but it is a life based on hard and unrelenting physicality with no luxury, no splendor, and little joy. These sharp disjunctions serve as warnings to More’s humanist readers that there are flaws, too, in Hythlodaeus’s unvarnished encomium. Plato realizes it: he has the Spartans reliant on Helot slaves and ridicules their form of government in Republic VIII. Hythlodaeus’s visionary account is untenable at any stage of its development. Cicero deals with laws and the rhetoric of law, but he also takes up in De Finibus I the Epicureanism that is the basis of Utopian philosophy. Cicero claims that pleasure is the chief good (1.9.29ff.), a pleasure that, naturally perceived, sought, and achieved, leads to natural fulfillment and therefore to wisdom, temperance, and reason (1.14.46–47). Here is indeed a royal road to happiness—open, simple, and direct! For clearly man can have no greater good than complete freedom from pain and sorrow coupled with the enjoyment of the highest bodily and mental pleasures. Notice then how the theory embraces every possible enhancement of life, every aid to the attainment of that Chief Good which is our

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object. Epicurus, the man whom you denounce as a voluptuary, cries aloud that no one can live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly, and no one wisely, honourably and justly without living pleasantly. (1.18.57)13

But then, having set this forth, Cicero himself attacks Epicureanism in De Finibus II where it may lead to happiness but may just as well lead to pride. Cicero sees how Epicureanism can leave out of account virtue and moral worth. This exercise of humanist reading practices is instructive: humanists read on beyond passages lifted out of fuller pagan texts; and, by implication, they thereby demonstrate the partiality of Hythlodaeus’s account. To such classical authorities More also adds the wit of Lucian (something surely beyond Hythlodaeus’s recognition): he may very well be drawing on the reservoirs of his own memory when he had previously translated Lucian’s Philopseudes, an attack on liars which is really an anatomy of human credulity. This, too, signals More’s treatment of the sailor turned narrator in Utopia II. It is with bifocal surveillance—with one eye on classical resources and one eye on the present treatise of Utopia— that the book’s learned first readers understood the purpose and accomplishment of More’s suppose.

IV For early readers, then, the Utopia was constructed in a classical neighborhood. But other contemporary authors lived alongside their forbears: Erasmus, for instance. His Encomium Moriae—so influential a work on the Utopia—turned an oration into a dialogue between the wise and the foolish and then into a triangulation with the reader who is always in the mediating, as well as the receiving, position. Although we do not often think of it, the Encomium Moriae rests on so slender a thematic proposition that those early readers must also have supposed it an illustration of another famous work by Erasmus, and one that kept expanding throughout his lifetime, De Copia. This spur to the imagination awakens the joys of creativity. One of the more famous, even now, is Erasmus’s illustration using the death of Socrates. This ‘‘can be used to show that death holds no fear for a good man, since he drank the hemlock so cheerfully; but also to show that virtue is prey to ill will and far from safe amidst a swarm of evils; or again that the study of philosophy is useless or even harmful unless you conform to the general pattern of behaviour. This same incident can be turned to Socrates’ praise or

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blame.’’14 Citing this example, Eugene R. Kintgen notes that for Erasmus, the ‘‘Philosophy’’ or ‘‘moral implications’’ of a passage are not always straightforward, may in fact even be contradictory, and the existence of a commonplace book, with its myriad pigeonholes to be filled, could have encouraged an alert reader to use each passage for as many entries as possible. But for Erasmus, this is not a matter of great—or even minor— concern: the value of the story inheres not in the lasting verities it illustrates but in the ways it can be deployed, and an example that can be used in many different ways may well be more valuable, because more useful, than one that is more limited. Or, as Erasmus goes on to exclaim, ‘‘If you look at this example of Socrates and determine its successive scenes, how many subject headings will you thus elicit!’’ (639)15

The passage is contagious, perhaps delirious, in its sense of possibility. And what is true of Erasmus for Socrates’s death is true of Hythlodaeus for Utopia’s virtues. Narrating a suppose where all is held in common to eliminate pride and greed—the twin evils of sixteenthcentury Europe for Hythlodaeus—he revels in what is common among Utopians: the garments they wear, the games they play, the meals they eat, the texts they hear, the farm they tend as apprentices, the houses they rotate. Nothing is ever private. Appropriating the Tudor commonplace that the polity can be likened to the family in its governance and dependence, Hythlodaeus makes Utopia one large family, too, but a family that knows each others’ business and a family where every member aligns himself and herself with every other family member. No secrets, in fact, are allowed: nuptials are conducted after a mutual inspection of the future partner’s nude body. No privacy means no trust. But no trust redounds rather differently as it transforms the meanings of pride and greed and selfidentity they constitute. Yet Hythlodaeus is not More’s only victim in this dimly understood suppose: More-persona is also culpable. At the end of Utopia I Hythlodaeus sums up his case against the capitalist societies of Europe at the dawn of the sixteenth century, and More-persona stoutly defends them. They are at an impasse. Oddly enough, though, Hythlodaeus makes precisely the same case at the end of Utopia II—and More-persona wavers. ‘‘I cannot agree with all that he said. But I readily admit that there are very many features in the Utopian commonwealth which it is easier for me to wish for in our countries than to have any hope of seeing realized’’ (4.245–47). But that is the point, of course, of all the copious illustrations of Utopia: there is no way to get there and so it is left out. There is no way

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to get Nowhere, to arrive at Never-Never Land, to realize the Ideal Place. But then, Quentin Skinner has acutely remarked, ‘‘Almost everything about More’s Utopia is debatable.’’16 We may be excused if we suppose, on the face of it, that the Utopia is deeply, powerfully, humanist itself. It attempts to liberate a country’s citizens from jealousy, pride, and poverty. It denounces injustice and immorality. It attacks the European abuse of power, the oppression of the weak, the self-serving rule that causes factionalism and war. It guarantees that no desire of an individual undermines the legitimation or governance of the state. It erodes materialism. It encourages moral and intellectual improvement. It assigns the greatest importance to learning; and, indeed, we are told, the Utopians surpass any of their neighboring nations. But the price that is paid for this is individual oppression. Control can be repressive, ruthless even brutal: exile, slavery, and imperialism are not unknown—are, indeed, fostered as necessary means for the state’s ends. There is no unlicensed travel and no real freedom of expression. Those who fear death are silently buried; those who commit suicide or die from a terminal illness are refused any proper burial. What glistens in Hythlodaeus’s eyes, and is reflected in his desire to return to Utopia, speaks to his own pride and greed. This suppose did not pass unnoticed among Utopia’s first readers. Bude´ writes to Lupset of the book as ‘‘very pleasant reading as well as reading likely to be profitable’’ but the real likelihood comes in the perceived effects of the book (especially in terms of profit): I had the book by me in the country as I ran up and down very busily and gave directions to the workmen, for, as you have partly come to know by yourself and partly heard from others, I had been expending much energy on the business of my country estate now for the second year. As I learned and weighed the customs and laws of the Utopians, the reading of the book impressed me so much that I almost neglected and even forsook the management of household affairs.17

He continues, ‘‘Now, the island of Utopia, which I hear is called also Udepotia, is said, by a singularly wonderful stroke of fortune (if we are to believe the story), to have adopted the customs and the true wisdom of Christianity for public and private life and to have kept this wisdom uncorrupted even to this day’’ (4:11)—if we are to believe the story. The sheer insistent weight of copia does not make it so. ‘‘I personally, however, have made investigation and discerned for certain that Utopia lies outside the limits of the known world. Undoubt-

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edly, it is one of the Fortunate Isles, perhaps close to the Elysian Fields’’ (4:13). Peter Giles, who after all was there, according to Utopia I and his own account, echoes Bude´ in a letter to Busleyden: As to More’s difficulty about the geographical position of the island, Raphael did not fail to mention even that, but in very few words and as it were in passing, as if reserving the topic for another place. But, somehow or other, an unlucky accident caused us both to fail to catch what he said. While Raphael was speaking on the topic, one of More’s servants had come up to him to whisper something or other in his ear. I was therefore listening all the more intently when one of our company who had, I suppose, caught cold on shipboard, coughed so loudly that I lost some phrases of what Raphael said. I shall not rest, however, till I have full information on this point so that I shall be able to tell you exactly not only the location of the island but even the longitude and latitude— provided that our friend Hythlodaeus be alive and safe. (4:23)

But why, we might ask sharing in this suppose, did you not ask him a second time, to repeat what he had just said? ‘‘There are various reports circulating about the man’’ now, Giles goes on (4:25). Perhaps Giles knew that from the beginning. We might easily suppose he did.

V To foster, solidify, or perhaps even to end supposings about the Utopia, early texts were not only preceded by a parade of letters which, commenting seriously or satirically on More’s work, nevertheless added to its very materiality. The Utopia appeared in the midst of the first great age of bookmaking: of dedications, prefaces, letters of commendation, even of multiple dedications to honor patrons and friends. In the earliest texts of More’s Utopia, the multiple dedication was displaced by a multiple title: The Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia; in which Best State might be synonymous or antonymous with Utopia; in which Commonwealth was taken more precisely than customary. The subtitle is also open to various supposings: A Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial than Entertaining—and no more? If Golden here is meant to introduce the scorn awarded to gold in Utopia II, or its impracticality, then Beneficial is transformed in meaning and becomes synonymous rather than antonymous with Entertaining. This passage finally concludes with: by the Distinguished and Eloquent Author THOMAS MORE Citizen and Sheriff of the Famous City of London. Here too the relationship be-

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tween Distinguished and Eloquent is unclear: might we suppose that one causes the other? or remains independent of it? As for More, he is both ruled and ruler, Citizen and Sheriff. Either way, however, he is of London, not of Utopia, and not even in Antwerp where Hythlodaeus was living, at least for a time. Moreover, ‘‘The reader who opened Thierry Marten’s edition,’’ Dominic Baker-Smith writes, once he had absorbed the significance of the title page, was confronted by a map of the unknown island and several other items which appeared to support its authenticity: the Utopian alphabet, a short poem in Utopian with a Latin translation and a further poem in Latin by Raphael’s nephew, Anemolius. This opening section was followed by the commendatory letters and verses provided by several humanists, the ‘‘glowing testimonials’’ which More had asked Erasmus to solicit [!]. The body of this introductory material, the parerga or ornaments of the text, plays a subtle part in the elaboration of the fiction, and the most important thing for the moment is to note the way in which it lures the reader into the Utopian game through such apparently objective features as the map and the alphabet.18

Even here, there was not one map; there were two: in 1516 a simple one, with the Utopian crescent of land representing a human head, the ship which carried Hythlodaeus ready to enter port. In 1518, though, Hythlodaeus is off the ship, and standing alongside Morepersona while, from another corner, lurking, Peter Giles looks on. The ship seems to be leaving rather than arriving; and the whole island has become more complicated with a decoration at the top that might be an artist’s added touch—the bells confused, merging characters that are somewhere between Greek and Hebrew. Supposing an ideal commonwealth stretched through the Tudor age. Just months after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, Armigail Wade sent to her ideal reader—the Queen—a chart entitled ‘‘The distresses of the Comon Welth with ye meanes to remedy them.’’ In the 1560s, an anonymous writer provided ‘‘A treatise on the well government of a commonwealth under heads’’ of which there were four: ‘‘Faith, Concord, Order, and Discipline.’’ William Blandy portrayed the ideal land not as an island but as a castle inhabited by a king, a justicer, a soldier, a merchant, an artificer, and a tiller of the ground. Lupset himself joined in with the dialogue SIUQILA: Too Good To Be True in 1580. ‘‘Dedicated to Sir Christopher Hatton,’’ William Sherman tells us, ‘‘the text documents the travels of the godly citizen ‘Siuqila’ (whose name, reversed, reads ‘Ailquis,’ or anybody).’’ He continues,

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1. Map of Utopia (1516) from Thomas More’s Utopia, printed at Louvain, Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

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2. Map of Utopia (1518) from Thomas More’s Utopia, published by John Froben in Basel. It is the work of Ambrosius Holbein, brother of Hans Holbein the Younger. Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

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3. The Utopian alphabet from Thomas More’s Utopia. Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

Tired of the ‘‘wickednesse, naughtinesse, falsehode, and other great enormities of his own Countrie’’ (which is that ‘‘famous and most fertile Iland called ‘Ailgna’ ’’ [‘‘Anglia’’]), he wandered among papists, Turks, and cannibals until he landed upon the shores of ‘‘Mauqsun’’ (‘‘Nusquam,’’ or nowhere). Here he met ‘‘Omen’’ (‘‘Nemos’’ or nobody), who—although he refused to bring Siuqila to his countrymen—gave in to a detailed comparison of the two societies. This device—like More’s

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division of the two books of Utopia—affords Lupton the opportunity to critically characterize the conditions in Ailgna while praising ‘‘commendable customes, the plaine meaning and true dealing, the Lordes liberalitie, the Ladies great courtesie, the husbands fidelitie, the wiues obedience, the maydens modestie, the masters sobrietie, the seruants diligence, the Magistrates affabilitie, the Judges equitie, the commons amitie, the preferring of publique commoditie, the generall hospitalitie, the exceeding mercie, the wonderfull charitie, and the constant Christiantie’’ of the Mauqsunians.

But ‘‘In spite of its utopian formula,’’ Sherman concludes, ‘‘Lupset’s Siuqila begs to be read in a different context—not that of dialogic play or moral philosophy but of prescriptive analysis and commonwealth policy.’’19 Another mapmaker volunteered his cartographical Utopia, too: the distinguished Abraham Ortelius executed a copper engraving of Utopia in 1595–96 at the request of J. M. Wackher a Wackenfels and Jacob Monau. Although Ortelius follows contemporary geographic conventions, his island resembles Australia more than the crescent shape described by Hythlodaeus. He does draw in the fifty-four towns and the capital Amaurotum, but adds his own fanciful names for those left nameless in More: Horsdumonde (‘‘out of this world’’), for example; Nulleville (‘‘no place’’); Sansterre (‘‘lack of land’’). The same is true for the rivers: Sanspoisson fleuve (‘‘river without fish’’) and Sanseau fleuve (‘‘river without water’’), and adds as well mountains and forests, wheatfields, vineyards, and animals.20

VI By the mid-sixteenth century, however, humanist supposes grounded in oratorical and dialogic visionary portraits were being superseded by the influence of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano Englished by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. Castiglione’s extraordinarily fertile work continues employing the propositional quality of speech and debate, resting as it must on methexis, but he vastly extends the voices, attitudes, and allusions by setting his investigation within a highly cultivated social and political setting and conversation: here prosopographia, in the court of Urbino imagined in 1506, joins prosopopaeia, both raised to marmoreal art. Given the refinements of civilization Castiglione means to suppose his is a work stressing not only eloquence but elegance. He counterfeits historic personages who in the aggregate might suppose the ideal courtier. About this he is, in a dedicatory epistle to ‘‘the Reverend

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4. Abraham Ortelius, Utopiae Typus, ex Narratione Raphaelis Hythodaei, Descriptione D. Thomas Mori (Antwerp, 1595–96).

and Illustrious Signor Don Michel de Silva, Bishop of Viseu,’’ openly unapologetic: Others say that since it is so difficult, and well-nigh impossible, to find a man as perfect as I wish the Courtier to be, it was wasted effort to write of him, because it is useless to try to teach what cannot be learned. To such as these I answer (without wishing to get into any dispute about the Intelligible World or the Ideas) that I am content to have erred with Plato, Xenophon, and Marcus Tullius; and just as, according to these authors, there is the Idea of the perfect Republic, the perfect King, and the perfect Orator, so likewise there is that of the perfect Courtier. And if I have been unable to approach the image of the latter, in my style, then courtiers will find it so much the easier to approach in their deeds the end and goal which my writing sets before them. And if, for all that, they are unable to attain to that perfection, such as it is, that I have tried to express, the one who comes the nearest to it will be the most perfect; as when many archers shoot at a target and none of them hits the bull’s eye, the one who comes the closest is surely better than all the rest.21

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Il Cortegiano is a suppose, then, rooted in paradox: reaching for the unreachable, realizing the unrealizable. Always conscious of this, as Hythlodaeus never was, Castiglione grounds his work in wit, ambiguity, feigning. Manner becomes indivisible from matter; feigning civilized ease even when it is untrue—what he termed sprezzatura— Castiglione encourages indirection to find direction out. Simulation is indivisible from dissimulation. His English disciple was not a writer of fiction, or of treatises about ideality, but the rhetoricial George Puttenham, who emphasizes the great variety of rhetorical devices used to bring supposes to life, to energize thought and imagination. Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (that is, imaginary writing) in 1589 stresses figures of speech like metaphor and allegory in which ‘‘we speake one thing and thinke another’’ in which ‘‘our wordes and our meanings meete not’’ (186). The ‘‘chiefe ringleader and captaine of all other figures’’ is the ubiquitous allegoria or false semblant: ‘‘The use of this figure is so large, and his vertue of so great efficacie as it supposed no man can pleasantly utter and perswade without it, but in effect is sure never or very seldome to thrive and prosper in the world, that cannot skilfully put [it] in ure [⳱use]’’ (186). Under this general heading, Puttenham lists enigma, irony, hyperbole; they are ‘‘holding somewhat of the dissembler, by reason of a secret intent to appearing by the words, as when we go about the bush, and will not in one or a few words expresse that thing which we desire to have knowen, but do chose rather to do it by many words’’ (193). He prizes the quick wit that is scorned by Roger Ascham and John Lyly (in Euphues, 1580). His open admission of feigning allies him to Sir Philip Sidney’s sense of poetry in his Defense (ca. 1580) as well. And, accustomed to this, a second generation of readers turned back to More’s Utopia seeing in it double entendres, beginning with the name of the island and its sailor-historian-narrator. Rereading Utopia as a suppose of the 1580s, readers might find the consequences of enclosure paradoxical, good and bad, for it both introduced a strong new economy and resulted in a massive dislocation of part of the populace. There is, again, the matter of thievery. Hythlodaeus argues in Utopia I that because thieves and murderers are sentenced alike to capital punishment, killing is encouraged: ‘‘Since the robber sees that he is in as great danger if merely condemned for theft as if he were convicted of murder as well, this single consideration impels him to murder the man whom otherwise he would only have robbed. In addition to the fact that he is in no greater danger if caught, there is greater safety in putting the man out of the way and greater hope of covering up the crime if he leaves

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no one left to tell the tale. Thus, while we endeavor to terrify thieves with excessive cruelty, we urge them on to the destruction of honest citizens’’ (75). Such spurious reasoning cannot withstand scrutiny in the 1580s, when men and women were alerted to the malleability and variety of expression. Hythlodaeus ignores the purpose of the law he alludes to, its first cause: in a country overpopulated with the poor, it is a nice question whether murder is worse; in a country in short supply, theft is tantamount to a capital offense. Stealing needs sterner control because, driven by debt, men are more apt to steal than to slay; English law knows human nature if Hythlodaeus does not know himself. And he surely does not: his diatribe on pride at the close of Utopia I is the proudest speech in the entire work. The bridge in the letter to Giles from More is pure Puttenham as well: According to my own recollection, Hythlodaeus declared that the bridge which spans the river Anydrus [‘‘without water’’; so why the bridge?] at Amaurotum is five hundred paces in length. But my John says that two hundred must be taken off, for the river there is not more than three hundred paces in breadth. Please recall the matter to mind. If you agree with him, I shall adopt the same view and think myself mistaken. If you do not remember, I shall put down, as I have actually done, what I myself seem to remember. Just as I shall take great pains to have nothing incorrect in the book, so, if there is doubt about anything, I shall rather tell an objective falsehood than an unintentional lie—for I would rather be honest than wise. (41)

The whole anecdote may be arranged for this final remark, divorcing honesty from wisdom, itself a conundrum; but this in turn is undermined since there need be no difficulty if the bridge arcing the river came down over the land one hundred paces at each end as it would most likely do. This fussiness for suitable presentation—this self-consciousness—is given fuller illumination (and play) in Castiglione, as the art of feigning and the use of irony and ambiguity was brought to the fore, establishing under the tutelage of Castiglione a wholly new aesthetic. At the same time Puttenham was encouraging a kind of heady delight in rhetorical practices, Sir John Harington, turning his attention to Ariosto and the interlacement of Orlando Furioso, was emphasizing the need and appeal of simple narrative line, of plot. This, he reminded his own readers, was what truly ‘‘holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner’’22 —‘‘a tale.’’ Clear sequence of events and ideas is what Thomas Blundeville advocates in The True Order and Method of Wryting and Reading Hystories (1574). Writing with patterns makes reading purposeful.

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And though we seeke by reading Hystories, to make our selves more wyse, aswell to direct our owne actions, as also to counsell others, to sturre them to vertue, and to withdrawe them from vice, and to beautyfie our owne speache with grave examples, when we discourse of anye matters, that therby it may have the more authoritie, waight, and credite. (sigs. H2v-H3)

Moreover, human supposes follow the orderly if mysterious providence of God. First that we may learne therby to acknowledge the providence of God, whereby all things are governed and directed. Secondly, that by the examples of the wise, we may learne wisedom wisely to behave our selves in all our actions, as well private as publique, both in time of peace and warre. Thirdly, that we maye be stirred by example of the good to follow the good, and by example of the evill to flee the evill. (sigs. F2v-F3)

Blundeville’s reading of More’s suppose differs from the witty elegance of Castiglione and the witty playfulness of Erasmus. Essentials are mined out of the dross also containing accidents. In the observing of meanes to attayne the ende, it is meete to marke well the order of those meanes, and howe they are linked togither, which order may proceede three maner of waies, that is, eyther in beginning wyth the verye first thing that tendeth to any ende, and so forward from one thing to an other, you come to the last, or else contrarywise in beginning with the last meane, next to the end, and so backewarde from meane to meane untill you come to the first, or leaving both these waies, you maye take the thirde, which is to devide all the meanes into their general kinds, and to consider of all the meanes contayned in every kinde, apart by themselves. (sigs. G2-G2v)

Blundeville’s approach is sequential, developing a traditional narrative so as to contextualize ideas and make them mnemonic; or it is segmental, dividing matters into cause and effect, ‘‘quicklye to discerne which meanes bee good, and which be not, to bring anye thing to passe’’ (sig. G4v). Thus readers will ‘‘reduce all things into a briefe summe’’ (sig. G4v). And therefore when we finde any such [useful example] in our reading, we must not onely consider of them, but also note them apart by themselves in such order, as we may easily finde them, when soever we shall have neede to use them. And the order of such examples, would not be altogither according to the names of the persons, from whence they are

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taken . . . but rather according to the matters & purposes whereto they serve. (sig. H3)

For readers in the 1580s, then, Utopia might seem a double narrative: the biography of Hythlodaeus in book 1 succeeded by the chronological history of the island in Utopia II, moving from geography to politics, from society to religion, and ending with a grand philosophy that is meant to pull together all the threads of Hythlodaeus’s two narratives. In reading More’s suppose this way, later Tudor readers would mediate and reconcile the angry Hythlodaeus of Utopia I, rigidly critical, sternly unsympathetic with the ways of contemporary Europe; and the disillusioned Hythlodaeus of Utopia II who is exiled from the land he dearly admires: a misfit in his secular Eden. And bycause we finde manye tymes, that like meanes have bene used to the obtayning of like endes, (as we suppose) & yet not with such like successe, we ought therefore diligently to consider the divers natures of thinges, and the differences of tymes, and occasions, and such like accidents, to see if we can possibly finde out the cause why mens purposes have taken effect at one time, and not at an other. (sig. H1)

Reading has become highly personalized with Blundeville: the purchase of self-awareness with More’s suppose in the later 1500s is that the social concerns urged by Hythlodaeus and the political consequences—the duty to counsel princes that More-persona presses on him—are displaced. The purchase comes at some real cost.

VII Reading habits were again changing in the twilight Tudor years. The publications of Richard Hakluyt—Diuers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of America in 1582 followed by editions of his Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoueries of the English Nation beginning in 1589—captured the attention and imagination of late Tudor readers while numerous other single works were also prominently on display in Paul’s Churchyard—or so we may very likely suppose. Amir D. Aczel has shown that the magnetic compass began with antiquity in China but became prominent in Europe with Henry the Navigator toward the end of the fifteenth century. The first notable achievement was during the time of the first Tudor, Henry VII, when Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal in 1497.

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At the latitude of Sierra Leone, da Gama made a bold and unprecedented move. All previous voyages of the Age of Exploration had continued south by east, following the coast of Africa. This would have been the logical choice, and the one that would have kept his ships not too far from land throughout their route down the Gabon-Congo-Angola coastline toward Guinea. But da Gama, who had no experience commanding such ships, was not bound by tradition. Trusting his instincts and his ability to navigate by compass and stellar observations, he decided to do the unexpected. Da Gama chose to turn west-southwest and sail straight into the open Atlantic.23

Whether da Gama was a courageous hero or a foolish risk-taker would not have been clear at the time. More catches all this at the outset of the Utopia. Peter Giles introduces Hythlodaeus to Morepersona by stating that ‘‘He left his patrimony at home—he is a Portuguese—to his brothers, and being eager to see the world, joined Amerigo Vespucci and was his constant companion in the last three of those four voyages which are now universally read of, but on the final voyage he did not return with him’’ (51). The choice da Gama faced happened on Hythlodaeus’s journey too, as Raphael proudly relates: Their mariners were skilled in adapting themselves to sea and weather. But [Raphael] reported that he won their extraordinary favor by showing them the use of the magnetic needle of which they had hitherto been quite ignorant so that they had hesitated to trust themselves to the sea and had boldly done so in the summer only. Now, trusting to the magnet, they do not fear wintry weather, being dangerously confident. Thus, there is a risk that what was thought likely to be a great benefit to them may, through their imprudence, cause them great mischief. (53)

The challenge of the unknown and the untried seemed irresistible. One motive may have been the thrill; another, the record of being first to discover a new place; but for Hythlodaeus—and for philosophers from Plato onward—the fundamental motive was acquiring new knowledge. We know that someone as landlocked as Hakluyt could not resist the tales of explorers, just as Peter Giles and Morepersona (and More’s readers) could not. Hakluyt recounts the joy and the seduction of hearing of journeys into the unknown regions of the world in his now-famous letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Elizabeth I and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in his dedicatory letter in 1589: Right Honorable, I do remember that being a youth, and one of her Majesties scholars at Westminster that fruitfull nurserie, it was my happe

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to visit the chamber of M. Richard Hakluyt my cosin, a Gentleman of the Middle Temple, well knowen unto you, at a time when I found lying open upon his boord certeine bookes of Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe: he seeing me somewhat curious in the view therof, began to instruct my ignorance, by shewing me the division of the earth into three parts after the olde account, and then according to the latter, & better distribution, into more: he pointed with his wand to all the knowen Seas, Gulfs, Bayes, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdomes, Dukedomes, and Territories of ech part, with declaration also of their speciall commodities, & particular wants, which by the benefit of traffike, & entercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied. From the Mappe he brought me to the Bible, and turning to the 107 Psalme, directed mee to the 23 of 24 verses, where I read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his woonders in the deepe, &c. Which words of the Prophet together with my cousins discourse (things of high and rare delight to my yong nature) tooke in me so deepe an impression, that I constantly resolved, if ever I were preferred to the University, where better time, and more convenient place might be ministred for these studies, I would by Gods assistance prosecute that knowledge and kinde of literature, the doores whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me.24

The moment, we can easily suppose, was intoxicating for the young boy and he remained exhilarated, just as Hythlodaeus’s long speech in Utopia II is the consequence of enthusiastic learning of the state of Utopia. ‘‘Whatsoever testimonie I have found in any authour of authoritie appertaining to my argument, either stranger or naturall, I have recorded the same word for word, with his particular name and page of booke where it is extant,’’ Hakluyt adds in his preface to the reader (1:xxiii): he takes the place of a fascinated Peter Giles and a recording More-persona, anxious to get every detail right, such as that of the bridge over the Anydrus River. The Utopia, then, catches the polyvalent spirit of exploration and discovery financed by Elizabeth I in Hythlodaeus’s protracted description of a hitherto unknown land. Arriving there, his observations are mixed: the country is isolated, peaceful, surrounded with dangerous reefs, and mounted with defensive weapons. As the winds are kept off by the land which everywhere surrounds it, the bay is like a huge lake, smooth rather than rough, and thus converts almost the whole center of the country into a harbor which lets ships cross in every direction to the great convenience of the inhabitants. The mouth of this bay is rendered perilous here by shallows and there by reefs. Almost in the center of the gap stands one great crag which, being visible, is not dangerous. A tower built on it is occupied by a garri-

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son. The other rocks are hidden and therefore treacherous. The channels are known only to the natives, and so it does not easily happen that any foreigner enters the bay except with a Utopian pilot. In fact, the entrance is hardly safe even for themselves, unless they guide themselves by landmarks on the shore. If these were removed to other positions, they could easily lure an enemy’s fleet, however numerous, to destruction. On the outer side of the island, harbors are many. Everywhere, however, the landing is so well defended by nature or by engineering that a few defenders can prevent strong forces from coming ashore. (111)

The fascination and hesitation here, the need to know and the danger of knowledge, themes throughout the Utopia, surface, and they anticipate (and resonate in) the many pamphlets Hakluyt so successfully collected and distributed. Here is part of an account, for instance, of Hore’s voyage of 1536 under Elizabeth’s father to Newfoundland and Cape Briton: M. Oliver Dawbeny, which (as it is before mentioned) was in this voyage, and in the Minion, told M. Richard Hakluyt of the middle Temple these things following: to wit, That after their arrivall in Newfoundland, and having bene there certaine dayes at ancre, and not having yet seene any of the naturall people of the countrey, the same Dawbeney walking one day on the hatches, spied a boate with Savages of those parts, rowing downe the Bay toward them, to gaze upon the ship and our people, and taking vewe of their comming aloofe, hee called to such as were under the hatches, and willed them to come up if they would see the natural people of the countrey, that they had so long and so much desire to see: whereupon they came up, and tooke viewe of the Savages rowing toward them and their ship, and upon the viewe they manned out a ship-boat to meet them and to take them. But they spying our ship-boat making towards them, returned with maine force and fled into an Island that lay up in the Bay or river there, and our men pursued them into the Island, and the Savages fledde and escaped: but our men found a fire, and the side of a beare on a wooden spit left at the same by the Savages that were fled. (8:4–5)

The voyagers are multiplied by the voyeurs hearing and reading this account, positioning themselves exactly as Giles and More-persona are positioned in Utopia II. And Hythlodaeus’s disgust at European materialism is frequently on display in Hakluyt’s varied accountings, too. In the ‘‘briefe and true report’’ of Sir Walter Ralegh’s voyage to Virginia as written by Thomas Harriot, there is a strong emphasis on the material gains (like the gold of the Utopians) more prized by the invaders than by the natives: grass silk, worm silk, flax, hemp,

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allum, pitch and tar and resin and turpentine, sassafras, cedar, wine, oil, furs, deer hides, copper, pearls, sweet gum for the apothecaries, dyes for coloring, woad—the list seems endless in the acquistiveness even of the hearing (8:353–58). Indeed, the very world was changing around the Elizabethans; and it is impossible not to suppose the new dimensions that revived interest in the Utopia. It seems in hindsight to serve as a template for most of the accounts in Hakluyt.25

VIII The forces of world expansion under Elizabeth were tempered, under James, by another emphasis: on introspection and reflection. The moment is heralded by John Florio’s splendid folio of Montaigne’s Essais in English in 1603. Like Francis Bacon and other Jacobeans whose emphasis on empiricism arose from a scientific interest in investigation—one that was rational and skeptical rather than bordering on the imaginary—Montaigne captured not the passionately spirited and prejudicial perspective of Hythlodaeus, as one who seeing Utopia has become an enlightened prophet to the world, but the persistent doubts which More-persona feels nagging at him at the end of Utopia II. While more persuaded after Hythlodaeus’s uninterrupted oration than before it, More-persona still has reservations—‘‘I cannot agree with all that he said’’ (245). Montaigne catches More-persona’s very spirit in an essay on the imagination: Fortis imaginatio generat casum: A strong imagination begetteth chance, say learned clerks. I am one of those that feele a very great conflict and power of imagination. All men are shockt therewith, and some overthrowne by it. The impression of it pierceth me, and for want of strength to resist her, my endevour is to avoid it.26

Montaigne catches the mood of More-persona and we can suppose he also captured and extended the feelings of some readers of the Utopia: Those which exercise themselves in controuling humane actions, finde no such let in any one part, as to peece them together, and bring them to one same lustre: For, they commonly contradict one another so strangely, as it seemeth impossible they should be parcels of one Warehouse. (‘‘Of the Inconstancie of Our Actions,’’ 2.1; 292) [T]ruth is of so great consequence, that wee ought not disdaine any Induction, that may bring us unto it. Reason hath so many shapes, that wee

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know not which to take hold of. Experience hath as many. (‘‘Of Experience,’’ 3.13; 963) We reason rashly, and discourse at random, saith Timeus in Plato: For, even as we, so have our discourses great participation with the temeritie of hazard. (‘‘Of the Uncertaintie of Our Judgement,’’ 1.47; 247)

The fundamental humanist texts such as the Republic and the Life of Lycurgus have been demonstrably displaced by those more skeptical, such as the Timaeus and the works of the Pyrrhonian skeptics. It is helpful to remember that Montaigne lined his private study with the sayings of Sextus Empiricus; that in his ‘‘Apologie of Raymond Sebond’’ he queried his ignorance of what his cat might ask or think of him even as he thought he knew what he thought of his cat (399). Montaigne’s radical questioning, like More-persona’s, is not meant to result in nihilism, but only to prevent self-delusion, mistaken judgment, misdirection of attention, faulty because incomplete or lazy thought. We can suppose that the world Montaigne spoke to is the world of readers of Utopia who found inconsistency in exiling citizens, in proclaiming peace and on occasion promoting war, in preaching contentment and practicing imperialism, in boasting of perfection while maintaining strict surveillance: all features of Hythlodaeus’s Utopia that must awaken a reader’s notice. His mimesis is not Hakluyt’s mimesis of a larger physical world but the mimesis of the behavior of the human and individual mind. The propositions and arguments of Utopia strongly invite considering this mimesis, too, and the promotion of Utopia as the special and individual action of Raphael Hythlodaeus, messenger from God and retailer of nonsense. ‘‘We assume unto our selves imaginarie and fantasticall goods, future and absent goods, which humane capacitie can no way warrant unto her selfe; or some other, which by the overweening of our owne opinion, we falsly ascribe unto our selves; as reason, honour, and knowledge’’ (‘‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond,’’ 2.12; 431). Montaigne’s authority—if he had just one—was not Hythlodaeus, but, pointedly, Diogenes (cf. 2.12; 408).

IX Dominic Baker-Smith reminds us that ‘‘In the Phaedrus (275c) Socrates complains of the way in which a thing, once it is put in writing, drifts out of the control of the writer’’ (85). In an infinite world of supposes—prompted by what Sidney in his Defense calls More’s

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5. The Renaissance book-wheel. Agostino Rameli, Le diverse et artificioise machine (Paris, 1588). Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

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6. Title page of Francis Bacon, Instauratio magna (London, 1620). Courtesy of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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‘‘feigned image’’ of a commonwealth—the danger of misreading (or even suggesting a single reading) is ever-present. The ‘‘community of interpretation’’ which Stanley Fish has argued helps to explicate a text may be a clue on how readers first read the Utopia, however. We know what else some of those readers were reading: classical texts emulated by the humanists; rhetorical texts employing the strategies outlined by Puttenham; travel accounts such as those collected by Hakluyt; and works of skeptical empiricism illustrated by the essays of Montaigne. While every book (like every manuscript) was ‘‘a hub from which innumerable receptions might emanate,’’ as Roger Chartier has it, we know that in the late sixteenth century the invention of the book wheel made contextualization far easier and perhaps more prevalent.27 Such wheels carried multiple books on rotating shelves to be stopped at the will of the reader, checking out, perhaps, his most recent suppose. (They were, Anthony Grafton tells us, flanked by other devices and in many libraries; some still survive.28) The concrete machinery thus upheld Bacon’s advice in his essay on books: ‘‘Reade not to Contradict, and Confute; Nor to Beleeve and Take for granted; Nor to Find Talke and Discourse; But to weigh and Consider.’’29 To Bacon—or his printer—we owe one of the most splendid images that might become associated with the Utopia, merging Plato with Hakluyt as it does. This is the grand title-page of Bacon’s Instauratio magna (1620) which shows how the advancement of learning is related to sailing out into the great ocean beyond the pillars of Hercules. For Bacon and his readers, such a voyage into the unknown, into the yet-to-bediscovered, when disciplined by reason and experience, still remained the greatest suppose of all.

Notes 1. George Gascoigne, The Posies (1575 edition), sig. A2v. 2. Opus Epistolarvm Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), 4:21. 3. Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; and London: Heinemann, 1930–35), 3–6; acts 4:31–35. 4. All references to the Utopia are to volume 4 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Edward Surtz, S. J., and J. H. Hexter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965). The translation is a modified one by Fr. Surtz. 5. See CW 4:464 n. 32. 6. Anthony Grafton, ‘‘The Humanist as Reader,’’ in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglieemo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, 180 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).

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7. Quoted in Arthur F. Kinney, Rhetoric and Poetic in Thomas More’s ‘‘Utopia’’ (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1979), 7–8. The reference is to Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), sigs. C4v–D1. 8. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 118. 9. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 118. 10. Edward Surtz, ‘‘Introduction,’’ CW 4:cliv. 11. In his letter to More in CW 4:35. 12. Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library (1914; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 13. Cicero, De Finibus, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (1914; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). 14. Erasmus, De Copia, trans. and ed. Betty I. Knott, Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 24:639. 15. Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 37. 16. Quentin Skinner, ‘‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism,’’ in The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden, 123 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 17. Bude´ in CW 4:5. 18. Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s ‘‘Utopia’’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 78. 19. William Sherman, ‘‘Anatomizing the Commonwealth: Language, Politics, and the Elizabethan Social Order,’’ in The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World, ed. Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene, 110–11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l997). Sherman also cites Wade, the anonymous author of ‘‘A treatise on the well government’’ and Blandy on 110. 20. Utopia, in The Search for the Ideal in the Western World, ed. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, 100 (New York: Oxford University Press for the New York Public Library, 2000). 21. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. Anchor Books, 1959), 6–7. 22. Sir John Harington and the quotation from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie about children and old men are cited by Kintgen, 89 n.12. 23. Amir D. Aczel, The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 140–41. 24. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (Repr., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 1:xvii–xviii. 25. See, for instance, the account of Martin Frobisher in Hakluyt, 7:28ff. 26. The Essays of Montaigne, John Florio’s translation (New York: Modern Library, n.d.): ‘‘Of the Force of Imagination,’’ book 1, chapter 20; 63. 27. Roger Chartier, ‘‘Reading Matter and ‘Popular Reading’: From the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century,’’ in A History of Reading in the West, 277. 28. Grafton, 209; he elaborates on this description. 29. Francis Bacon, ‘‘On Books,’’ quoted by Kintgen, 186.

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Taking More Seriously: Humanism, Cultural Criticism, and the Possibility of a Past Andrew D. Weiner

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS ACCLAIMED RENAISSANCE SELF-FASHIONING from More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt sounds the call of what has come to be known as the New Historicism, rejecting formalist literary criticism in favor of ‘‘a more cultural or anthropological criticism’’ based on the ‘‘conviction that men are born ‘unfinished animals,’ that the facts of life are less artless than they look, that both particular cultures and the observers of these cultures are inevitably drawn to a metaphorical grasp of reality, that anthropological interpretation must address itself less to the mechanics of customs and institutions than to the interpretative constructions the members of a society apply to their experiences.’’1 Greenblatt adds, ‘‘A literary criticism that has affinities to this practice must be conscious of its own status as interpretation and intent upon understanding literature as a part of the system of signs that constitutes a given culture; its proper goal, however difficult to realize, is a poetics of culture’’ (4–5). Yet in achieving its understanding of the ‘‘given culture’’ it seeks to interpret, ‘‘if cultural poetics is conscious of its status as interpretation, this consciousness must extend to an acceptance of the impossibility of fully reconstructing and reentering the culture of the sixteenth century, of leaving behind one’s own situation’’ (5). In calling for a historicist criticism that despairs of the possibility of anything approaching objective historical understanding, Greenblatt has opened the way for a series of Foucauldian mediations on power—the key defining feature of sixteenth-century English culture for New Historicists generally—often, though now not invariably, introduced by the retelling of an anecdote whose apparently peripheral relationship to the text or texts under discussion becomes the machine that wrenches our prior frame of interpretation into a new shape conditioned upon the discovery of a perspective that makes the previously marginal central to a new understanding of the text(s). 54

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Greenblatt’s chapter on Sir Thomas More is a case in point. Greenblatt begins with a ‘‘merry tale’’ from More’s Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534), a transformed memory of a dinner party at Cardinal Wolsey’s long ago. In this tale about how inferiors flatter superiors, Greenblatt finds the emblem for More’s entire career. It is as if he were watching the enactment of a fiction, and he is equally struck by the unreality of the whole performance and by its immense power to impose itself upon the world. This is, in fact, one of the central perceptions of the Dialogue of Comfort, repeated again and again in a variety of guises. No sooner is one fantasy laid to rest than another pops up to be grappled with in turn and defeated, until the whole world, the great body of man’s longings, anxieties, and goals, shimmers like a mirage, compelling, tenacious, and utterly unreal. But why should men submit themselves to fantasies that will not nourish or sustain them? In part More’s answer is power, whose quintessential sign is the ability to impose one’s fictions upon the world; the more outrageous the fiction, the more impressive the manifestation of power (13). Certain characteristic notes are sounded with great eloquence in this passage. For Greenblatt, the world has no physical or historical reality; rather it is merely ‘‘the great body of man’s longings, anxieties, and goals.’’ It may be ‘‘compelling’’ and ‘‘tenacious,’’ but it is finally ‘‘utterly unreal.’’ To combat this unreality, humanity has neither ideas nor beliefs, goals nor hopes, but only ‘‘fantasies that will not nourish or sustain them.’’ Moreover, the More Greenblatt posits, the More whose vision of the world is so strikingly postmodern, is something ‘‘quite exceptional’’ in the context of early sixteenth-century England. In place of Erasmus’s More, who seemed ‘‘born and designed for’’ friendship, who was so ‘‘sweet’’ of disposition that he ‘‘enliven[ed]’’ the melancholy, who found ‘‘entertainment’’ in all of human life, who ‘‘applied his whole mind to the pursuit of piety’’ yet who ultimately ‘‘chose to be a god-fearing husband rather than an immoral priest’’ because ‘‘he could not shake off the desire to get married,’’ Greenblatt offers us a More who ‘‘wishes, as it were, to stop modern history before it starts, even as he wishes to cancel his own identity.’’2 To Greenblatt, More represents self-fashioning man: ‘‘his life seems nothing less than this: the invention of a disturbingly unfamiliar form of consciousness, tense, ironic, witty, poised between engagement and detachment, and above all, fully aware of its own status as an invention’’ (31). This More, always conscious of being both his own creator and his own self-mocking critic, Greenblatt sees as the More who authored Utopia, ‘‘the perfect expression of his self-con-

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scious role-playing and an intense meditation upon its limitations’’ (33). Utopia largely becomes in this reading a psychomachia between the public self More crafted and ‘‘all that More deliberately excluded from the personality he created and played,’’ here represented by Raphael Hythlodaeus, ‘‘the sign of More’s awareness of his own self-creation, hence his own incompleteness’’ (33). Although Greenblatt tends to privilege Raphael’s arguments (the authentic self rebelling against the ultimately empty public gestures of the public man), he does finally remind us that ‘‘Hythlodaeus means ‘well-learned in nonsense,’ that More deliberately introduces comic and ironic elements that distance his fantasy from himself and his readers, and that More remains ambivalent about many of his most intensely felt perceptions’’ (54). Yet ultimately what is important here is not the public statement but the private revelation: ‘‘The work is, after all,’’ Greenblatt insists, ‘‘an expression of More’s inner life, the life that it dreams of engineering out of existence’’ (54). ‘‘It is as if he were watching the enactment of a fiction’’: More watching himself create himself is for Greenblatt the image of More’s life and the image of Utopia, the ‘‘supremely constructed self ’’ constructing a fiction that would not permit him to exist in his own creation. It is, perhaps, a fascinating vision, but not one that would have been readily available to the eyes of More’s contemporaries. In what sense, then, does this reading exemplify Greenblatt’s desire for a criticism that can enable us to see the ‘‘interpretative constructions the members of a society apply to their experiences’’? On the contrary, it seems rather to insist upon Greenblatt’s caution that ‘‘if cultural poetics is conscious of its status as interpretation, this consciousness must extend to an acceptance of the impossibility of fully reconstructing and reentering the culture of the sixteenth century, of leaving behind one’s own situation.’’ By insisting upon the impossibility of realizing the reality of the past, Greenblatt insists that we place ourselves in More’s position, creating fictions that we know to be fictions because we have acknowledged the impossibility of ever approaching those lost realities for which we can only yearn helplessly, our own dream of completeness shattered by the reality of incompleteness and historical unreality. While this may strike some as a rather heroic critical stance, others, whose despair over history’s absent presence is less profound, may find it somewhat unsatisfactory. In recent years, Quentin Skinner’s work has provided an alternative to Greenblatt for those not totally content to historicize the past into their own image. Skinner has rather tartly remarked that ‘‘if

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historical studies are not to be studies of what genuine historical agents did think (or at least could have thought), then they might as well be turned into fiction by attainment. History (notwithstanding a fashionable attitude among philosophers) cannot simply consist of stories: a further feature of historical stories is that they are at least supposed to be true.’’3 Skinner’s theoretical work on interpretation of historical texts has focused on the question of intentionality, and he has argued that the essential question . . . we . . . confront, in studying any given text, is what its author, in writing at the time he did for the audience he intended to address, could in practice have been intending to communicate by the utterance of this given utterance. It follows that the essential aim, in any attempt to understand the utterances themselves, must be to recover this complex intention on the part of the author. (63)

Skinner suggests that the reader ought first ‘‘to delineate the whole range of communications which could have been conventionally performed on the given occasion by the utterance of the given utterance, and, next, to trace the relations between the given utterance and this wider linguistic context as a means of decoding the actual intention of the given writer’’ (63–64). Rather than begin, as Greenblatt would, with the social, political, or ideological contexts of the work, Skinner insists that the linguistic governs the social: Once the appropriate focus of the study is seen in this way to be essentially linguistic and the appropriate methodology is seen in consequence to be concerned in this way with the recovery of intentions, the study of all the facts about the social context of the given work can then take its place as a part of this linguistic enterprise. The problem about the way in which these facts are handled in the methodology of contextual study is that they get fitted into an inappropriate framework. The ‘‘context’’ mistakenly gets treated as the determinant of what gets said. It needs rather to be treated as an ultimate framework for helping to decide what conventionally recognizable meanings, in a society of that kind, it might have been possible for someone to have intended to communicate. (64)

Given the Renaissance insistence upon the agency of the writer and the consequent intentionalism of their poetics, Skinner’s theory at least has the advantage of committing us to the project that Greenblatt desired to attempt while despairing of achieving it, to address the ‘‘interpretative constructions the members of a society apply to their experiences.’’ To this end, Skinner offers two general rules for the interpretation of ‘‘other people’s intentions.’’ His first

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rule invites us to ‘‘focus not just on the text to be interpreted but on the prevailing conventions governing the treatment of the issues or themes with which the text is concerned’’ because ‘‘to understand what any given writer may have been doing in using some particular concept or argument, we need first of all to grasp the nature and range of things that could recognizably have been done by using that particular concept, in the treatment of that particular theme, at that particular time.’’4 This first rule invites us to see the writer as taking part in a continuing debate on a given issue in such a way that his intended audience would be capable of seeing his text as participating in that debate. His second rule I take to be a vital corollary designed to prevent a leveling of individual utterances into the general pool of discourse available at that time: focus on the writer’s mental world, the mental world of his empirical beliefs. This rule derives from the logical connection between our capacity to ascribe intention to agents and our knowledge of their beliefs. (78)

We may not ever succeed fully into entering into the mental world of another, but there seems no reason not to make the effort to explore as much of that world as possible. Skinner has discussed More’s Utopia in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought, but the framework of his argument leads him there to emphasize the first of his two general rules at the expense of his second. Skinner sees More as typical of the Northern humanist at the same time that he is ‘‘by far the greatest of these political theorists’’: As well as employing the same genres as their Italian precursors, the northern humanists generally shared their way of thinking about the role of the political theorist in political life. . . . They accordingly tended to see themselves essentially as political advisers—as writers of political handbooks and purveyors of sage counsels to kings, princes and magistrates.5

Because he is looking for political advice, Skinner, like Greenblatt, tends to take Raphael Hythlodaeus as More’s spokesman in the debate in book 1 of Utopia and likewise tends to see Raphael’s description of the Utopian state in book 2 as presenting More’s prescriptions for improving England in particular and Christendom generally. As a political theorist, More must be offering a political solution to the problem of injustice and poverty in European societies that Raphael attacks so vigorously both in the beginning of book 1 and at the end of book 2:

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If private property is the source of our present discontents, and if our basic ambition is to establish a good society, then it seems undeniable to More that private property will have to be abolished. This means that, when he presents his description of Utopian communism in Book II, he must be taken to be offering a solution—the only possible solution—to the social evils he has already outlined in Book I. And this in turn suggests that, in giving Utopia the title of ‘‘the best state of a commonwealth,’’ he must have meant exactly what he said. (262)

Unfortunately More’s title does not provide such conclusive evidence that Utopia is ‘‘the best state of a commonwealth,’’ since the full title is actually DE OPTIMO REIPVBLICAE STATU DEQUE noua insula Vtopia libellus uere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festiuus, clarissimi disertissimique uiri THOMAE MORI inclytae ciuitatis Londinensis ciuis & Vicecomitis / [concerning] THE BEST STATE OF A COMMONWEALTH AND THE NEW ISLAND OF UTOPIA. A Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial than Entertaining, by the Distinguished and Eloquent Author THOMAS MORE, Citizen and Sheriff of the Famous City of London.6

The title of More’s little book does not equate Utopia with ‘‘the best state of a commonwealth,’’ nor does it promise to offer us a picture of that state; rather it promises to entertain us beneficially with discussions of both of those topics. However with the recent resurgence of interest in all things political, the political theory supposedly embodied in More’s Utopia has again come to govern discussions of the text, and many have followed Skinner in assuming that in order to take More seriously, we must take the ambiguously titled Utopia as More’s picture of ‘‘the best state of the commonwealth,’’ as a happy place or ‘‘eu-topia’’ and not as a no-place or ‘‘ou-topia.’’ This, of course, is the way Sir Philip Sidney took it in his Defense of Poetry: But even in the most excellent determination of goodness, what philosopher’s counsel can so readily direct a prince, as the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon; or a virtuous man in all fortunes, as Aeneas in Virgil; or a whole commonwealth, as the way of Sir Thomas More’s Eutopia? I say the way, because where Sir Thomas More erred, it was the fault of the man and not of the poet, for that way of patterning a commonwealth was most absolute, though he perchance hath not so absolutely performed it. For the question is, whether the feigned image of poetry or the regular instruction of philosophy hath the more force in teaching.7

Sidney assumes, like many of More’s other critics, that by using the ‘‘feigned image’’ of that ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘happy place’’ (and Sidney uses

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the appropriate ‘‘eu’’ prefix to specify which place he has taken Utopia for), More has set out to offer ‘‘directions’’ to a ‘‘whole commonwealth’’ on how it should reform itself according to the ‘‘absolute’’ pattern of his Utopian state. Sidney assumes, that is, that More is a philosopher, whose ‘‘sailing,’’ like Raphael Hythlodaeus’s, has ‘‘not been like that of Palinurus, but more that of Ulysses, or rather of Plato.’’8 In this view, to understand More one needs to attend seriously to Raphael’s description of Utopia, presumably seeing Raphael as More’s stalking horse, under whose guise More is able to voice ideas and positions that he could not safely speak in his own voice. This is a not-unattractive way of reading Utopia: the institutions of the Utopian commonwealth are sometimes sensible, frequently appealing in an ascetic sort of way, and often novel; the easy assumption is that like the many ‘‘Utopian’’ writers who have followed in his footsteps, More is here donning his prophetic robes and singing of a future inevitably coming our way and indeed one that ought to come our way. Unfortunately, it is a reading that I believe More went out of his way to discourage us from adopting in the two letters to Peter Giles he appends to the work, in the ‘‘dialogue of counsel’’ between Raphael and persona More that he apparently added to book 1 after he had already written book 2, and in the structuring of the description of the Utopian institutions in book 2. Rather, I believe that if we attempt to enter, as Skinner’s second rule insists, into More’s ‘‘mental world, the world of his empirical beliefs,’’ we may discover that More is writing in the context of his defenses of Erasmian humanism and of Erasmus’s presentation of the ‘‘philosophia Christi’’ in his 1516 New Testament. In my view, More’s other ‘‘literary works’’ of this period—the letter to Dorp (1515–16), the letter to Oxford (1518), the letter to a monk (1519), and the letter to Lee (1519)—offer us reasons to consider the possibility that the Utopia might well be read as a companion to Erasmus’ Praise of Folly in which More is ‘‘praising’’ wisdom as Erasmus has ‘‘praised’’ folly. Rather than considering all of these works, however, after some brief remarks about More’s letter to Dorp, written, More tells us, while he was at Bruges, just before his king called him home and so, according to the chronology established in Utopia, just after meeting Raphael Hythlodaeus and hearing his story, I will turn to More’s contributions to the volume in which his Utopia was published in its first two editions. Martin Dorp was a young humanist turned scholastic theologian at the University of Louvain, a former friend of Erasmus who turned on him to voice the conservative response to both the Praise of Folly

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and Erasmus’s projected Greek Text (with Latin paraphrase) of the New Testament. Erasmus and More took his publicly circulated letter to Erasmus seriously enough that each wrote a lengthy response to it (More’s is about half as long as the Utopia itself ). More takes the stance that Dorp is not motivated by malice, but that he is merely a bit confused about many issues, issues upon which More will undertake the office of a friend and attempt a clarification for Dorp. More begins with Dorp’s dismissal of Erasmus from the ranks of the theologians on the grounds that Erasmus is a grammarian who knows nothing about the science of dialectics, the basic tool of the theologian. More’s response distinguishes, as many other defenses of humanism (beginning with Petrarch’s ‘‘On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others’’) had, between the modern practice of dialectics and the function of reason: I do believe that even you will admit that rhetoric is a very special gift of his, and if you grant that, I do not see how you can so completely strip him of dialectics. Not the lowliest of philosophers were correct when they maintained that dialectics and rhetoric were no more distinct than are the fist and the palm of the hand, because what dialectics holds together more tightly, rhetoric unfolds more freely, and just as the former strikes with the point of the blade, so the latter by its sheer force completely prostrates and destroys. . . . Take a man who has some learning and a moderate supply of talent—I mean one with far less talent than Erasmus. Such a man I do not think will take second place in an argument to every dialectician, provided both parties are acquainted with the subject under discussion; native talent will supply the deficiency in formal training. The very precepts of dialectics are merely the products of man’s native intelligence; that is to say, they are methods of reasoning which reason has observed as useful for investigating things.9

More’s defense of Erasmus clearly suggests that rhetoric, whose field is the probable, can be a far more useful way of approaching a reader than the science of dialectics, which More goes on to attack for its current practitioners’ excessive reliance on abstraction, indulgence in wresting the sense of a word’s meaning to permit any favored interpretation, and lack of common sense. Like Petrarch earlier, More sees a distinction between the effectiveness of dialectics’ tightly held together syllogistic argumentation and rhetoric’s freely unfolding but overwhelmingly powerful argument, which ‘‘completely prostrates and destroys’’ a listener’s objections. Like Petrarch earlier, More positions himself on the humanist side with respect to the relative efficacy of philosophic disputations on the nature of truth and rhetorical persuasions to action:

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For though our ultimate goal does not lie in virtue, where the philosophers locate it, it is through the virtues that the direct way leads to the place where it does lie; and these virtues, I must add, must be not merely known but loved. Therefore the true moral philosophers and useful teachers of the virtues are those whose first and last intention is to make hearer and reader good, those who do not merely teach what virtue and vice are and hammer into our ears the brilliant name of the one and the grim name of the other but sow into our hearts love of the best and eager desire for it and at the same time hatred of the worst and how to flee it. It is safer to strive for a good and pious will than for a capable and clear intellect. The object of the will, as it pleases the wise, is to be good; that of the intellect is truth. It is better to will the good than to know the truth. The first is never without merit; the latter can often be polluted with crime and then admits no excuse. Therefore those are wrong who consume their time in learning to know virtue instead of acquiring it, and, in a still higher degree, those whose time is spent in learning to know God instead of loving Him. In this life it is impossible to know God in His fullness; piously and ardently to love Him is possible.10

Discourse should not simply seek to present the truth; the truth must be presented in such a way that those who meet it love it. This means that the mode of presentation must be not dialectics but eloquence, and it is for this eloquence that Erasmus prays in his preface to his New Testament, the Paraclesis: I indeed might heartily wish, if anything is to be gained by wishes of this kind, so long as I exhort all men to the most holy and wholesome study of Christian philosophy and summon them as if with the blast of a trumpet, that an eloquence far different than Cicero’s be given me: an eloquence certainly much more efficacious, if less ornate than his. Or rather . . . an eloquence which not only captivates the ear with its fleeting delight but which leaves a lasting sting in the minds of its hearers, which grips, which transforms, which sends away a far different listener than it had received.11

If the goal is to transform the hearer, to make him both wholesome and holy, not theological dialectics but rhetorical persuasion must be the tool employed by the one who would send ‘‘away a far different listener than [he] had received.’’ After discussing Dorp’s horror that if Erasmus were allowed to carry out his project, anyone, not just theologians, could study the Bible—a horror More did not yet share, thinking it better they do so than ‘‘keep themselves from it, as some men do, who hung up for their entire lives on petty questions, never condescend to search the

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Scriptures, as if it were not at all pertinent’’ (Rogers, 28)—More turns to Dorp’s proposal that Erasmus make amends to those insulted by the Praise of Folly by writing a Praise of Wisdom. More ridicules such a project, on the grounds that they are indeed wise men if they think that by this Praise of Folly Folly has been so lauded as to want wisdom lauded in the same manner! If that is what they want, why are they angry? They too have been copiously lauded by Folly that has been so lauded. Besides, I do not see how Erasmus could appease the ill-will of such men towards himself; rather he would only aggravate it . . . because he would be forced to expel them from the coterie of Wisdom, just as now he has been forced to admit them into the company of the most gifted priests of the secret rites of Folly. (62)

More, who was always less concerned than Erasmus with appeasing his enemies, might have found such a work intriguing, and if he had, might have chosen, as Erasmus chose Folly for his spokesman, an appropriate narrator to praise wisdom, perhaps even one named both ‘‘Raphael,’’ whom Pico had praised as the ‘‘celestial physician’’ who ‘‘may set us free by moral philosophy and dialectic as though by wholesome drugs’’ (Oration on the Dignity of Man) and ‘‘Hythlodaeus’’ (a Greek coinage meaning ‘‘babbler of nonsense’’).12 In fact, in his second letter to Giles, added to the second edition of Utopia, More, by way of denying the intention to do anything other than tell a ‘‘true’’ story, points particularly to the work’s naming of names as a guide to readers. In this second letter, More tells Giles of a ‘‘very sharp man’’ who ‘‘posed this dilemma about my Utopia: if the story is put forward as true, he said, then I see a number of absurdities in it; but if it’s a fable, then it seems to me that in various respects More’s usual good judgment is at fault’’ (124). This reader, who More insists ‘‘has pleased me more than anyone else since the book was published,’’ read the book all the way through, ‘‘read slowly and attentively, noting all the particular points,’’ and gave careful and considered approval to all but the matters he ‘‘singled out’’ for criticism (124). As a reader, More goes on to say, his only fault is to have too high a standard: ‘‘It’s easy to see what a high opinion he has of me when he expresses disappointment over reading something imperfect or inexact—whereas I don’t expect to say more than one or two things which aren’t totally ridiculous’’ (124). More goes on to excuse himself on the grounds of necessity: I don’t see why he should think himself so keen . . . just because he’s discovered some absurdities in the institutions of Utopia, or caught me

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putting forth some half-baked ideas about the constitution of their state. Isn’t there something absurd in the institutions of most other states elsewhere in the world? and haven’t most of the philosophers who’ve written about the state, its ruler, and even the office of a private citizen managed to say something that needs correcting? (124)

If no earthly institution can be free of absurdities, no one who writes about them can write without sharing in the general folly. More insists that if he had been writing a fable about the state and not simply reporting the truth, rather than trying to get everything right, he would have been content merely to make one or two points, warning the wise that he was writing a fiction about ‘‘a republic’’ by ‘‘giving special names to the prince, the river, the city, and the island, which hinted to the learned that the island was nowhere, the city a phantom, the river was waterless, and the prince had no people, that would not have been hard to do, and would have been a good deal more clever than what I actually did. Unless I had an historian’s devotion to fact, I am not so stupid as to have used those barbarous and senseless names of Utopia, Anyder, Amaurot, and Ademus’’ (124–25), which do, in fact, mean precisely that! If the choice were between absurdities inherent in the real world or in philosophizing about it, as More’s anonymous reader had suggested, by the end of the letter, the ‘‘learned’’ may now be sure that Utopia is a fiction and that More has deliberately given it some features that would alert his readers to that fact by their absurdity. This rather contorted acknowledgment makes the pose More had adopted in his first letter to Giles, which functions as a preface to Utopia in its early editions, more obviously a pose and the self he portrays there and in book 1 of the work itself a ‘‘fictional’’ self, to whom I will refer throughout as persona More. In that letter, More introduces himself as a hard-working subject to the king, the state, and his family, whose book must take the last claim on his time. Apologizing for the delay to Giles, persona More insists that it falls into the class not of a rhetorical work, which had to undergo the artful process of composition—invention, disposition, and stylistic embellishment—but a simple, factual narrative of another man’s travels: ‘‘Truth in fact is the only quality at which I should have aimed, or did aim, in writing this book’’ (109). Had anything more been called for, persona More insists, that would have been beyond his competence: ‘‘if the matter had to be set forth with eloquence, and not just bluntly and factually, there’s no way I could have done that, however hard I worked, for however long a time’’ (110). Truth is all persona More cares for, and that soon raises two problems for him, both relating to the state of truth in this world.

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First, truth is not always apparent, even to those who earnestly seek it. Persona More appeals to Giles to settle a dispute between himself and his servant. While he remembers Raphael as having said that a bridge was 500 paces long, John Clement, who has no motive for lying, believes Raphael to have said it was only 300 paces wide: If your recollection agrees with his, I’ll yield to the two of you and confess myself mistaken. But if you don’t recall the point, I’ll follow my own memory and keep my present figure. For as I’ve taken particular pains to avoid untruths in the book, so I would rather make an honest mistake than say what I don’t believe. In short, I’d rather be truthful than correct. (110)

The translation I have been using is a little misleading here. More’s Latin for the last phrase quoted reads ‘‘quod malim bonus esse quam prudens,’’ which More’s Tudor translator, Ralph Robinson translates more pointedly as, ‘‘I will rather tell a lie than make a lie, because I had rather be good than wily.’’13 The importance of the passage is insisted upon in the early editions by Erasmus’ marginal note to the reader: ‘‘Nota Theologicam differentiam inter mentiri & mendacium dicere’’ (Yale Utopia 1965, 40). More is engaged here in trying to influence the way in which we see persona More. Given the difficulty in recognizing truth in a world where memory may fail and lead good men to disagree, persona More says that unless there is a consensus against him, he will be true to his inner sense of truth rather than cleaving to what another tells him is true. If persona More is a good man, however, he is not a naive one. His awareness that all men are not good has led him to wonder whether there is any point in his publishing his book at all: men’s tastes are so various, the tempers of some are so severe, their minds so ungrateful, their tempers so cross, that there seems no point in publishing something, even if it’s intended for their advantage, that they will receive only with contempt and ingratitude. . . . Most men know nothing of learning; many despise it. The clod rejects as too difficult whatever isn’t cloddish. . . . Finally, some men are so ungrateful that even though they’re delighted with a work, they don’t like the author any better because of it. They are like rude, ungrateful guests who, after they have stuffed themselves with a splendid dinner, go off, carrying their full bellies homeward without a word of thanks to the host who invited them. A fine task, providing at your own expense a banquet for men of such finicky palates, such various tastes, and such rude, ungracious tempers. (111)

Persona More, a good man knowledgable in the ways of the world but believing himself incapable of eloquence, sees little point in publish-

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ing his book since it is unlikely to have much of an effect on anyone else. Here, I believe, we may see More, announced on the title page of the second and third editions as the eloquent author of an eloquent and beneficial handbook, trying to alert us to one of the differences between himself and his persona. More the humanist, believing eloquence to have the power to overcome the waywardness of readers, actively participated in the production of his work, writing a series of impatient letters to Erasmus, to whom he had entrusted the chief responsibility for publication, urging him to collect laudatory letters from their friends and to get his book out. More’s ethical persuasions continue in the first book of Utopia proper, where persona More continues to be portrayed as a good but ineffective man, obedient to his king, loving to his family, generous in praise to his friends, and concerned about the fate of the state. Our sense of persona More’s goodness is accentuated by More’s contrasting portrait of Raphael Hythlodaeus, who has no interest in his family (whom he has provided for materially so that he does not have to ‘‘enslave’’ himself ‘‘to any king whatsoever,’’ 7), no interest in the fate of any European commonwealth, in fact no interest in anything other than in living ‘‘as I please’’ (7–8). When persona More suggests that ‘‘if you would devote your time and energy to public affairs, you would do a thing worthy of a generous and philosophical nature, even if you did not much like it’’ (8), Raphael attempts to excuse himself on the grounds that the courtiers wouldn’t listen to him unless they knew that their superiors agreed with him. Persona More repeats again that Raphael ought to serve: ‘‘I think if you could overcome your aversion to court life, your advice to a prince would be of the greatest advantage to mankind. This, after all, is the chief duty of every good man’’ (20; italics added). After Raphael again attempts to show that his advice that kings give up waging war on others to make their kingdoms greater and enriching themselves at their people’s expense would not be welcome, persona More rebukes his methods sharply: I don’t think you should offer advice or thrust upon people ideas of this sort which you know will not be listened to. What good will it do? When your listeners are already prepossessed against you and firmly convinced of opposite opinions, what good can you do with your rhapsody of newfangled ideas? (25)

Rather than taking this as a proof that ‘‘[t]here is no place for philosophy in the councils of kings,’’ as Raphael is quick to suggest, persona More continues that this shows that there is a place for

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everything and that Raphael must learn the proper place for different kinds of counsel: ‘‘This academic philosophy is quite agreeable in the private conversation of close friends, but in the councils of kings. . . . There is no place for it’’ (25). Rejecting ‘‘this scholastic philosophy which supposes that every topic is suitable for every occasion,’’ persona More insists, ‘‘[t]here is another philosophy that is better suited for political action, that takes its cue, adapts itself to the drama in hand, and acts its part neatly and well’’ (25). That philosophy – Erasmus’ marginal note names it as a ‘‘philosophia civilior’’ (Yale Utopia 1965, 98), a more civil philosophy—sounds very much like Folly’s arguments in favor of her kind of prudence: When a comedy of Plautus is being played, and the household slaves are cracking trivial jokes together, you propose to come on stage in the garb of a philosopher, and repeat Seneca’s speech to Nero from the Octavia. Wouldn’t it be better to take a silent role than to say something wholly inappropriate, and thus turn the play into a tragicomedy? You pervert and ruin a play when you add irrelevant speeches, even if they are better than the original. So go through with the drama in hand as best you can, and don’t spoil it all simply because you happen to think another one would be better. That’s how things go in the commonwealth, and in the councils of princes. If you cannot pluck up bad ideas by the root, if you cannot cure long-standing evils as completely as you would like, you must not therefore abandon the commonwealth. Don’t give up the ship in a storm because you cannot direct the winds. And don’t arrogantly force strange ideas on people who you know have set their minds upon a different course from yours.14

Because persona More has no faith in the efficacy of eloquence, his vision is limited to a merely ameliorative one (‘‘thus what you cannot turn to good you may at least make less bad. For it is impossible for all institutions to be good unless you make all men good, and that I don’t expect to see for a long time to come’’ [26]). Yet making all men good was the dream of the humanists in general and of Erasmus and More in particular, and eloquence, as we have seen, was the tool they felt could be used to do so. Raphael dismisses persona More’s arguments out of hand: ‘‘ ‘The only result of this,’ he answered, ‘will be that while I try to cure others of madness, I’ll be raving along with them myself ’ ’’ (26). Playing one’s part in the play at hand, while it may be madness, is for Erasmus the essence of the philosophia Christi, and even Christ himself accommodated himself to the play of life during his time on earth. As Erasmus argued in ‘‘Sileni Alcibiades,’’ an adage added to the 1515 edition of the Adagia:

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Of course it would have been easy for Christ to have set up his throne over all the earth, and to possess it, as the old rulers of Rome vainly claimed to do [. . .] to impose silence on all the philosophers and overthrow the emptiness of the Sophists. But this was the only pattern that pleased him, and which he set before the eyes of his disciples and friends-that is to say Christians.15

Though Raphael complains bitterly that by following persona More’s advice he would be doing what he refuses to do, setting aside ‘‘most of the commandments of Christ even in a community of Christians’’ and accommodating ‘‘his teaching to the way men live’’ (27), he clearly seems more committed to the letter of Christ’s commandments than to their spirit. If life is a comedy, it is true wisdom (or, as Folly would put it, true folly) to recognize that it is so because God, the ‘‘maker of the plaie’’ (38), has so designed it. Persona More’s rebuke takes its strength, ultimately, from our recognition that in refusing to serve on any but his own terms, Raphael is rejecting not simply what may be largely fruitless labor but what is also the folly of Christ. Yet persona More’s self-announced doubts about his ability to persuade are also clearly justified. His attempts to convince Raphael that he has a duty to serve have been predestined to failure because he has ignored his own advice and not adopted his arguments to the ‘‘drama in hand.’’ He has appealed to a lover of wisdom with arguments calculated to appeal to a lover of goodness. Both Raphael and persona More have maneuvered themselves into extreme positions. Raphael, fearing that his wisdom will be rejected by those not wholly committed to it, wishes to take it away to Utopia; persona More, fearing all things will not be well until all men are good, has come almost to despair of the positive power of goodness and to conceive of the good man’s task merely as making things ‘‘as little bad’’ as he can. Thus we find ourselves, midway through Utopia, offered a choice of mutually exclusive and equally unsatisfactory alternatives. We can either play stoic wise man with Raphael and withdraw into the fruitless intellectual liberty of philosophy while the ship of state founders—with us aboard!—in a tempest of human folly or we can join with persona More in the fruitless labor of trying to keep things from getting worse without any real hope of being able to make them get any better. Raphael’s monologue about Utopia in book 2 offers us not a new option but only a continuation of our difficulty. Although, for Raphael, Utopia is indeed the happy place (Eutopia) he proclaims it to be, More adroitly confirms its internal contradictions by

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a rhetorical arrangement which juxtaposes, for instance, the Utopians’ willingness to establish colonies by force on the territory of their neighbors whenever the Utopian population increases too much with the Utopian insistence that only bondslaves should be involved in slaughtering animals on the grounds that ‘‘slaughtering our fellow-creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable’’ (42). While various of the Utopian institutions may be good—at least better than their European counterparts—or wise, there do not seem to be any—at least any of which Raphael approves—that are both good and wise. Our frustration at having to choose only between partially acceptable but largely problematic positions is at its height when, immediately before his conclusion, Raphael suddenly points at a solution outside the terms supplied for the debate to this point (although he does not accept it). Having dismissed European societies as nothing more than a ‘‘conspiracy of the rich, who are fattening up their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth’’ (83), Raphael concludes a hyperbolical proclamation of all the good the elimination of money procures and all the evil it prevents (such as fraud, theft, rapine, quarrels, disorders, brawls, seditions, murders, treasons, poisonings, fear, anxiety, worries, toils, and sleepless nights), when the grounds suddenly shift and pride replaces money as the root of all evils and Christ replaces communism as man’s savior. Raphael had introduced communism as the only system designed to maximize happiness by declaring ‘‘absolute equality of goods’’ (28) and he had concluded by insisting that only in Utopia can everyone have what they need: ‘‘where everything belongs to everybody no man need fear that, so long as the public warehouses are filled, he will ever lack for anything he needs. . . . Though no man owns anything, everyone is rich’’ (82). Now, however, the goods we must seek are spiritual goods and the riches we must gather are to be laid up in heaven, for Christian communism was instituted not to maximize each man’s worldly wealth but to permit him to follow Christ without worldly impediments. As Christ’s authority replaces Plato’s, we find wisdom and goodness finally reconciled in the alternative that the work drives us to seek. Although Christ’s ‘‘authority’’ is only one argument in favor of Utopian communism for Raphael, it is our only way out of the dilemma that More’s portrayals of hitherto ineffective goodness and inflexible wisdom have created for us. As Utopia draws to its close with persona More swallowing his objections to the absurdities he finds in the Utopian institutions, and

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leading Raphael in to dinner in what is almost the only example in the work of what Erasmus calls ‘‘that kindness to our neighbor’’ which ‘‘wrests [Mercy] from [God],’’16 we are left with the option of accepting, as persona More seems to have done by his act of charity, ‘‘the authority of Christ our Savior—whose wisdom could not fail to recognize the best, and whose goodness would not fail to counsel it’’ (Yale Utopia 1965, 84), or of resisting, ostensibly on the grounds of our own estimation of what is really best, and so remaining with pride, that ‘‘serpent from hell which twines itself around the hearts of men’’ and ‘‘acts like the suckfish in holding them back from choosing a better way of life’’ (Yale Utopia 1965, 84). As Utopia comes to its sudden close and human sympathy replaces fruitless debate, we find ourselves able to understand why, having sought ways to revivify rhetoric by discovering an eloquence that depends as much upon the structure of responses it arouses as upon the power of words, Erasmus and More could feel that they had indeed found a way to put rhetoric at the service of the philosophy of Christ and liberate it from those who would use it only to treat serious matters triflingly and frivolous matters seriously. By cultivating an eloquence not merely verbal, Erasmus and More could more confidently feel that the day when all things might be well because all men were good might not be so far away as Dorp and persona More had feared. By moving their audiences to a self-transforming leap of faith, the obstacles in fallen human nature could be overcome and a truly Christian commonwealth founded upon the philosophy of Christ might be erected. As Erasmus put it in the Paraclesis: If princes in the execution of their duties would manifest what I have referred to as a vulgar doctrine, if priests would inculcate it in sermons, if schoolmasters would instill it in students rather than that erudition which they draw from the fonts of Aristotle and Averroes, Christendom would not be so disturbed on all sides by almost continuous war, everything would not be boiling over with such a mad desire to heap up riches by fair means or foul, every subject, sacred as well as profane, would not be made to resound everywhere with so much noisy disputation, and, finally, we would not differ from those who do not profess the philosophy of Christ merely in name and ceremonial. . . . If it should happen that [princes and magistrates, bishops and their delegated priests, and teachers] having laid aside their own affairs, should sincerely cooperate in Christ, we would certainly see in not so many years a true and . . . genuine race of Christians everywhere emerge, a people who would restore the philosophy of Christ not in ceremonies alone and in syllogistic propositions but in the heart itself and in the whole life. (99)

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Given the alacrity with which More defends the whole of the Erasmian program in his other works of this period, if we look not for the political philosophy that underlines the institutions of Utopia but for the strategies by which More tried to persuade his readers that they must live somewhere, not in Nowhere, we may find ourselves much closer to taking More seriously. I would also like to suggest that there are benefits to be gained by taking history seriously as well. Hayden White has claimed that ‘‘the historian can claim a voice in contemporary cultural dialogue only insofar as he takes seriously the kind of question that the art and science of his own time demand that he ask of the materials he has chosen to study,’’ and Lee Patterson, insisting that all interpretation is political, has argued that ‘‘historical criticism must abandon the hope of any theoretical foundation and come to rest upon its own historically contingent moment, and upon convictions that find their final support within experience.’’17 These dicta seem to me simply to doom us to superimpose the vision of the present everywhere, to limit us to see only what our own cultural biases deem worthy of notice and so to leave us with no alternative except a present from which we have declared there is no exit. I find Skinner’s hope for historical criticism an antidote to both the intellectual pride and the despair that the rejection of history seems to involve: it is a commonplace—we are all Marxists to this extent—that our own society places unrecognized constraints upon our imaginations. It deserves, then, to become a commonplace that the historical study of the ideas of other societies should be taken as the indispensable and the irreplaceable means of placing limits on those constraints. (‘‘Meaning and Understanding,’’ 67)

Objectivity may be a chimera, but unless we are willing to try to encounter the historical other as other, we condemn ourselves only to seeing ourselves reflected everywhere we look. If we then try to look at what More thought he was doing not from our perspective but, as Skinner urges, from More’s own perspective, we can get a better sense of what More thought he was doing. If by our definitions Utopia is one of the quintessential humanist works, how does that help us to arrive at a sense of what More would have thought a humanist work was? In a passage I have already quoted, persona More argues that wisdom is not enough. Rebuking Raphael for ‘‘thrust[ing] on people ideas of this sort that you know will not be listened to,’’ persona More insists that ‘‘[w]hen your listeners are already prepossessed against you and firmly convinced of opposite

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opinions,’’ a ‘‘rhapsody of new-fangled ideas’’ will be useless (25). Yet persona More has already urged Raphael to become an adviser to a prince as a means of improving the commonwealth: I think if you could overcome your aversion to court life, your advice to a prince would be of the greatest advantage to mankind. This, after all, is the chief duty of every good man. (20)

If, as his letters to Erasmus urging him to proceed apace with getting Utopia published are any indication, ‘‘the Distinguished and Eloquent Author THOMAS MORE’’ seems to have thought that his ‘‘Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial than Entertaining’’ might be a way of accomplishing that duty urged on Raphael within his book (Rogers 1961, 73, 76). Despite persona More’s fears about the ineffectiveness of thrusting new ideas on people unwilling to receive them, More thought that there was indeed a tool for changing people’s minds and overcoming their objections, eloquence, and a model for those who would use it, Erasmus. In his 1515 letter to Dorp, as we have seen, More talks about the power of rhetoric to completely prostrate and destroy the opposition of those unwilling to hear new ideas, and he talks about Erasmus as one with a ‘‘very special gift’’ for rhetoric (Rogers 1961, 15). In his letter to Edward Lee (1519), he praises Erasmus for doing what persona More had urged Raphael to do: ‘‘I confess that I am very fond of Erasmus, for practically no other reason than that for which all of Christendom cherishes him, namely that this one man’s unceasing exertions have done more to advance all students of sound intellectual disciplines in both sacred and secular learning than virtually anyone else’s exertions for the last several centuries’’ (Yale More 1965, 15, 159, 161). In his letter to a Monk (1519), More again defends Erasmus by praising his efforts at practicing what we might well see as the ‘‘more civil philosophy’’ persona More had urged on Raphael: If anyone carefully considers the steady stream of massive, excellent, and numerous volumes that Erasmus has produced single-handedly, so many that you would think that one man would not even be equal to copying them all out, he will readily conclude that even if Erasmus were not totally preoccupied with virtue he would certainly have little time to devote to vice. Now if you look even closer with an unbiased eye, first considering the fruitfulness of his works and then appraising the testimony of those who have derived from his works either illumination in their studies or fervor in their affections, I for one think you will not find it at all

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likely that the heart from which such sparks of piety leap forth to kindle the spirits of others is utterly cold in itself. (Yale More 1965, 293, 295)

In Erasmus, whose ‘‘fruitful’’ works were essential tools for advancing ‘‘sound intellectual disciplines’’ in both the sacred and secular spheres of life and which were capable of either illuminating those who read them or filling them with a fervor to practice what had illuminated them, we find an adviser who can serve not just a prince but everyone who is intelligent enough to understand what they read and not so consumed by envy that they reject it. In a very real way, Erasmus holds for More in his writings the place that St. Jerome held for Erasmus in his, one who ‘‘had been born . . . for the world at large’’ and ‘‘educated for the service of mankind.’’18 He is what Raphael refused to become, a good man who has accepted what More saw as the obligation to put his gifts of learning to the service of all. If Utopia could become the means of inspiring another Raphael to become another Erasmus, then the time when all things could be good because all men had become good would be much nearer than persona More believed.

Notes 1. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4. 2. Resp. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Letters 993 to 1121 (1519–1520), trans. R. A. B. Mynors, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), letter 999, to Ulrich von Hutten, July 23, 1519; and Greenblatt, 54. 3. Quentin Skinner, ‘‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,’’ in Meaning & Context. Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 49. 4. Quentin Skinner, ‘‘Motives, Intentions, and the Interpretations of Texts,’’ in Meaning & Context. Quentin Skinner and his Critics, 77. 5. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Volume One: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:216. 6. Utopia, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Edward J. Surtz, S.J., and J. H. Hexter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 4:1. 7. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 86–87. 8. Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 5. 9. Thomas More, Selected Letters, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 15. 10. Francesco Petrarch, ‘‘On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others,’’ trans. Hans Nachod, in Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernest Cassirer, Paul

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Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., 105 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 11. Paraclesis, in Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 93. 12. Gioanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernest Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., 237 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 13. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (1551) (New York: E. P. Dutton for Everyman’s Library, 1951; repr. 1965), 9. 14. Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, 25–26; cf. The Praise of Folie, trans. Sir Thomas Chaloner (1549), ed. Clarence H. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 37–39. 15. Sileni Alcibiades, in Erasmus on His Times: A Shortened Version of the ‘‘Adages’’ of Erasmus, ed. and trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, 80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 16. Erasmus, Desiderius, Concerning the Immense Mercy of God, in The Essential Erasmus, trans. and ed. John Dolan, 264 (New York: New American Library, 1964). 17. Resp. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 41; and Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 48. 18. The Patristic Scholarship: The Edition of St. Jerome.Collected Works of Erasmus E 61. Ed. and trans. James F. Brady & John C. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 25.

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Thomas More at Epigrams: Humanism or Humanisms? Elizabeth McCutcheon

SOON AFTER FINISHING A SHORT STUDY OF LAUGHTER IN THOMAS MORE’S Epigrammata, I happened upon John Carroll’s Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture.1 Carroll is intentionally provocative: he begins and ends his book by celebrating the death of humanism: ‘‘To say it once again, it is time to bury the dead, and to start the difficult business of restoring our capacity for life.’’2 Obviously, he doth protest too much. But it is his definition of humanism that particularly startled me. He begins by claiming that humanism ‘‘attempted to replace God by man, to put man at the centre of the universe, to deify him,’’ and he characterizes pre-Reformation humanism as the champion of will and reason.3 That it could be skeptical, or riddled with selfdoubt, instead, is seen simply as a later reaction to its initial conviction that human beings could remake themselves and/or their society.4 In addition to Carroll’s rhetorical overkill, his approach is an obvious overgeneralization and simplification that seems dated and privileges what Carroll calls ‘‘the rare masterpieces of culture,’’ ignoring the rest.5 Perhaps inadvertently, it also highlights an issue that has long been the subject of critical and scholarly debate; given the inconsistencies, contradictions, and failures of humanism, and the humanists’ hyperbolic self-assessments, to what extent is the term meaningful? Can we speak of humanism in the singular, in other words, or would we be better off speaking of humanisms—not only with reference to humanism as a large-scale movement in Renaissance Europe or early sixteenth-century England, but with reference to any single humanist or a single humanist work?6 Certainly my reading of More’s Latin epigrams and the critical studies of them pointed to the plural, even though I had been looking for some unifying element in the collection and thought that I had found one in the way that laughter, as a social and human bond, has programmatic, social, and psychological relevance in the Epigrammata, connecting More with a larger, international humanist community and 75

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vice versa, and reinforcing shared perceptions at the same time that (for better or worse) it excludes those with a different mind-set. I want to revisit this issue of humanism/humanisms, then, using More’s collection and various interpretations and readings of it as a test case. It seems to me that the Epigrammata resists any single definition or treatment of it as humanist, although that is the label that is customarily (and understandably) associated with it. To put this more plainly still: while More’s collection was published with impeccable humanist credentials, the nature of its humanism / humanisms is surprisingly complicated and multifaceted, if not contradictory. The publication of the Epigrammata was itself a cooperative and international venture. It was first printed in Basel in 1518, together with the third edition of More’s Utopia and a collection of epigrams of a quite different, more sober and religious sort by Erasmus. It was printed a second time that same year, and a revised collection was printed separately in 1520.7 In each case, the printer, who was closely connected to Erasmus and other Northern humanists, was Johann Froben, and the title pages call attention to More’s credentials as a ‘‘clarissimus’’and ‘‘disertissimus vir.’’8 In a dedicatory letter to a German humanist, Willibald Pirckheimer, Beatus Rhenanus (a wellknown editor of classical texts, an associate of Froben, and a friend of both Erasmus and Pirckheimer), likewise writes glowingly about More and his epigrams. He singles out More’s many accomplishments and his wit, language, style, learning, and ability as both composer and translator, while emphasizing the pleasure and profit that will accrue to the reader, echoing a Horatian commonplace dear to the Northern humanists.9 We know less than we’d like about when and why the poems were first written or how they were circulated before they appeared in print, however. Fewer than a quarter of the poems in the collection (260 in the 1518 editions, 269 in 1520, which omitted two epigrams from 1518 and added eleven new poems) are dateable.10 On Erasmus’s authority they have sometimes been treated as the work of a very young man. But they actually seem to have been written over a period of as much as twenty years on all sorts of occasions— occasions that their titles often emphasize.11 Moreover, some of them were presented to individuals or circulated in manuscript among a coterie group or were published singly in another collection before they were collected and printed. This complicates any reading of them; David Carlson has shown just how much an interpretation of one of More’s epigrams may change when it is stripped of its original context and placed among the Epigrammata.12 In any

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case, their publication as a collection intensified their humanist context in some sense, for not only do they overlap chronologically with More’s other humanist productions—his translations of Lucian, his History of Richard III, and his Utopia—but their appearance in print, directed to a humanist coterie, publicly links them with the Utopia and with epigrams by Northern Europe’s best-known humanist. The title and the poetic form likewise mark the collection as a humanist endeavor. As a genre, the epigram, which was very popular throughout the Renaissance, is linked to the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics, perhaps the least common denominator of the humanist impulse, which sought out antiquity, recovered old models, and invented new ones based upon an interpretation of the ancients, while stressing the importance of grammar and rhetoric.13 More was the first to translate and publish many of the epigrams from the Planudean Anthology in Western Europe, and the two 1518 printings highlighted his classicism by including ‘‘pleraque e Graecis uersa’’ on their title pages—words dropped from the revised edition of 1520, perhaps because they obscure the original nature of the greater number of the poems, perhaps as a response to Brixius’s insinuations about More’s knowledge of Greek and Latin.14 ‘‘Plera’’ is somewhat hyperbolic, in any case; over one hundred (but less than half ) of the Epigrammata are either translations of or variations upon epigrams from a Greek text.15 But More’s major source is undeniably classical, up-to-date, and even forward looking, and his other sources are extremely varied and often, though not invariably, humanist as well. He reworks material from any number of other classical writers (among them Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Plato, Aristotle, Lucian, Plautus, and Martial), weaves in biblical texts, adapts traditional jests and Aesopic fables, and translates two near contemporaneous English love lyrics.16 It would be a mistake to limit More’s classicism or humanism to the kind of material he chose to translate or imitate, however. He understood the formal nature of the classical epigram, what Rhenanus calls a ‘‘learned epigram’’ (‘‘doctum epigramma’’) in his prefatory letter to the Epigrammata and helpfully defines, lest some of More’s readers were not sufficiently informed: ‘‘an epigram, as you know, must have wit combined with brevity; it must be lighthearted, and then it must end promptly with a witty point (epiphonema).’’17 In fact, not all of More’s Epigrammata are epigrams, at least as we understand the term today; there are lyrics, verse epistles, and an ode. Nor are they always lighthearted. But his epigrams clearly have the brevity, the often bipartite structure, the tendency to concentrate action in a particular instance, the topical variety, and the acu-

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leate, often gnomic or inscriptional quality that characterize the classical form.18 A case in point, no. 115, ‘‘De Principe Bono Et Malo’’ (‘‘On Kings, Good and Bad’’), which is an original political epigram. The English reads, ‘‘What is a good king? He is a watchdog, guardian of the flock, who by barking keeps the wolves from the sheep. What is the bad king? He is the wolf.’’19 This translation catches the substance of the epigram, one of many indictments of the tyrant, a theme that More makes peculiarly his, together with its question-answer format and its submerged transformation of images from St. John, chapter 10. But we need More’s Latin (17 words instead of English’s 31) for the bluntness and concision of the diction, the sharpness of the contraries (good/bad, dog/wolf ), the sting of the answers, and the full horror of guardian dog turned predator wolf, grimly focused on the mouth. Where the mouth of the dog protects the flock, the wolf ’s devours it: Quid bonus est princeps? Canis est custos gregis inde Qui fugat ore lupos. Quid malus? Ipse lupus.20

Peculiarly, the topical variety of the Epigrammata, which is yet another indication of its humanism, also frustrates attempts to find a ‘‘core’’ or principle of coherence, and helps to explain the very different interpretations of what its humanism amounts to. For the most part, More eschews a favorite Renaissance type—the erotic epigram. Otherwise, his topics are extremely diverse and his range much broader than his fellow humanists’; in some sense his epigrams constitute a world. At one extreme he writes about foolish astrologers, prostitutes, cuckolds, a Frenchified courtier, women who paint their faces, and a way to eliminate bad breath after eating leeks (by eating onions, and so on, to an earthy conclusion); at the other there are reflections upon kingship, government, the brevity of life, and death. In mood, too, the epigrams and other poems vary. There are jokes, slapstick comedy, scatology, satiric jabs, expressions of friendship, encomia, ironic reflections, aphorisms, lyric moments, and epitaphs. More enjoys writing variations upon a theme or motif—as in his seven epigrams upon two beggars, one blind and one lame, who are each other’s support. But a cluster or run of epigrams on a similar topic will be interrupted, and jests and gnomic treatments of mortality can follow one another in rapid succession. There is a wide range of addressees, as well, including King Henry VIII, potential patrons, humanist friends, More’s children, the anonymous ‘‘Candidus,’’ the French poet Brixius, a fat priest, a woman More loved long ago, other persons named and nameless

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(sometimes learned and sophisticated, sometimes the butt of a joke), and, in some instances, himself, along with dramatic dialogues and monologues. Moreover, the epigrams proved easily detachable, and were frequently reprinted for the next two hundred years or so—indeed the Epigrammata long rivaled More’s Utopia in popularity.21 Faced with such diversity as well as such a large number, critics have tended to focus on a few that best make their case, sometimes treating them, wittingly or not, as if they were the entire collection. Thus, readings of the epigrams often depend upon taking a humanist part for a more complex humanist whole, or, as I would rather put it, a complex mix or assemblage of humanisms. Mary Thomas Crane’s studies of More’s epigrams, for instance, treat More’s humanism as an educational project: she argues that More’s collection (like John Constable’s and William Lily’s) was ‘‘intended to further the political and educational aims of their authors.22 More particularly, she stresses what she calls ‘‘moralizing poems,’’ poems that are admonitory, satiric, or epideictic.23 Relegating the comic to a brief comment and an endnote, she calls attention to More’s epigram on the ignorant bishop who lacks the spirit that gives life (no. 202); his poems praising Henry VIII on the occasion of his coronation (nos. 19–23); and the Progymnasmata (nos. 1–18), a group of translations from the Greek by More and William Lily, which were written in friendly competition and could be thought of as models for schoolboys to imitate (so that the process of composition, like the topics, is educational and tied to the new learning, with its emphasis on grammar and rhetoric). But these first eighteen epigrams seem to have been intended as a kind of introductory exercise for the epigrams that follow, and Crane’s approach runs the risk of overweighing the didactic aspect of many of the epigrams, which are not as transparently educational as they may seem to be, although grounded in ethical and political situations. By focusing on the most original topic in the Epigrammata, kingship, and, by extension, the political dimension, Ann Baynes Coiro and Damian Grace offer more nuanced readings of More’s humanism. By Coiro’s count, there are at least 26 epigrams on kingship, by Grace’s, thirty-one.24 Coiro, like Crane, emphasizes the educational impulse, observing, for example, that ‘‘In this coronation epigram, More initiates a function of the English epigrammatist as educator of princes that will remain central.’’25 So what for some readers is mere or mostly flattery, is, for her, ‘‘politic advice and criticism in epigram form.’’26 And she points to the many ‘‘remarkably outspoken’’ epigrams on kingship, singling out More’s epigram about the

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king as lion (no.162), which she views as the center or core of a collection that reflects More’s own arrangement.27 Compare Coiro’s to Damian Grace’s provocative study, ‘‘Thomas More’s Epigrammata: Political Theory in a Poetic Idiom.’’ Preceding the studies of Crane and Coiro, it emphasizes how More used the epigrammatic form ‘‘not only as a vehicle for political expression but as an idiom of a political language whose finest expression was Utopia.’’28 Grace helpfully identifies three categories (what he calls ‘‘gradations’’) of the political; there are ‘‘the explicit, the directly ambiguous, and the contextually suggestive.’’29 He also shows just how More applies the otherwise familiar maxims of political theory to concrete cases— and, more subtly, how the explicitly political poems (many of them about the dangers of tyranny) ‘‘form a context for interpretation of less explicit ones.’’30 So Grace’s categories overlap; a poem may be both obviously political (and seemingly a praise of a king or his actions) and indirectly ambiguous, when, for example, it is juxtaposed with an epigram attacking that same kind of action. Grace is equally attentive to More’s language, arguing that More, like other Northern reformers, wanted to rehabilitate ‘‘discourse as an instrument of reform.’’31 In fact, More’s language is essential for any understanding of the epigrams as humanist. First, though, we need to consider a seemingly very different, almost contrary, sort of reading to those by Crane, Coiro, and Grace. Where they emphasize the topics, and, in Crane’s case, the impersonality of the poems (she argues that they ‘‘are conspicuously public and anonymous’’), several critics have read them primarily as autobiographical or self-promotional, viewing them in relation to More’s life, his personality, or his status as a professional humanist.32 John Marsden’s Philomorus is an interesting extended example of a nineteenth-century biographical approach. He begins by recognizing the collection as a kind of vers de socie´te´ and a fashion ‘‘written upon every imaginable subject, personal or public’’ by writers who ‘‘were bound together by a sort of freemasonry of scholarship.’’33 He subsequently weaves together a biographical narrative of sorts, rearranging the poems in the collection to treat them, sometimes chronologically, sometimes topically, in the light of More’s own life. So he juxtaposes More’s poem about a woman he loved in his youth (no. 263) with his epitaph for his two wives and himself (no. 258), and he argues that ‘‘Sola Mors Tyrannicida Est’’ (no. 80) must have been written at the time of King Henry VII’s death, given More’s known condemnation of him.34 A recent study, though otherwise quite different, likewise highlights the biographical element. Questioning Erasmus’s glowing humanist

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portrait of the young More, Fox sees, rather, a personality subject to contrary impulses. For Fox, More is a man who moved between extremes, and he sees the epigrams as evidence of a movement (postulated rather than traced) from the pessimism of More’s early English poems to what he calls ‘‘the genuine Morean synthesis’’ of the Utopia.35 For proof he cites the tremendous variety of the epigrams that follow the fulsome optimism of the early coronation poems, which are the first poems in the Epigrammata proper, but which More had presented to King Henry VIII in 1509 in a handsomely illuminated manuscript. Critics have long been struck by the self-promotional aspect of humanism; in 1959, for example, H. A. Mason pointed out that the humanists (at least some of them) ‘‘constituted a vast mutual-admiration society, and that one of their principal activities was self-praise.’’36 This link between humanism and self-promotion and/or the fashioning of a public self has become a preoccupation of recent criticism, given its interests in material culture, patronage, and the literary system of exchange. In two brilliantly researched essays, which are, however, focused on a single sort of epigram (praise/dispraise), David R. Carlson has shown just how far More (like other humanists, particularly Erasmus) was willing to go to establish his literary career and reputation among an international humanist community—far enough to engage in duplicity or deceit. His earlier article follows two appearances of More’s epigram in praise of Hymni Christiani (1517), an ambitious collection of hymns by Bernard Andre´, a well established humanist and propagandist for the Tudor court. An epigram by More praising (or apparently praising) Andre´’s collection was published with it. But when the same epigram was published in More’s own collection eight months later, it had a new, derogatory title, so that the epigram, read ironically, became a poem ridiculing Andre´. As Carlson points out, now the epigram ‘‘functions as an encomium of More, who not only saw through Andre´’s pretensions but could write such a thing as could be published once as praise of him and once as blame.’’37 A second study, showing how essentially occasional poems were ‘‘made over into a single, weighty monument to More’s public self, functioning to advertise his ingenium,’’ adds three epigrams related to Henry Abyngdon, the choirmaster of the Chapel Royal, who died in 1497.38 The first epigram (no. 159) is an elegant elegy in the classical meters beloved of the humanists; the second (no. 160) is also an epitaph, this time, however, in medieval rhymed meter. In the 1518 collection, these are followed by a third epigram (no. 161), where More laughs at Abyngdon’s heir, ‘‘Janus,’’ who had objected to More’s first epitaph

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and wanted one in rhyme, which the humanists considered barbarous; to More’s feigned amazement the rhymed epitaph was placed on Abyngdon’s tomb.39 It was, then, a palpable hit (one of many) when Germanus Brixius, a French humanist whose grandiloquent poem about a battle between a French and English ship in 1512 was mocked by More in several of his epigrams, claimed that there was only one good poem in the 1518 Epigrammata, no. 160. ‘‘I know, More,’’ he writes, ‘‘that the verses wherein you sing the singer Abyngdon were struck off as a jest. But, lest you fail to note your appeal, you are fine as a laughable bard; as a serious one, you are a failure’’ (‘‘Ridiculus bonus es, serius at malus es’’).40 The insult was the more dangerous because Brixius contrasted the ‘‘success’’ of the poem on Abyngdon with More’s criticism of Henry VII in the coronation poems for his son.41 For much of his Antimorus, though, Brixius attacks More’s scansion and his ‘‘utterly disgraceful solecisms and barbarisms,’’ producing long lists of errors in his meters and in his choice of words.42 More, who was alarmed by Brixius’s charges, some of them politically dangerous, defended himself in a long rejoinder. But he also corrected some of the errors in the 1518 texts in the revised edition of 1520. More’s twentieth-century editors have also noted some of his problems with scansion—albeit in a much less hostile fashion.43 More’s epigrams have been denigrated on other grounds, as well. H. A. Mason, for one, distinguishes between ‘‘bonae literae in the best sense and belles-lettres in the bad sense,’’ and relegates More’s Epigrammata to the latter category, faulting them as puzzles grounded in the taste of the age and essentially medieval, despite their humanist trimmings. Finally, he sees them as trivial, in some superficial sense translations, but not creatively so.44 There is an element of truth in Mason’s claims; some of More’s epigrams are interesting primarily as the small change of a male coterie, and More’s epigrams on rape (nos. 116, 167) seem like the humanist equivalent of lockerroom humor. Nor would anyone today prefer the Epigrammata to the Utopia. I am not convinced by his conclusion, however, where he justifies his survey of More’s Latin poetry by asking readers to ‘‘contrast this use of Latin with More’s use of it for advancing thought’’ in the Utopia.45 There are important overlaps between More’s topics, the rhetorical strategies, and language in the two works—particularly in the ways that More uses ambiguity, ambivalence, and incongruity to startle and stimulate inquiry or to invite different perspectives upon the question of good government and other central questions of life. Several of the critics whom I’ve already discussed, including Coiro, Grace, and Carlson, have shown just how ambiguous More’s

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epigrams can be. Another detailed demonstration of this occurs in David Rundle’s ‘‘A New Golden Age? More, Skelton and the Accession Verse of 1509.’’ Rundle begins by pointing to very real ambiguities in epigram no. 201, ‘‘On the King and the Peasant,’’ which tells how a rustic and naı¨ve peasant came to town and watched as a huge crowd of people lined the street, first shouting that ‘‘The king is coming,’’ and then, as he rode by, ‘‘Long live the king.’’ But the puzzled peasant cannot see the king, even when one of the bystanders points to a man who is resplendent in gold and sits on a tall horse. ‘‘I think you are making fun of me,’’ he says; ‘‘To me he looks like a man in fancy dress.’’46 According to a slightly later jestbook version of this (1532?), the joke is on the peasant for not being ‘‘well nourished up and virtuously endoctrined.’’47 So interpreted, the joke (and the epigram) reinforce the status quo. Yet this is in the midst of a group of epigrams that deflate pretensions and pompous behavior. So a subversive reading that deflates the royal presence (and invites questions about the king’s claims to power) by insinuating that the king, too, is a man, regardless of his dress, and/or that laughs at the crowd for being taken in by the king’s appearance, seems a more likely reading. Much depends upon point of view, then, or where we stand as we read this and other epigrams. Similarly, Rundle finds conscious ambiguity in what others have read as some of More’s most straightforward poems—his accession verses. He argues that More, like the rustic in several of the epigrams, was not taken in by the ceremony of the occasion, or, more precisely, reacted ambivalently to the celebrations. Rejecting the idea that the commonplaces are simply conventional, he also argues that even at the time that the coronation poems were written there is ‘‘an ambivalence which is totally in keeping with pieces like the political epigrams, and he points to the ambiguity in the classical parallels More uses in the ‘Carmen Gratulatorium’ ’’ (no. 19).48 Indeed, even the notion of a return of the golden age proves equivocal, for in one of his shorter accession poems (no. 21), More alludes to the Platonic notion of the cycle of the recurrence of all the ages, from gold to iron, undercutting the apparent optimism of his earlier encomium of Henry VIII.49 This potential ambivalence becomes actual in a number of later epigrams. In several of these, for example, More as ironist claims that death and/or sleep is a leveler, so that the king is no better off than the beggar, Irus, and may even be worse off (nos. 40, 45, 46, 80, 107, 108, 110). Some of these same epigrams could be read in a quite different but still derogatory way, however—as evidence of frustration, if not rage or an almost Swiftian saeva indignatio on the speaker’s part. So they could have had a more

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personal application, as strategies for psychological survival or peace of mind in a world where power rules—or appears to. Many of More’s epigrams are also ambivalent or ambiguous by virtue of their word play. Here I want to cite an apparently frivolous one, no. 106, ‘‘On a Fool,’’ a traditional joke that More translated from the Planudean Anthology. It is an example of a popular form, the noodle, which turns up in a later humanist work, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, though not attributed to More there.50 The Yale version renders More this way; ‘‘When the fleas bite Morio, he puts out his light and says, ‘These fleas will not see me now,’ ’’ nicely preserving some part of More’s word play, which connects the fleas that ‘‘mordent’’ with his own name.51 But if More’s version is self-promoting (to follow Carlson’s argument), it is also self-deprecatory, and at one and the same time personal, social, and public. Insofar as it is (or could be) any or all of the three, it is also more complex than Burton’s less dramatic version of ‘‘that stupid fellow [who] put out the Candle, because the biting fleas should not finde him,’’ a more abstract and distanced rendering.52 Both versions, though, reflect humanist preoccupations with folly and the nature of deception and perception that Democritus Junior’s preface to Burton’s Anatomy, Erasmus’ Moria, and More’s epigrams share. Another important rhetorical device that contributes to the ambiguity of More’s epigrams is his use of question and answer. ‘‘What is the Best Form of Government’’ (no.198) is probably the best known single example of this. In effect a dramatized monologue-dialogue, it begins as if it were answering a question put to the speaker by an unidentified friend: ‘‘You ask which governs better, a king or a senate. Neither, if (as is frequently the case) both are bad. But if both are good, then I think that the senate, because of its numbers, is the better and that the greater good lies in numerous good men.’’53 But after he has made a strong case for a republic, and started to answer his friend’s objection, he interrupts himself: ‘‘Is there anywhere a people upon whom you yourself, by your own decision, can impose either a king or a senate?’’ More could have ended the epigram here. But the speaker continues, ‘‘Stop considering to whom you may give power. The more basic question is whether it would do any good if you could.’’54 So what begins as if it were a little dialogue upon the best state of the commonwealth (compare the original title of Utopia) becomes something far more complex, startling, and unstable, as Clarence Miller has shown.55 Alluding to More’s Utopia by way of word play (‘‘Est ne usquam populus’’), it turns away from theory to the ambiguities of political life.56 Here, among other issues, More anticipates the vexing differences between theory and

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practice and intentions and results that render the world (like many of his epigrams and the Utopia) so problematic. Many other epigrams likewise speak of ambiguities and ambivalence in a world that resists or subverts our attempts to control it. ‘‘On a Cat and a Mouse’’ (no. 262), a disarmingly simple epigram added to the collection in 1520, depends upon a favorite Morean metaphor, the trap, as it inverts an old proverb, ‘‘As a cat plays with a mouse,’’ for startling results by way of a little narrative, another Morean strategy.57 Normally, of course, a cat plays with a mouse before eating it. In this case, though, the cat outwits herself. As she continues her play (or ‘‘play,’’ since the epigram dramatizes just how cruel her play is), she increases the space between herself and the mouse until the terrified mouse manages to escape and reaches a safe hiding place, leaving the cat to sit by the hole in vain. But More disingenuously complicates the story. According to the narrative ‘‘I,’’ the mouse ‘‘would have died in the trap if what ordinarily destroys it had not protected and saved it—a cat.’’58 But the speaker was the one who took the mouse from the trap to begin with and gave it to the cat. So the epigram concludes with a reverberating irony that confuses intentions with results and begs the question of the narrator’s complicity and frustrated intentions, as well as the cat’s. It also leaves us with open-ended questions. To what extent does the cat (a miniature version of the lion, who figures as a standin for the king in several epigrams) represent royal power?59 To what extent do we emphasize the mouse’s successful, albeit ironic, escape, instead? And to what extent is this epigram about the multiple absurdities and ironies that characterize so much of life as we experience it, whether we be mouse, cat, a Morean speaker, or (even) a king? In any case, the epigram invites reflections upon issues that belie the apparent lightness of the narrative and signal its affinities with no. 198. By now Carroll’s definition of humanism can seem almost completely inapplicable to More’s epigrams, which are far more conscious of both the dangers of power and the limits upon human beings than their ability to remake themselves or their world; if nothing else, death, which escorts everyone out of this world, will lower the mighty from their seats.60 But this is too simple, as well; More’s epigrams return again and again to the question of power, its uses, abuses, and subversion. In this and in many other ways, the epigrams are very much in this world at the same time that they are able to question, laugh, and ironically comment about the way that More and others see it. Thus his epigrams seem, to me, ultimately provisional, an odd thing to say, given the epigram’s reputation as

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a closed form.61 But More characteristically subverts, questions, or reopens an initial claim, inverts an old proverb, or otherwise renders an epigram open-ended, by juxtaposition, by ambiguity of language and allusion, by exploiting different points of view and incongruities of situation, and by innumerable other rhetorical strategies.62 Finally, then, there is no finally, but rather a fundamental inconclusiveness. In his recent introduction to a collection of essays on the Renaissance, Glyn P. Norton has pointed out that the ‘‘deepest, most central impulses of humanism are . . . critical.’’63 Writing at moments of crisis, the humanists explored various ways to look at the world, as they sought ‘‘a language that would not only reflect the cultural crisis at hand, but base that crisis in its own distinctiveness as a period.’’64 This seems to me about the closest we can come to the spirit behind the epigrams. But here, of course, I run the risk of contradicting myself. Nor do I want to press this notion of a critical impulse to the exclusion of the many other humanisms that are part and parcel of More’s Epigrammata, which is neither a completely random nor a completely unified collection, but rather a multifarious set of takes upon self, society, and the world.

Notes 1. Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘‘Laughter and Humanism: Unity and Diversity in Thomas More’s Epigrammata,’’ paper delivered at the Congress of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies held in Cambridge, England, in 2000, forthcoming in the Acta of the Congress. I have drawn upon some parts of this study in writing this essay, albeit for different purposes. 2. John Carroll, Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 232. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. Ibid., 47. 5. Ibid., 7. 6. In this connection, see the interesting study by Alistair Fox, ‘‘Facts and Fallacies: Interpreting English Humanism,’’ in Reassessing the Henrican Age: Humanism, Politics, and Reform 1500–1550, ed. Alistair Fox and John Guy, 9–33 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), which calls for a radical revision of English humanism. See also the balanced review of the question by Mary Thomas Crane, ‘‘Early Tudor Humanism,’’ in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway, 13–26 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003). Also valuable is James McConica, ‘‘The Patrimony of Thomas More,’’ in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh-Loyd Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden, 56–71 (London: Duckworth, 1981), which carefully distinguishes Erasmus’s humanism and philosophical attitudes from More’s. 7. For this and other information about the publication, see St. Thomas More, Latin Poems, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3, pt. 2, ed. Clarence H. Miller, Leicester Bradner, Charles A. Lynch, and Revilo P. Oliver (New Haven, CT:

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Yale University Press, 1984), 3–9. All citations of More’s Latin poems and English translations are from this edition. 8. Title pages for March 1518, November/December 1518, and 1520 are conveniently included in R. W. Gibson, comp., St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography of His Works and of Moreana to the Year 1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 7, 8 (second title page); 10, 11 (second title page); and 77. 9. For this part of Rhenanus’s letter, see Latin Poems, 72–75. 10. This count is based on information in Latin Poems, 9, 11. An additional ten poems that were not part of either the 1518 or 1520 Epigrammata are included as nos. 272–81. 11. Latin Poems, 10–11. 12. David R. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 142–62; 239–45. 13. For a rigorous and conservative definition, see J. B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and Their Books (London: British Library, 1991), 1–2. 14. See Gibson, Preliminary Bibliography, 7 and 8; 10 and 11; cf. the title page for 1520, on 77, which emphasizes the author’s emendations. For Brixius’s attack on More, see below. 15. Latin Poems, 61, 12. 16. Latin Poems, 12, where Leicester Bradner and Charles A. Lynch comment that More’s ‘‘most unusual sources’’ are the English songs he translates; cf. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More, 42, on just how startling More’s use is. 17. Included in Latin Poems, 72–75. Rhenanus clearly did not have to tell Pirckheimer this, as Pirckheimer was himself an epigrammatist; hence, there seems to be a double audience in mind—an inner circle of humanist elite and a larger group of literate readers to be informed and educated. 18. See Daniel Russell’s succinct discussion, ‘‘The Genres of Epigram and Emblem,’’ in The Renaissance, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Glyn P. Norton, 278–83 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Standard treatments of the Renaissance epigram include J. W. Binns, ‘‘Latin Translations from Greek in the English Renaissance,’’ Humanistica Lovaniensia 27 (1978): 128–59; J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990); Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947); Lawrence Ryan, ‘‘The Shorter Latin Poem in Tudor England,’’ Humanistica Lovaniensia 26 (1977): 101–31; and T. K. Whipple, ‘‘Martial and the English Epigram from Sir Thomas Wyatt to Ben Jonson,’’ University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 10 (1925): 281–302. See also Ann Baynes Coiro, Robert Herrick’s ‘‘Hesperides’’ and the Epigram Book Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 45–77, which situates More’s epigrams between classical models and later English epigrammatists. 19. Latin Poems, 165. 20. Latin Poems, 164. Besides the interesting note on the significance of the transformation from shepherd to dog (Latin Poems, 364), notice how More typically emphasizes the collective or group that needs protection. 21. In this connection see ‘‘Appendix D’’ by Charles Clay Doyle in Latin Poems, 695–744, and the many notes on sources and analogues that have appeared in Moreana and other journals. 22. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 138.

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23. Crane, Framing Authority, 140; cf. her earlier study, ‘‘Intret Cato: Authority and the Epigram in Sixteenth-Century England,’’ in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, Harvard University Studies 14, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 158–86. 24. Coiro, Robert Herrick’s ‘‘Hesperides,’’ 67; Damian Grace, ‘‘Thomas More’s Epigrammata’’: Political Theory in a Poetic Idiom,’’ Parergon n.s. 3 (1985): 116. 25. Coiro, Robert Herrick’s ‘‘Hesperides,’’ 67. 26. Ibid., Contrast the view in Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More, 42; Harold Andrew Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period: An Essay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 49–51; and Jerry Mermel, ‘‘Preparations for a Political Life: Sir Thomas More’s Entry into the King’s Service,’’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977): 53–66. 27. Coiro, Robert Herrick’s ‘‘Hesperides,’’ 68. 28. Grace, ‘‘Thomas More’s Epigrammata,’’ 115. 29. Ibid., 117. 30. Ibid., 120. 31. Ibid., 125. 32. Crane, Framing Authority, 143. 33. John Marsden, Philomorus: Notes on the Latin Poems of Sir Thomas More, 2nd. ed. (London: Longman’s Green, 1878), 6, 28. 34. A later literary historian, Leicester Bradner, also singles out More’s personal epigrams; see his Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry 1500–1525 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1940), 17. 35. Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 49. 36. Mason, Humanism and Poetry, 28. 37. David R. Carlson, ‘‘Reputation and Duplicity: The Texts and Contexts of Thomas More’s Epigram on Bernard Andre´,’’ English Literary History 58 (1991): 268. 38. Carlson, English Humanist Books, 150. 39. Ibid., 157–60. 40. Germanus Brixius’s Antimorus, ed. Daniel Kinney, in Latin Poems, 511 and 510. For more on the dispute between the two humanists, and the relevant primary material, see Latin Poems, appendixes A, B, and C, along with the commentaries and (of course) More’s epigrams. See also R. Morris Day, ‘‘Sir Thomas More and the Defense of the Royal Navy,’’ in Personalities and Politics: Essays on English and European History Presented in Honor of Dr. Marguerite Potter, ed. E. Deanne Malpass (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1977), 1–12. 41. See, in particular, Antimorus in Latin Poems, 490–97 and 508–09. 42. These lists run from 515–47 in Antimorus, ed. Kinney, in Latin Poems. 43. See, for example, Revilo P. Oliver’s comments in Latin Poems, 18–37. 44. Mason, Humanism and Poetry, 36–58. 45. Ibid., 58. 46. Latin Poems, 233. 47. David Rundle, ‘‘A New Golden Age? More, Skelton and the Accession Verses of 1509,’’ Renaissance Studies 9 (1955): 58. Cf. the commentary in Latin Poems, 392– 93, which points to the difficulty in deciding which of two possible (and antithetical) readings seems more likely, given similar ambiguities and ironies in Morus’s speech at the end of Utopia. 48. Rundle, ‘‘A New Golden Age?,’’ 68. 49. Ibid., 76. Cf. the interesting discussion of potentially ominous or tragic undertones in the classical allusions More makes in no. 143, ‘‘To Candidus: How to

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Choose a Wife,’’ and in no. 19 in James Hutton, ‘‘A Speculation on Two Passages in the Latin Poems of Thomas More,’’ in Essays on Renaissance Poetry, ed. Rita Guerlac (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 330–38. 50. See Charles Clay Doyle, ‘‘The Popular Aspect of Sir Thomas More’s Latin Epigrams,’’ Southern Folklore Quarterly 37 (1973): 87–99, as well as Doyle, ‘‘Appendix D,’’ in Latin Poems, 697–744. 51. Latin Poems, 161, and the commentary for 106/3, 362. 52. See Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Liessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989–1994), 1:56, and Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘‘Robert Burton/Democritus Junior and Thomas More,’’ Moreana 35, no. 125–36 (1998): 60. 53. Latin Poems, 229. 54. Latin Poems, 231. 55. Besides the commentary on no. 198 in Latin Poems, 390–92, see Miller’s fascinating analysis of the epigram, 49–50, with the many parallels drawn with Utopia. 56. Latin Poems, 230. 57. Latin Poems, 275; see the commentary, 412. 58. Latin Poems, 275. 59. See, for instance, epigrams nos. 162, 180, and 181, each of which features a lion and is about royal power. 60. See, for instance, no. 80, ‘‘Death Unassisted Kills Tyrants,’’ Latin Poems, 145. Cf. no. 119, ‘‘On the Vanity of this Life,’’ where the speaker meditates upon how ‘‘We are all shut up in the prison of this world under sentence of death,’’ Latin Poems, 167. The poem is grimly ironic, but behind it I hear 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘‘For now we see through a glass darkly,’’ as well as an echo of Plato’s allegory of the cave (line 8). 61. I have borrowed the term ‘‘provisional’’ from Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979), xiii. The problems he addresses seem just as applicable to the humanist texts of Thomas More. 62. These are, of course, characteristic of his Utopia as well. 63. Glyn P. Norton, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Renaissance, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Glyn P. Norton, 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 64. Glyn P. Norton, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 1.

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Melanchthon, Latomus, Ramus: Teachers of Careful Reading Kees Meerhoff

Like we have done in the other areas of rhetoric, we have said many things that you might not find to be taught by others. If you read Cicero carefully, however, you will realize that our rules derive directly from what he did. Cicero, indeed, composed his speeches with great care, whereas he produced casually his rhetorical rules. —George of Trebizond Two dominant characteristics of humanism during the Renaissance were a concern for Latin style and a taste for the practical issues of moral philosophy. Such a combination was both a cause and a consequence of studying Cicero, and his description of rhetorical culture emerged as the alternative to the abstractions of late-scholasticism. —Dominic Baker-Smith1

IN AUTUMN OF 1525 THE ‘‘DUTCH’’ HUMANIST GERARD GELDENHOUWER (1482–1542), born in Nijmegen and therefore known as Noviomagus, went from Antwerp to Wittenberg. He kept a diary of his journey which informs us very precisely of his whereabouts. Among his halting places he mentions Rotterdam, Haarlem, Deventer, and the German town of Osnabru¨ck. He also reports not only on the people he meets in the different towns, but also on the execution at the stake of a priest who had openly given up ‘‘the regulations of the Roman Popes,’’ as Geldenhouwer puts it. This took place in The Hague on September 16, the day before his departure. In Osnabru¨ck, he tells this awful story to another sympathizer with the Reformation who bursts into tears and thanks the Lord for the event. Finally, he arrives at his destination, where he attends the lectures of some famous men. ‘‘In Wittenberg, Doctor Martin Luther lectured in German (enarrabat Germanice) on Exodus; Philip Melanchthon on the speeches of Cicero; John Bugenhagen on the letters of Paul; Justus Jonas on the Gospel of Matthew.’’ He adds solemnly a 90

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bit later on that ‘‘in the year 1525, on the 19th of October, they began for the first time to celebrate mass in German at Wittenberg, in my presence.’’ Geldenhouwer leaves Wittenberg on November 8. Some days later he is brought down, severely injured and robbed by some fellow travelers, who are caught within the hour. He returns home, but continues his diary. He reports, for instance, on other executions of Protestants in the year 1529, in Cologne, Antwerp, and Brussels. He tells us that ‘‘persecution is heavy in Brabant, Zeeland, and Holland.’’ Some pages later he mentions a letter which informs him that ‘‘in Paris, King Franc¸ois the First has founded a trilingual institution (trilingue . . . studium), in spite of the theologians (invitis magistris nostris).’’2 These are words written by a humanist who has taken a serious, and indeed a dangerous decision. Geldenhouwer had worked in Louvain for many years, as a corrector of one of the major printers there, and as an editor of important texts. He was well acquainted with Erasmus and supervised the publication of several of his texts; but when he tried to associate him with the cause of the Reformation, Erasmus took vigorous measures. Geldenhouwer took an active part in the publishing of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and edited with two other humanists, Maarten (Martin) van Dorp and Alardus of Amsterdam, the very corrupt manuscript of Agricola’s De inventione dialectica (1515). His religious convictions brought him an errant life which he ended quietly, however, as a professor of history and of theology at the Protestant University of Marburg. In that period he wrote an important pedagogical treatise, Institutio scholæ christianæ (Frankfurt 1534), which is a paraphrase of Quintilian and has recently been republished. In this treatise, he recommends the schoolbooks of Melanchthon several times, especially those concerning the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic).3 His unfortunate travel accident is used by his close colleague Reinhard Lorich of Hadamar in his commentary on the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius, translated by Rudolph Agricola and very frequently used in Marburg as elsewhere. It has become an elaborate example of an exercise called ethopoiia, that is, a speech attributed to a historical person. The set piece begins when Geldenhouwer comes to his senses; he starts lamenting his misfortune and his lack of caution over several pages; in the end, he turns devoutly to the Lord for help and consolation, and rhetorically amplifies his trust in him.4 This was by no means the last time that Geldenhouwer was used as a historical character. In the nineteenth century, he was to feature

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in a historical novel about the arrival of the Reformation in the Netherlands, written by the popular woman writer A. L. G. BosboomToussaint in a lofty style that tries to capture the ‘‘ordinary’’ language of the sixteenth century.5 This essay is about people engaged in editing and writing in precarious times; about the rise of the humanist commentary, which was, according to Jill Kraye, a genuine ‘‘invention of the Renaissance’’; about the new humanist institutions, founded, either in the face of the official teachers at existing universities, or as a result of Reformation politics, as in Wittenberg and Marburg. Indeed, most of the abovementioned towns, like Louvain, Cologne, Wittenberg, and Paris, became real powerhouses of humanistic learning, to borrow an expression from Ann Moss; and the traditional ‘‘academic journey,’’ the peregrinatio academica, had to be re-invented as the Reformation was making progress.6 The three humanists I have chosen to present briefly have many things in common. They were all important authors, of both textbooks and commentaries; they were all deeply influenced by the founding fathers of Northern humanism, Agricola and Erasmus. In addition, they are closely linked together by personal correspondence and even by personal contact. Latomus wrote to Melanchthon to report on the very strained religious and political situation in Paris; in it, he expressed what he owed to him in terms of learning and of belief.7 He also was the very first ‘‘royal lecturer’’ (lecteur du roi, regius professor) of Latin eloquence at the newly founded institution, who with some other Germans, like John Sturm, introduced the work of Agricola in Paris. People like Latomus and Sturm were instrumental in the negotiations between the king of France and some Protestant German princes who tried to bring Melanchthon to Paris and to open an ‘‘oecumenical’’ council between Protestant and Catholic theologians. This was supposed to happen in 1535, but things went wrong and Melanchthon stayed home.8 Latomus and Sturm were also the teachers who most influenced Peter Ramus. Although Latomus as a German, and as a friend of Sturm, was suspected to be a ‘Lutheran’ heretic, he mainly moved within progressive Catholic circles and once he went back to Germany, he became an able civil servant to the emperor and a well-known controversialist writer against major Protestant leaders. Peter Ramus, however, moved slowly but steadily toward a Protestant position; already intellectually suspect as a stern critic of Aristotle and other classic authorities, he had to be very cautious once he had been appointed in his turn as lecturer of philosophy and eloquence by the king of France,

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this country being the ‘‘eldest daughter of the (Roman Catholic) Church.’’ Student diaries speak of his ambiguous behavior in religious matters.9 This did not save him: his violent death during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day is well known and dramatically presented to the English public by Marlowe in scene 9 of The Massacre at Paris (1593). Let us now situate the three humanists more precisely and determine their major intellectual interests. In order to bring about similarities in behavior and to point once more to the tradition of the ‘‘academic journey,’’ let us first consider briefly the career of one of their chief heroes, Rudolph Agricola. In the biography of Agricola written by his pupil John von Pleningen, we read that Agricola was taught grammar in Groningen, then dialectic and rhetoric in Erfurt, and that he earned his masters degree in Louvain at the age of sixteen. He then went on to study theology in Cologne before moving to Italy, the cradle of humanism, where he studied law in Pavia, to please his father rather than out of true interest. Eventually he quit law school, and, yearning for still higher learning, he finally turned to literature and to the studia humanitatis, reading most of all Cicero and Quintilian. In short, he moved from formal education in the liberal arts to the higher faculties, but then, just like Petrarch, he made his discovery of the great writers, teachers, and orators of antiquity.10 Let us compare this start of a brilliant career with those of Melanchthon and Latomus. Born in Bretten in 1497, Melanchthon received his first education in Latin in his hometown and in Pforzheim nearby, then moved to Heidelberg and obtained his masters degree in Tu¨bingen at the age of sixteen (almost seventeen). He had followed the traditional curriculum, but had also made some major discoveries: classical and neo-Latin poetry on the one hand, the work of Agricola on the other. This happened, so he tells us in an ‘‘autobiographical’’ sketch written much later, in 1515, shortly after the publication of De inventione dialectica in Louvain. The result was, he adds, that he gained a deeper understanding of the texts he read and appreciated them more fully; he also understood for the first time the proper use of the logical rules that he had learned previously.11 In 1518 he was appointed professor of Greek at Wittenberg University, thanks to his exceptional abilities and to an influential relative, John Reuchlin. There are obviously many similarities between the two sketches. Formal education gives way to literature, and this blissful discovery is linked up with a second discovery: that of the proper tools to read that literature. In the case of Agricola, the tools were handed down

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to him by Cicero and especially by Quintilian. To Melanchthon, Agricola offered a modern and refined version of those tools. Agricola had indeed combined the benefits of formal logic with those of classical rhetoric, and taught how to get hold of the structure of a text, how to grasp the connections between parts of a larger whole. He could tell you, for instance, how and where the different Tusculan Disputations of Cicero are logically linked together to form a coherent argumentative whole. I will return to this crucial matter below.12 Moving on to Latomus, a comparable picture emerges.13 Long before he was appointed in Paris, he had studied in Freiburg-imBreisgau, then went on to Cologne, and achieved his education in Louvain. Already in Freiburg where he arrived in 1516 to stay for almost seven years, he met Erasmus and discovered the work of the young Melanchthon. From there he wrote his first letter to him, which is now lost. We do not know exactly when or how he got acquainted with Agricola; his first writings stem from his stay in Cologne where, as he already did in Freiburg, he combined his studies with teaching. His first publications are the result of that teaching, and it is obvious that by that time (the end of the 1520s) he had discovered, and read thoroughly, the works of Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon, not to mention George of Trebizond who also was a major source for the young Melanchthon, and a probable source for Agricola. He saw his humanist views fully confirmed during his short stay at Louvain, which had been a center of Agricola studies for two decades, and where the ‘‘heretical’’ Melanchthon had been read discretely, but avidly, as soon as he had published his first works, around 1520.14 When we consider for a moment the writings of the three humanists at Louvain responsible for the publication of Agricola’s manuscripts—Gerard Geldenhouwer, Alardus of Amsterdam, and Martin Dorp—we can detect the influence of Melanchthon in all three cases. It is safe to assume that from 1520 onwards, Agricola has been read more or less consistently with Melanchthonian eyes. In Latomus’s own works this cumulative effect is quite clear as well. Whereas he absorbed all kinds of influences, both classical and humanistic, in his first theoretical writings, he was able to give a unique impulse to Agricola’s fame by composing a brilliant summary of the latter’s masterpiece: his very successful Epitome of the long and often difficult De inventione dialectica. Latomus’s Epitome is extant with two different prefaces: one addressed to a German protector, another to the principal of the outstanding Parisian colle`ge Sainte-Barbe where he was appointed to teach rhetoric in the summer of 1531.15 Three

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years later he would deliver his inaugural lecture as a royal lecturer of Latin literature, the famous Oratio de studiis humanitatis.16 As we have already observed, Peter Ramus was among his first students. As we have seen, Latomus had to teach in order to pay his tuition fees and his books. His father was a mason, as his name recalls. Peter Ramus had even more modest origins. He had to polish the boots of wealthy fellow students in order to survive. He had his ‘‘academic journey’’ later, not as a student but as a famous professor. Whereas Latomus was a rather compliant man, always tending to adapt himself to other persons’ views, Ramus was a relentless fighter with strong convictions and an even stronger personality. Born in 1515 in a small village named Cuts, the main road of which is now called the rue de La Rame´e (as far as I know, there is no rue Latomus in Arlon), he went straight to Paris and obtained his masters degree at the age of twenty-one by defending a provocative thesis about Aristotle. He repeated his views about the corrupted tradition of the Aristotelian corpus and the resulting confusion in the surviving texts in his first publications. These are illustrative of an intellectual attitude he would maintain throughout his life. His admiring pupils have pictured him as a new Hercules cleaning the Augean stables. Indeed, with his fellow countryman from Picardy, close associate and friend Omer Talon, he attacked virtually all the established authorities in the different branches of learning. To both of them, critical reading of the classical texts was a prerequisite of the construction of a new set of manuals in the liberal arts. Defiance toward authority was in their eyes a basic intellectual virtue, and stern methodological criticism the only road to truth.17 Because the principles of method are given in logic, Ramus himself started his ‘‘methodical cleansing raid’’ with the Organon of Aristotle. He wanted to go ‘‘back to basics,’’ that is, to the natural, innate abilities of each human being to reason correctly. This implied that he always wrote at least two books on each individual branch of learning: first, a critical appraisal of the major authoritative source; and second, a slim and well-structured manual in which he avoided all the mistakes he had detected, and passionately denounced, in his critical exploration of the classics. Because of his humanistic training and of the fundamental debt to Sturm and Latomus that he recognized rather reluctantly at the end of his career, he was convinced of the necessity to join logic with rhetoric. In this, he remained faithful to the tradition inaugurated by Agricola and reinforced by Melanchthon. As a result, his second series of attacks was launched against the two greatest Latin classics

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in the field: Cicero and Quintilian. Both attacks are now available in English and form an excellent introduction to his thought.18 Ramus entrusted Omer Talon with the construction of a ‘‘purified’’ rhetoric, to be written on the basis of the rather fierce attacks I just mentioned, and as close as possible to ‘‘natural’’ eloquence. Like the logical textbook, this ‘‘ramist’’ rhetoric was rewritten several times and translated into the authors’ mother tongue at a certain moment—after Ramus’s appointment as a royal lecturer in 1551. Translation was indeed another way ‘‘back to nature.’’19 As a matter of course, this appointment raised hell in the intellectual circles in Paris. His earlier attack on Aristotle had been officially censured and punished by a royal decree that is still extant in the Sorbonne library. Pamphlets in defense of Aristotle were published. Things got worse with the publication of the attacks against Cicero and Quintilian. New, violent replies were written. I think it is realistic to affirm that virtually all his new colleagues, including first-rate scholars like Adrien Turne`be and Pierre Galland, who had succeeded Latomus as a lecturer of Latin literature, had desperately tried to prevent his nomination.20 But a former fellow student whose boots he had polished more than once, now a cardinal and a pair de France, persuaded the new king, Henry II, to admit this angry young man among his lecteurs royaux. His colleagues were deeply hurt, both in their intellectual convictions and in their academic standing. In spite of all their individual differences in attitude and outlook, I have presented all three humanists as members of the same intellectual family. Even though Latomus was older than Melanchthon, it is fair to maintain the order I have proposed. Melanchthon, appointed in 1518, was a fundamental inspiration to Latomus, appointed in 1534. The latter, in his turn, played an important part in the education of Ramus, appointed in 1551. All three authors started their careers by publishing textbooks of logic and rhetoric in the tradition of Agricola. Melanchthon had even started writing his first rhetoric, the very successful De rhetorica libri tres, before his arrival at Wittenberg. All three stressed that logic and rhetoric are inseparable; and this is why Latomus, like Agricola, published a manual in which both disciplines were fully integrated.21 Melanchthon and Ramus, on the other hand, wrote separate handbooks, while stressing the importance of the combined use of logic and rhetoric.22 Significantly, in addition, they aimed at combining theory with practice. Their aim was eloquentia in its highest possible form: an outstanding competence in reading, speaking, and writing Latin. All the studia humanitatis were mobilized to achieve this goal. This led

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them to quote extensively from literary sources in their handbooks; but above all, to teach eloquence by reading the poets, historians, and orators of antiquity. This meant that alongside their handbooks they published commentaries in which they illustrated the use of rhetorical and dialectical rules.23 In their theoretical manuals, they offered tools for methodical reading and stressed the importance of coherence and elegance in the process of writing texts through imitation. So in the end, rhetoric, logic, and commentary became constituent parts of one and the same pedagogical approach. The skillful reading of texts opens the gates to classical learning; and learning is a prerequisite of elegant speaking and writing. In a historical period of intense political and religious strife, the proper use of logic gained, moreover, a strongly ethical dimension. It became an essential means of maintaining peaceful communication. For consistency meant both persuasiveness and transparency. A sloppy construction of arguments was the fastest road to conceptual confusion and ensuing disagreement. The selection of examples in the textbooks, as well as the choice of the texts to read for practice, mirrored this ethical, if not religious, preoccupation of contemporary humanists. For texts are carriers of values; and reading texts also meant gaining insight into the way essential political and moral convictions were defended by the great orators and historians of the past.24 This leads us to some final considerations. The constant confrontation with complex texts, which is the hallmark of humanistic education, leads to the question of the integration of the different disciplines into a unified perspective. The curriculum, indeed, should mirror the humanists’ awareness of the many ways in which logic interacts with ethics, and eloquence with history. To what extent is there an overarching ‘‘philosophy’’ that makes these links explicit and offers a satisfactory conceptual background for the creation of a coherent curriculum? Do Melanchthon, Latomus, and Ramus share a handful of basic principles or do they differ in their conception of the relationship between the fields of learning? Here again, let us first cast a glance at their common spiritual father, Agricola. As we have seen, he was first and foremost appreciated as an excellent reader. But he was also considered to be a genuine philosopher. Phrissemius, one of his best commentators, writes that he used to call him a Latin Plutarch, ‘‘that is, a kind of civic and philosophical orator’’ (civilem quondam et philosophicum oratorem). Exactly ten years later, Melanchthon also wrote that Agricola was deeply interested in history and very fond of laws (amabat leges); beside that, he was fascinated by theological questions.25 It is certainly

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true that Agricola was fully aware of the importance of questions of law and of history, both for the reader and for the orator; in the course of his De inventione dialectica, he more than once confronts theoretical conceptions with real practice in the law courts; and he is ready to question traditional views, even those expressed by Cicero, as a result of this confrontation with practice, ‘‘that most trustworthy of masters in all things,’’ as he puts it.26 It is also significant that among the three major kinds of speeches, he underlines the fundamental role of the epideictic genre, because it is concerned with the values that are at the basis of forensic and political cases as well. The Belgian philosopher Chaı¨m Perelman would have been delighted to read these fairly uncommon remarks.27 In the appreciation of Agricola, Phrissemius and Melanchthon doubtlessly had in mind the famous letter On the proper method of study (De formando studio), and perhaps the truly epideictic oration In praise of philosophy as well. In these texts Agricola presents his vision of the different disciplines that have to be mastered in order to achieve genuine eloquence. It is a highly spiritual, if not religious vision, in which the influence of Plato and Cicero seems to prevail. But the classic conception of wisdom has taken a Christian bend; philosophy is considered to derive directly from heaven, and the human mind to be the essential link between God and man. Once more, Agricola stresses the importance of moral philosophy; but mathematics, physics, and medicine receive almost equal praise. As is well known, the influence of De formando studio has been widespread; it has been often republished separately or together with other programmatic texts that promote the humanistic (and Ciceronian) ideal of wisdom joined with eloquence. We know less about the reception of the speech In praise of philosophy, except that it had been published several times before Alardus’s edition of the collected works in 1539.28 Although in both texts Agricola presents a unified vision of the studia humanitatis, he doesn’t have much to say about the precise interaction between the different fields. His praise of learning simply seems to run parallel to the high standards he sets for eloquence. His focus is on the adequate reading of the classics and on achieving excellence in writing and speaking. A truly integrated vision of the different sciences appears to be the original achievement of Philip Melanchthon. His systematic effort to link the branches of learning has been rightly called a ‘‘theological philosophy.’’29 It is no coincidence that his own academic speeches, especially his inaugural lecture and his Praise of Eloquence, have been frequently reprinted together with Agricola’s humanistic manifesto.

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In contrast with Agricola’s more generic approach, Melanchthon not only engaged actively in almost every individual discipline, but over the years developed a more and more solid conceptual grasp of the links between the different branches of philosophy. He was deeply interested in the physiological foundations of moral philosophy, for instance, but also in the way in which ethics interacts with logic. What enabled him to remain faithful, both to Luther’s new theology and to his essentially humanistic outlook, was his reflection on the opposition between Gospel and Law. This opposition, present in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, had become the cornerstone of Lutheran theology and thus equally dominates Melanchthon’s Loci Communes. Already in the earliest versions of this first Protestant dogmatics, he develops a theory of ‘‘the law of nature’’ given by God to mankind as soon as he created the world, long before the historical and crucial event of the Gospel that promises redemption to the truly faithful. Human justice and justification by faith alone, sola fide, should never be confused; nevertheless, law is a genuine gift of God, who printed a set of moral notions in the human mind as universally valid as the principles of mathematics and the rules of the syllogism. The exact number of natural laws can be determined by the Christian philosopher by testing them logically: method, indeed, is as ‘‘natural’’ a gift as law. As we can see, in his first theological handbook printed in 1521, Melanchthon refers to mathematics, to logic, and to ethics, and finds in the stoic (and Ciceronian) concept of ‘‘common notions’’ or ‘‘preconceptions’’ (koinai ennoiai or prolepseis) a kind of common ground for each discipline. It is characteristic of his humanistic outlook that he adds later in the same chapter: ‘‘If you wish, you can join [viz., to the set of innate moral rules] specific sentences culled from the work of poets, orators, and historians.’’30 From the outset, his reading of classical texts is directed toward the insertion of classical wisdom into a more abstract, conceptual framework. Reading classical poetry is useful because the Christian reader can detect in it traces of God’s gifts to mankind. In one of his summaries of moral philosophy, Melanchthon would affirm that great writers are specially gifted for the elegant expression of natural law.31 In the same way, great orators base their argumentation on the universal laws, both of ethics and of logic. This is also the ‘‘logic’’ behind what Geldenhouwer witnessed as a student in 1525: Luther taught Exodus, Melanchthon Cicero’s orations. These subjects were not so diverse after all. It stands to reason that in his analyses of classical oratorical works, Melanchthon is particularly sensitive to the process in which the de-

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fense of a particular case is enhanced by referring it to a general principle. In technical terms, this is called referring the hypothesis to the thesis. Cicero highly recommended this technique in his rhetorical works and practiced it in speeches as famous as the Pro archia poeta, in which he defends the civil rights of an individual poet by amplifying the role of poetry and of learning in a civilized state. Melanchthon called this topic of learning useful for society a ‘‘commonplace’’ and took the opportunity to underline in his analysis the crucial link between loci communes of politics or ethics and the syllogism that constitutes the backbone of the oration. In doing so, he systematized some illuminating remarks made by Agricola and showed in a simple way how the principles of all the sciences interact with eloquence.32 Along the same lines, young preachers were told how, in the sections from Scripture they wished to deal with in their sermons, to refer to one or more of the theological loci communes that constituted the scientifically sound summary of biblical theology. In sum, two relatively simple sets of oppositions, viz. Law and Gospel on the one hand, general rule (‘‘commonplace’’) and particular case on the other, command the entire system and enable a regulated shift from theory to oratorical practice and vice versa. Theology, rooted in the logical and rhetorical analysis of biblical texts, crowns it all. Ancient philosophy, as far as it shows by its methodical makeup to be true to human nature as God created it, is accepted within the system and both integrated in, and set apart from, the principles of Christian faith by means of the first opposition. Thus, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s treatise On duties (De officiis) are fully accepted within the framework; both texts are models of good method; Cicero, moreover, combines method with elegance, and can even easier be used in Latin composition.33 I recommend reading of Melanchthon’s commentary on Cicero’s Pro Milone to see graphically how in the analytical process the tools offered by Christian ethics, by logic, and by rhetoric are combined.34 I further recommend the reader to compare this commentary (or any other on pagan orators or poets) with his methodical exegesis of biblical texts. For the integration of ancient learning and eloquence enabled Melanchthon to use the same systematic devices while dealing with sacred eloquence. It is fascinating to witness his ‘‘conceptual struggle’’ in the different stages of his reading, as in the prefaces to his commentaries on Solomon’s Proverbs, and, of course, in his famous series of commentaries on Saint Paul.35 Of the three humanists under discussion here, Melanchthon, as a faithful ally to Luther, was the only one to use the reading tools

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handed down to them by Agricola for both secular and sacred texts. I have suggested previously that both kinds were treated within the same Christian framework. But whereas Melanchthon explicitly referred to this framework in his commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, his vocabulary in his commentaries on Cicero’s speeches is purely ‘‘classical’’ and the references to his ‘‘theological philosophy’’ are bound to go unnoticed, except to insiders. To Melanchthon, Cicero’s eloquence was a fine example of the outstanding use of God’s gifts to mankind; and he doubtlessly saw the use of a principle of natural law in Cicero’s defense of Milo—viz. the natural right of self-defense—in the light of his own Christian philosophy.36 But it is quite possible to read Melanchthon’s commentary with great profit without accepting the whole theological framework. And the tremendous success of his commentaries on Cicero’s speeches in countries outside the German Protestant areas—in France, for instance—indicates that many of his readers contented themselves with only one side of his genius and tried to imitate especially the lucid way in which he handled the tools offered by humanistic logic and rhetoric.37 One of them was Latomus, who in contrast to several other lecteurs royaux, was never bothered by the doctors of the Faculty of— Catholic—Theology of the University of Paris. Latomus had enough courage to express his sympathy with those who dismissed Scholastic theology and recommended using the studia humanitatis to transform it along Erasmian lines.38 However, contrary to John Sturm who, as it seems, was invited by a Sorbonne doctor to join forces in order to analyze the Letter to the Romans with the new humanistic tools, Latomus kept away from sacred texts. He was an able and cautious professor of Latin eloquence who never trespassed the limits of the field he was appointed for, as most of his colleagues did. Besides the Epitome of Agricola’s main work, his numerous commentaries, especially those on Cicero’s ethical, rhetorical, and oratorical works, brought him considerable fame all over Europe.39 He refrained from deeper speculation and showed no interest in building a systematic conceptual framework of his own. His academic speeches are fine samples of humanist eloquence, and bear witness of Latomus’s deep concern for a proper education of the young; but there is nothing in them that had not been said before by Agricola, Erasmus, Bude´, or Melanchthon.40 As time went by, he turned more and more to the study of law, obtained a doctorate in Italy, and left Paris, a few years before Ramus published his infamous attack on Aristotle. Latomus’s friend and successor as a regius professor, Pierre

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Galland, became, as we have seen, one of Ramus’s fiercest enemies.41 In sharp contrast to Latomus, Ramus held very definite views about the structure of the curriculum and about the best way to teach the liberal arts. It is not easy, however, to get a clear picture of the way in which, according to him, the different disciplines interact. Indeed, Ramus spent most of his time struggling against the average humanist tendency to blur the boundaries between the arts. In that respect, his methodological conceptions run squarely counter to Melanchthon’s teaching practice. Whereas the latter always refers to other parts of his ‘‘system’’ in each of his manuals, Ramus is the man of the absolute theoretical separation of the arts. Like Melanchthon, he constantly rewrote all his texts; the numerous attacks he was subject to were often instrumental in the evolution of his thought. Only in the earliest versions of his controversial manual of logic does he show us a glimpse of something like an over-arching philosophy. This occurs in a section he would erase soon afterwards and which is called ‘‘the third level of judgment.’’ Peter Mack correctly concluded that ‘‘it was dropped from subsequent versions of the dialectical manual, probably because it does not belong within the boundaries of dialectic.’’42 This section in itself is extant in three versions: a manuscript version offered to King Franc¸ois I, in 1543, and two printed versions printed in the same year. It is obvious that Ramus struggled with its composition. It is based on a careful reading of Plato’s Republic, and it puts the famous allegory of the cave in a new, entirely Christian perspective. As is well known, Plato discusses the appropriate philosophical education for the elite of his ideal state, which leads him to an examination of the disciplines to be taught. He not only speaks of the essential ‘‘kinship’’ between all the sciences several times (531d), or uses the expression ‘‘sister arts’’ (511b), but also considers the power of reasoning (heˆ tou dialegesthai dynamis) as the ‘‘cornice’’ (thrinkos, 534e) crowning the entire edifice of the higher sciences and determining their proper order (537c). Plato saw contemplation as something ‘‘divine’’ in human beings (518e); and we have seen that Agricola remains faithful to that idea. As Agricola and Melanchthon did before him, Ramus recurs to the classic triad of logical, physical, and ethical sciences to define each of them individually. However, instead of the Idea of the Good, that in the allegory of the cave was symbolized by the sun, Ramus puts the Christian God; likewise, instead of the Platonic notion of knowl-

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edge as recollection, anamnesis, Ramus prefers to speak of the innate principles of each discipline. Of course, it is logic that gives ‘‘light’’ and ‘‘brightness’’ to all the sciences, and the whole edifice of the sciences thus leads back to the source of the light, ‘‘the sun itself ’’ (516b), sol ipse. ‘‘All this,’’ says Ramus, ‘‘directs people not only to admiration and knowledge of God, but pushes them violently to His praise and adoration.’’43 Logic, indeed, offers ‘‘an image of the divine Mind,’’ and Ramus invites his reader to ‘‘recognize in our [own, human] minds sparks that are divinely implanted in them.’’ Arithmetic, for instance, is ‘‘adorned with the elementary notions (notitiae) of numbers that God has implanted in it.’’44 The idea of ‘‘participation,’’ methexis, is in itself characteristic of Platonic thought. But the Christian interpretation of this idea, and the systematic use of the concepts of ‘‘common notions’’ and ‘‘preconceptions’’ in order to give a common ground to all sciences is not so much Platonic, as it is distinctly Melanchthonian. Not surprisingly, then, scholars who at the turn of the century tried to reconcile the two major currents in humanistic thought, and are therefore called ‘‘Philippo-Ramists,’’ recurred to these very notions upon which to rest their case.45

Notes 1. George of Trebizond, Rhetoricorum libri quinque (Paris: Chr. Wechel, 1538), 56 and 400 respectively. And Dominic Baker-Smith, ‘‘Juan Vive`s and the Somnium Scipionis,’’ in Classical Influences on European Culture, AD 1500–1700, ed. R. R. Bolgar, 239 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 2. Collectanea van Gerardus Geldenhauer Noviomagus, ed. Jacob Prinsen (Amsterdam: Mu¨ller, 1901), 78–81, 92–93. 3. See Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985–1987) [henceforth COE], 2: 82–84 (G. Tournoy); and I. Bejczy (in collaboration with M. Verweij), ‘‘Die Institutio scholæ christianæ von Gerard Geldenhouer: Kritische Ausgabe mit Kommentar,’’ in Humanistica Lovaniensia 49 (2000), 55–87. On Geldenhouwer and his colleagues at the University of Marburg, see Melanchthon und die Marburger Professoren (1527–1627), ed. Barbara Bauer, 2 vols. (1999; repr., Marburg, Germany: Barbara Bauer, 2000). 4. I used the edition published at Wesel (1670), 291–94 (Quaenam verba Gerhardus Noviomagus ex lipothymia [‘‘swoon’’] ad sese rediens olim potuisset dicere). Agricola’s translation of Aphthonius was first published in 1532 in Cologne by Alardus. See also Gerda C. Huisman, Rudolph Agricola: A Bibliography of Printed Works and Translations (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf, 1985), items 151 and 251. 5. A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint, 2 vols. Het Huis Lauernesse (Amsterdam: Beijerinck, 1840). 6. J. Kraye, ‘‘Renaissance Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics,’’ in Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. O. Weijers, 96–

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117 (99) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1995); Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 166. 7. Correspondence of Melanchthon [⳱MBW], ed. H. Scheible et al. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977–), MBW 1336. 8. See K. J. Seidel, Frankreich und die deutschen Protestanten (Mu¨nster, Germany: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1970), chap. 7; James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1985), 150–59; H. Scheible, ‘‘Melanchthons o¨kumenischer Einsatz in Frankreich,’’ in Melanchthon und Europa. Vol. 2: Westeuropa, ed. G. Frank and Kees Meerhoff, Melanchthon-Schriften der Stadt Bretten, 6:2, 195– 210 (Stuttgart: J. Thorbecke 2002). Compare Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘‘The Reception of Melanchthon in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge and Oxford,’’ in Melanchthon und Europa, 233–54 (esp. 234–36). (King Henry VIII seeks to invite Melanchthon, 1533–35.) 9. See, for instance, Simon Wirt, Commentarii de itinere francogallico, ed. D. Martı´nkova´ (Budapest: Akade´miai Kiado´, 1979). 10. Commentarii seu index vite Rhodolphi Agricole . . . per doctorem Johannem de Pleningen, dedicated to his brother Dietrich, one of Agricola’s closest pupils and friends. Ed. F. Pfeifer in Serapeum (1849), 97–119. Also in Commentarii seu index vite Rhodolphi Agricole: Relicto itaque juris studio ad maiora eluctans litteris pollicioribus et artibus, quas humanitatis vocant, et Ciceronis Quintilianique lectioni praecipue . . . animum applicuit (101–2). Cf. Rudolf Agricola, Vita Petrarchae, ed. L. Bertalot in Serapeum (1849); Studien zum italienischen und deutschen Humanismus, ed. P. O. Kristeller, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1975), 2: 1–19 (‘‘Rudolf Agricolas Lobrede auf Petrarca’’). Ibid., 5: verum ad maiora semper eluctans, quicquid ocii subripere ab aliis studiis poterat, id omne ad has quas humanitatis artes vocant conferebat. To the modern reader, the message clearly is: never take a Renaissance biography at face value. 11. CR 4, 716; MBW 2780. The literature on Melanchthon is incalculable. See P. Mack, ‘‘Melanchthon, Philip,’’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1998); and Kees Meerhoff, ‘‘Melanchthon, Philippe (1497–1560),’’ in Centuriae Latinæ, ed. Colette Nativel (Geneva: Droz, 1997), 537–49, also for currently used abbreviations (CR, MSA, MBW). 12. See P. Mack, ‘‘Rudolph Agricola’s Reading of Literature,’’ in JWCI 48 (1985), 23–45. See also Agricola, De inventione dialectica, ed. Alardus of Amsterdam (Cologne, 1539; repr., Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf, 1967), 2: 14 (henceforth: DID). See also the critical edition (without Alardus’s commentary, but adequately annotated), by L. Mundt (Tu¨bingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1992). 13. See COE, 2: 303–4, and my chapter on Latomus in Histoire du Colle`ge de France, ed. A. Tuilier (Paris: Fayard, forthcoming). 14. See Kees Meerhoff, ‘‘Melanchthon lecteur d’Agricola: rhe´torique et analyse textuelle,’’ chap. 2 in Entre logique et litte´rature: Autour de Philippe Melanchton (Orle´ans, France: Paradigme, 2001). 15. See Gerda C. Huisman, Rudolph Agricola; and the precious bibliography of Latomus’s works by Louis Bakelants in Bibliotheca Belgica s.vv. Cicero, Latomus, and Terence (Brussels, 1964–1975). 16. The oration has been republished in B. Latomus, Deux discours inauguraux, ed. and trans. Louis Bakelants (Brussels: Latomus, 1950). See also previous note. 17. The literature concerning Ramus is too vast to be quoted here. Peter Sharratt has published no less than three ‘‘Present State’’ articles on this subject; the last of these, ‘‘Ramus 2000,’’ appeared in Rhetorica 18 (2000), 399–455. On Omer Talon [Talæus], see my entry in Centuriae Latinæ dedicated to Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie (Geneva: Droz, 2005), vol. 2 (forthcoming).

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18. Peter Ramus’s Attack on Cicero: Text and Translation of Ramus’s ‘‘Brutinæ Quæstiones’’ [1547] (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1992); Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian: Translation and Text of Peter Ramus’s ‘‘Rhetoricæ Distinctiones in Quintilianum’’ (1549) (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986). Both texts are translated by Carole Newlands and come with an introduction by James J. Murphy. 19. On the evolution of Ramist rhetoric, see my Rhe´torique et poe´tique au xvie sie`cle en France (Leiden: Brill, 1986), part 3; and ‘‘La Rame´e et Peletier du Mans: Une Defence du ‘naturel usage,’ ’’ in Nouvelle Revue du Seizie`me Sie`cle 18 (2000): 77–93; Guido Oldrini, ‘‘La retorica di Ramo e dei ramisti,’’ in Rinascimento, 2nd series, 39 (2000): 467–513. 20. See for instance ‘‘Three Unpublished Letters from Adrien Turne`be to Pierre Dane`s,’’ ed. L. C. Stevens in Studies in Philology 50 (1953): 128–43. Text and translation do not always seem trustworthy. A volume on Ramus’s struggles with his many adversaries is now available: Autour de Ramus ii: Le Combat, ed. M. Magnien, Kees Meerhoff, and Jean-Claude Moisan (Paris: H. Champion, 2005). Cf. infra note 41. 21. B. Latomus, Summa totius rationis disserendi uno eodemque corpore et dialecticas et rhetoricas partes complectens (Cologne, 1527). 22. Melanchthon stresses this in all the prefaces to his manuals and repeats it in the first pages of the texts. Explicit recommendation of the combined use of dialectic and rhetoric is already found in the earliest versions of Ramus’s Dialecticæ Partitiones and repeated elsewhere. But he also strongly underlines the necessity of a theoretical separation of the disciplines. The conciliatio, consociatioque must exclusively take place in practice, never in textbooks. 23. See Kees Meerhoff and Jean-Claude Moisan, ‘‘Pre´cepte et usage: un commentaire ramiste de la 4e Philippique,’’ in Autour de Ramus: Texte, the´orie, commentaire (Que´bec: Nuit Blanche, 1997), 305–70; P. Mack, ‘‘Ramus Reading: The Commentaries on Cicero’s Consular Orations and Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics,’’ in JWCI 61 (1998): 111–41. 24. See, for instance, J. Ch. Adams, ‘‘Gabriel Harvey’s Ciceronianus and the Place of Peter Ramus’s Dialecticæ libri duo in the Curriculum,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 551–69; J. Rice Henderson, ‘‘Must a Good Orator be a Good Man? Ramus in the Ciceronian Controversy,’’ in ‘‘Rhetorica movet’’: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of H. F. Plett, ed. P. L. Oesterreich and Th. O. Sloan, 43–56 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1999). 25. J. Phrissemius, letter to Alardus, dated at Cologne, March 27, 1529, and reproduced by the latter in Agricola’s Lucubrationes aliquot (Cologne, 1539; repr. Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf, 1967), fo†2vo; Ph. Melanchthon, letter to Alardus, dated at Frankfurt, March 28, 1539, ibid. ff.†3ro–4ro (CR 3, 673–676; MBW 2169). Alardus himself calls Agricola literatorum studiosissimus, et studiosorum literatissimus in his commentary on DID II, 7. 26. See Rudolph Agricola, DID, II, 8 where he plays down the importance of definition in oratorical practice (usu, certissimo rerum magistro). 27. Ibid., III, 13: Late enim patet laus, et omnium civilium quæstionum ratio prope ex eo fonte desdendit (&c.). Agricola may have had in mind especially a speech like Cicero’s Prolege Manilia which he has analyzed extensively. See the excellent modern edition of this analysis, published by Marc van der Poel in Lias 24 (1997), 1–35; and by the same, ‘‘Rudolph Agricola’s Method of Dialectical Reading: the Case of Cicero’s De lege Manilia,’’ in Northern Humanism in European Context, 1469–1625, ed. F. Akkerman, A. J. Vanderjagt and A. H. van der Laan, 242–66 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1999). Cf. Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traite´ de l’argumentation, Brussels 1970, I, § 11 (epideictic genre) and II, § 18sqq. (values).

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28. Rudolph Agricola, Lucubrationes aliquot, 1539, quoted above (notes 12 and 25), 144–59 and 192–201. On the publishing history of both texts, see Huisman (1985), nos. 4, 5, 83–122, 128. 29. Gu¨nter Frank, Die theologische Philosophie Philipp Melanchthons (1497–1560) (Leipzig: Benno, 1995). 30. Ph. Melanchthon, Loci Communes [1521], ed. H. G. Po¨hlmann (Gu¨tersloh, Germany: Mohn, 1993), 100–102, and 108. Compare CR 16, 424 (commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, 1530). 31. Ph. Melanchthon, Philosophiae Moralis Epitome (Strasburg, 1538), 12. The book opens with a long, classic section Quid interest inter philosophiam et Evangelium. See also the long section on philosophy in his commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians (1527) reprinted in MSA 4, 230–43. There is now an interesting collection of texts available in English: Philip Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, ed. Sachiko Kusukawa and trans. C. F. Salazar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 32. See esp. Rudolph Agricola, DID II, 12 and 19: Loci quidem communes (ut rhetores vocant), non sunt aliud quam maiores ratiocinationum propositiones: &c. Cf. Cic. Or. xxxvi, 126; De orat. III, xxvii, 106. Cf. Kees Meerhoff, ‘‘Logique et cre´ation selon Philippe Melanchthon: a` la recherche du lieu commun,’’ in Kees Meerhoff, Entre logique et litte´rature, chap. 4. 33. This is not yet the case in the 1521 Loci Communes, where Aristotle is dismissed as a rixator (ed. quoted note 30 above, p. 102). See J. Kraye, ‘‘Melanchthons ethische Kommentare und Lehrbu¨cher,’’ in Melanchthon und das Lehrbuch des 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ju¨rgen Leonhardt, 195–214 (Rostock, Germany: Universita¨t Rostock, Philosophische Fakulta¨t, 1997); H. Scheible, ‘‘Aristoteles und die Wittenberger Universita¨tsreform,’’ in Humanismus und Wittenberger Reformation, ed. Michael Beyer et al., 123–44 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1996). 34. See Mack, ‘‘Melanchthon’s Commentaries on Latin Literature,’’ in Melanchthon und Europa, vol. 2, 29–52. 35. Most commentaries are reprinted in the CR, although hardly ever in their original form. See for the commentary on Solomon’s Proverbs CR 14 and MSA 4, 305–464 (1529 version, with interesting prologue); cf. also K. Hartfelder, ‘‘Aus einer Vorlesung Melanchthons u¨ber Ciceros Tusculanen,’’ in Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft fu¨r deutsche Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte 1, 168–77 (1891). Ibid., 171–72 on notitiae naturales, including the innate insight into the immortality of the soul, analyzed by means of a syllogism. 36. See for instance the Philosophiae Moralis Epitome, 58: [Seventh law of nature]: Defensio humani generis necessaria est . . . Huc pertinet lex: Vim vi depellere licet, videlicet in defensione legitima. Compare with the underlying syllogism that Melanchthon detects in the Pro Milone: this universal law offers a perfect maior propositio, as Agricola already recognized (and as Ramus will repeat). Cf. DID II, 18 (Cologne 1539 ed., 267–68) with the remarks of Alardus (ibid. 270), who characteristically interprets this section by referring it to the theory of dispositio as developed by Melanchthon in his rhetorical works (combining logical syllogism with rhetorical status theory). 37. See my ‘‘Philippe Melanchthon aux Pays-Bas et en France: quelques sondages,’’ in the volume Melanchthon und Europa, vol. 2, 163–93. 38. This view was commonly accepted among progressive Parisians scholars. See the edition of Latomus’ Oratio de studiis humanitatis (1951). The clash between the theologians and the first lecteurs royaux has been studied by James K. Farge in his well documented book Le parti conservateur au xvie sie`cle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992).

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39. See for instance his analysis of the speech of the noble dictator Camillus (Livy, Early History of Rome V, 51–54), partly reproduced in Autour de Ramus, 109–18. 40. See his inaugural lecture quoted above, and the speech in which Latomus announces his intention to read the Verrine orations with his students: Oratio . . . de laudibus eloquentiae et Ciceronis (Paris, 1535), often reprinted in collections of humanistic commentaries on Cicero’s speeches. In this last speech, Latomus stresses that social and political values are confirmed by and can survive thanks to eloquence. 41. Petrus Gallandius (ca. 1510–59), a close friend to the more famous Adrianus Turnebus, edited and published a commentary by Latomus on Cicero’s De partitione oratoria; he wrote an attack on Ramus and Talon which deserves careful [re]consideration: Contra novam academiam Petri Rami oratio (Paris, 1551). 42. Mack, ‘‘Agricola and the earliest versions of Ramus’s Dialectic,’’ 31. 43. P. Ramus, Dialecticæ Partitiones (Paris, 1543) [first printed ed.], ff. 40vo–58vo. Different reading in the Ms (BnF Latin 6659) which in lyrical terms refers to Hic lux, hic veritas duobus testamentis impressa, consignataque legitur. . . . Hæc est non solum metaphysis, sed etiam metamathesis, hic hominum reditus ad cœlum, hæc via est in illam æternam beatarum mentium domum (Ms. ff. 36vo, 37vo). 44. Ibid. [first printed ed.], ff. 51vo, 56ro. 45. See Friedrich Beurhaus, De P. Rami Dialecticæ principuis capitibus disputationes (Cologne, 1598), 4 and 30. Here, reference is made to Melanchthon’s Erotemata dialectics (1547), as well as such notions as the notitia principiorum and the lux divinitus insita mentibus.

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Christian Humanism in John Rolland’s Court of Venus Roderick J. Lyall

IN 1575, IN THE MIDST OF A VERITABLE CAMPAIGN OF REPUBLICATION OF earlier Scots works, the Edinburgh printer John Ross produced an edition of Ane Treatise callit the Court of Venus, ‘‘newlie compylit be Johne Rolland in Dalkeith.’’1 For reasons which will soon become clear, it is certain that Ross’s assertion that the poem was new cannot have been true in 1575: either the printer was here engaging in a calculated misdescription of his text, or he had been misled, or he simply took the wording of his title page from his exemplar (which would then imply that there had been a previous edition of the poem, probably—but not, of course, necessarily—issued when the text was ‘‘newly compylit’’). In attempting to contextualize The Court of Venus, then, we must examine all the available evidence in order to determine how far back in the sixteenth century it can be located. The result, I shall suggest, is to give Rolland’s poem a much greater cultural significance than has been realized, placing him in the vanguard of those who transmitted the materials, and to a degree the values, of Continental Christian humanism into Scotland: The Court of Venus was when it was written a remarkable, if aesthetically topheavy, synthesis of classical and biblical scholarship, and can be related to debates which were taking place among humanist poets in France toward the end of the second quarter of the century, and thus forms part of the same cultural process as the emergence of a scholarly circle at St. Leonard’s College in St. Andrews and the work of the expatriate Florens Wilson.2 In the prologue of his (later) poem The Seauin Seages, written in 1560, Rolland describes the circumstances in which he came to compose The Court of Venus. Wishing ‘‘to schaw my diligence / To manifest my waik wit and ingyne,’’ he tells us, he sought literary advice from four distinguished poets-about-Court: In Court that time was gude David Lyndsay, In vulgar toung he bure the bell that day

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To mak meter, richt cunning and expart, And Maister Johne Ballentyne suith to say Mak him marrow to Dauid weill we may. And for the thrid, Maister Williame Stewart, To mak in Scottis, richt weill he knew that Art, Bischop Durie, sum tyme of Galloway, For his plesure sum tyme wald tak thair part.3

Having plied them with wine, he was encouraged by this foursome to turn his hand to the writing of a dialogue, fashionable advice which he rejected on the grounds that ‘‘Dialogs . . . weis get anew’’; and his caution was suitably rewarded by a vision in which Venus appeared, inspiring him to produce The Court of Venus, a poem which was enthusiastically approved by his four-man committee of readers when he subsequently laid his work before them (though subsequently not by his aunt, who complained of the poem’s difficulty and its antifeminist views). It is in response to this criticism, he continues, that he has now set about a translation of The Seauin Seagis, a text less bedevilled with academic language and dubious opinions. This account, if it is to be believed, can obviously be helpful in dating The Court of Venus, which must have been composed during the lifetime of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, Andrew Durie, John Bellenden, and William Stewart. The first two died in 1555 and 1558 respectively, but Bellenden seems clearly to have been deceased by November 1548, when he was succeeded as prebendary of Lumhair by John Kincaid.4 Mr. William Stewart, it would appear, died at just about the same time: if, as seems virtually certain, Rolland is referring to the translator of Boece’s Scotorum historia, and if we can safely identify this poet with the vicar of Pencaitland and rector of Quothquan, then we know that he was killed in a skirmish in Edinburgh shortly before 7 October 1548.5 Rolland’s poem cannot, therefore, have been written after 1548, and may well date from a good deal earlier. To assert, as A.A. Macdonald has recently done, that Rolland’s statement demonstrates that the Court ‘‘is a product of the age of James V’’ is perhaps to go too far, since while it is possible that the poem was written before James’s death in 1542, it might equally have been composed between that year and 1548.6 Much depends on what we make of the ‘‘sum tyme’’ in line 26: if it is merely a less legalistic form of ‘‘umquhile,’’ it does no more than indicate that Durie was no longer alive when Rolland wrote his preface in 1560, but it might be taken to suggest that he was not yet bishop when the discussion took place, in which case we would have evidence that the

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genesis of The Court of Venus occurred earlier than Durie’s provision to the see in 1541–42.7 Durie, abbot of Melrose from 1526 onward, had been appointed treasurer of the Chapel Royal (in succession to the eminent philosopher and theologian John Major) as early as June 1, 1520, and was therefore closely associated with the Court from at least that time: we might therefore see the period before his provision to Galloway as no less likely a context for this literary activity than the later one.8 But all that can positively be stated is that Rolland’s composition must be earlier than 1548. Although we know relatively little, even by sixteenth-century standards, about Rolland’s career, evidence recently published by John Durkan provides us with some valuable starting points for further research. We now know, for example, that he was born in Ayr around 1504, and that his early career was in the west of Scotland: only after becoming a notary public in 1528 did he move to Lothian, practicing at Melrose and elsewhere, and eventually basing himself in Dalkeith, where he evidently enjoyed the patronage of James Douglas, earl of Morton.9 None of this is much help in providing a terminus a quo for The Court of Venus, but it does suggest a framework within which Rolland might have been in a position to make his approach to Lindsay, Bellenden, Stewart, and Durie. At the very least we can say that, if Ross’s statement that the poem was ‘‘newly compylit be John Rolland in Dalkeith’’ implies that it was actually written there, and this implication is accurate, then it cannot have been composed before 1528; we might, of course, go further and suggest that the consultative process described by Rolland in The Seauin Seages is unlikely to have occurred before Lindsay, Stewart and Bellenden established their literary reputations at the court of James V, which is to say, around 1530 or later. Useful as it undoubtedly is, then, Rolland’s account of the genesis of his poem does not enable us to be more precise than to locate the composition of The Court of Venus between ca. 1530 and 1548, although we might bring the terminus ad quem back to 1541 if we presume that Durie’s involvement predated his nomination to the see of Galloway. But this is already to give the poem a quite different cultural context from that in which it is usually discussed, insofar as it is discussed at all. Scottish poetry in the 1570s was characterized by plainstyle lyric and the polemical verse of Robert Sempill: not until the end of the decade would the emergence of the young James VI from tutelage provide the impetus for a return to the courtly verse of the earlier Makars. The Court of Venus would sit very oddly in such company; but it fits naturally enough into the milieu provided by the court of James V and, after his death, of the governor, his widow

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Mary of Guise. The combination of learned display and stylistic elevation practiced by Bellenden and, in certain moods, Lindsay is carried still further by Rolland, and it is not difficult to believe that they and their fellow-courtiers greeted the poem with approval. It would, however, be mistaken to see the context of the Court as exclusively Scottish: even more than the work of Bellenden and Lindsay, Rolland’s poem draws upon classical materials and contemporary French taste for its characters, its style, and perhaps also its themes. While it may be difficult to relate its detail to specific contemporary sources, the whole approach and manner of The Court of Venus is infused by the spirit of the later rhe´toriqueurs, and it is, as we shall see, not improbable that Rolland was aware of the work of such men as Jean Lemaire de Belges and Cle´ment Marot, and perhaps even of the contenders in the querelle des amyes (1542–47). The uncertainty over dating here returns to haunt us: if we could be sure that Rolland wrote before 1542, then any direct connection with this fashionable debate would be impossible. The question must remain open, but we can at the very least observe that the central concerns of the Court are essentially those which preoccupied many of the poets at the court of Franc¸ois I through much of the 1540s. The Court of Venus demands to be read as very precisely a poem of its time. The central action concerns the trial of Desperance, an allegorical protagonist who offends the goddess of love by the vehemence of his attack on Esperance. Book 1 introduces these two characters and gives a detailed, stylized account of their dispute, culminating in the collapse of Esperance and the intervention of Venus on his behalf. Book 2 describes Desperance’s search for legal help, eventually bringing him to the palace of the goddess Vesta, who agrees to act for him. This she does in book 3, where, after an account of the impaneling of a jury, Rolland narrates the arguments presented by Vesta and by Venus. Perhaps inevitably, Desperance is convicted in book 4; his death sentence is, however, quickly lifted by Venus, and he changes his name to Daliance to mark his acceptance of her rule. The overall structure of the action, therefore, seems to vindicate the claims of sexual love, and yet the force of Vesta’s arguments suggests that the truth is actually more complex. Rolland, moreover, strikingly ends his poem, in an apologetic apostrophe to the female members of his audience, with a balancing of amatory and Christian claims: Praying yow all baith Ladeis ald and ying Gif I haif said or foryit ony thing Of my awin heid into your contrarie,

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To grant mercie, and gif pennance conding First fra Venus and sine fra Cupide King, Quhair all lufaris suld leill Heretouris be. Now last of all praying Christ on our kne He wald vouchesaif till heuin vs for to bring At our last end, Amen for cheritie. (4: 743–51)10

The sentiments expressed here could scarcely be more conventional, and yet the balance which Rolland strikes is a fair reflection of the argument of the poem as a whole, in which the amatory theme is systematically played off against Christian wisdom, and an unusual and, in Scottish terms at least, unprecedented display of classical learning is carefully interwoven with biblical authorities. Rolland’s classical knowledge and preoccupations raise some fascinating questions. In structuring the allegory of a divine court around the opposition of Venus and Vesta he may conceivably have made use of the precedent of Jean Lemaire de Belges’ Couronne margaritique (1504–5): the parallel is certainly striking, but Lemaire’s poem seems not to have been printed before 1549, and Rolland would therefore have had to have access to the text in manuscript. The cult of Vesta herself was, it is true, fairly generally known from classical sources (particularly Ovid’s Fasti, 6: 249–466), and the scant detail Rolland provides could have come from many intermediate authorities; in particular, he is very likely to have known the discussion of the goddess in Boccaccio’s De genealogia deorum, a work he is, as we shall shortly see, likely to have known.11 It is the structural prominence he gives her, especially in the legal debate on book 3 and its aftermath in book 4, which indicates that he has seen the advantage of the Venus/Vesta opposition, and for this Lemaire is manifestly an analogue, if not a source. The other classical figure who is, most unusually, given a dominant role in Rolland’s allegory is Rhamnusia, Venus’s ‘‘juge deput’’ (1: 928). This clearly illustrates both the extent and the limitations of his classical knowledge: as an epithet for Nemesis, the name Rhamnusia occurs a few times in Roman sources, but it can scarcely be said to be a widely recognised form. Ovid mentions her once in his Metamorphoses (iii, 406) without explaining the identification with Nemesis, which derives from the existence of a temple of Nemesis at Rhamnus in Attica (Pausanias), and Statius makes a similar allusion (again without naming Nemesis) in his Silvæ (2:6.73). Rolland was evidently aware of the Nemesis association, but he apparently believed that Nemesis and Rhamnusia were separate dei-

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ties: the former is appointed ‘‘schiref and officiar’’ in the case against Desperance (1:875), and Rhamnusia is then introduced four stanzas later as ‘‘ane vther nimph.’’ This confusion about the historical use of the geographically-derived epithet as an alternative name for Nemesis suggests that Rolland’s learning did not go very deep, yet it seems very probable that in giving these two figures such a prominent place in his allegory he was working directly from classical sources rather than taking his material, as medieval poets had characteristically done, from a narrow range of standard deities and personifications. Apart from these major characters, The Court of Venus involves a wide variety of lesser figures, including the numerous encyclopedic lists for which Rolland seems to have had an irrepressible weakness. Some of these are part of the stock-in-trade of the medieval scholarpoet: the prologue begins with an analysis of the Four Humours, linked to the planets, signs of the zodiac, and the elements in an account of the physical world which Rolland could have found in almost any standard textbook, and there is no more that is distinctively modern in the lists of the ‘‘seuin digne Doctouris,’’ the Muses and the Nine Worthies, which occur in book 2. Rolland evidently takes as one of his models the encyclopedic poem as it had been practiced by Lindsay and Bellenden in their role as court poets under James V. But his prologue out-Lindsays Lindsay, and the catalogues in his prologue include a list of Roman kings and a thirtyfour-line passage anaphorically classifying various kinds of men, all by way of proving that Sa be mouing of the Planeitis and Signeis Diuers folkis ar geuin to diuers thingis. (Prol. 181–82)

There is, perhaps, a clearer indication of humanist interest in his enumeration of the Sibyls (2: 481–509), especially when he follows his list up with an account of Cumana’s exchange with the ‘‘Empriour Tarquine.’’ The names themselves appear to be drawn, as Walter Gregor suggested in 1884, from Lactantius’ Divinarum Institutionum (a work first printed in Rome as early as 1465), while the Tarquin story may well have been influenced by the narrative in Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticæ, which was frequently printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is, however, not necessary to suppose that Rolland obtained his material directly from either of these works; the list of the Sibyls and the reference to Tarquin can both be found in a standard mid-sixteenth century reference book, Robert Estienne’s

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Dictionarium proprium nominum, first published in Paris by Estienne himself in 1541. Given the combination of extensiveness and shallowness which characterizes Rolland’s classical knowledge, there are good grounds for considering his possible debt to one or more such works. The most comprehensive of all Rolland’s lists is that of well over a hundred ‘‘nymphis’’ who are described as forming part of Venus’s court at the beginning of book 3. Here Rolland goes so far as to indicate the authorities from whom he has taken his catalogue: Gif sum wald seik, or to despyre be schawin Thair nimphis names and quhair to find thame knawin Luik Virgill weill into his Eneydois, Als his Georgiks and Bucolikis weill drawin; In transformatis Ouid on breid hes blawin Intill his buik of Metamorphoseos; Theodolus baith in his text and glos; And De Remedio Amoris throw out sawin Thair salbe fund, and mony mo than thos. Alsua quha list to tak pane or laubour Out throw to reid the Palice of Honour, Maid be Gawine Dowglas, of Dunkell Bischop, and als ane honest oratour, Profound poet and perfite philosophour; Into his dayis abone all buir the bell, In sic practikis all vtheris did precell, Weill put in vers in gude still and ordour Thir nimphis names, thair he dois trewlie [tell]. (2: 100–117)

The great majority of the names provided by Rolland do, it is true, occur in one or more of these standard sources: fifty or so are accounted for by the Metamorphoses alone, and an additional eight are mentioned in the Remedium Amoris. Forty (including a fairly high degree of overlap with Ovid) are referred to in one or more of the works of Virgil;12 eight names which do not occur in either of the Ovidian texts identified by Rolland can be found in Virgil, and some of these also turn up in the Ecloga Theoduli or in the commentary by Odo of Picardy which is very probably the ‘‘glose’’ Rolland means.13 At least one other well-known name is easily accounted for: although Hero is not mentioned in the Metamorphoses or the Remedium Amoris, Rolland is virtually certain to have known about her from Ovid’s Heroides. When all these named sources have been exhausted, however, we are left with a list of twenty-eight ‘‘nymphis’’ whose names Rol-

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land must have found in works he does not identify. This group includes the seven daughters of Atlas mentioned in 3: 84–85 and the following: Antiopa, Augeria, Candaces, Chestias, Deidamia, Erichto, Guanor (Guenevere), Hypermnestra, Jocasta, Lampethusa, Lara, Mirta, Nicostrata, Nictimena, Octavia, Omphale, Pandora, Philyra, Phemonoe, Sicoris, and Tomyris. Elsewhere in the Court, Rolland appeals to the authority of Boccaccio, and his De genealogia deorum is one obvious source for several of Rolland’s list, including Antiopa (10: 29), Ypermestra (2: 24), Lampethusa (7: 43), Lara (12: 65), Nicostrata (5: 51), Nictimena (10: 30), and Pandora (4: 44). Guenevere, of course, does not occur in any classical sources, and her intrusion is the sole instance of Rolland’s awareness of the heritage of medieval romance. Boccaccio’s De genealogia deorum, however, offers only a partial explanation of the range of Rolland’s list. A much higher correlation can be found in a standard sixteenth-century handbook, Hermannus Torrentinus’s Elucidarius carminum et historiarum, a work which was first published in Deventer in 1498 and which then went through more than fifty editions in the Low Countries, France, Germany, and Switzerland over the next half-century, eventually forming the basis for Robert Estienne’s Dictionarium, in which, as we have seen, Rolland might have found his material about the Sibyls.14 Torrentinus’s extraordinarily successful little text seems very likely to have been, in some form, a key source for Rolland: it was, clearly, highly accessible, and no fewer than eighteen of the names which he includes (assuming that we can justifiably assume that the otherwise inexplicable Mirta represents Torrentinus’s Myrrha) can be found in its pages.15 Recourse to such a reference work was presumably responsible for his one clear-cut mistake, that of presenting the Sicoris, a river in Spain, as one of his classical ladies. Two of his ‘‘nimphis,’’ however, can be explained neither by reference to his specifically named sources nor by invoking Torrentinus: Augeria and Chestias. The former may, perhaps, derive from Auge, the mother of Telephus, who is mentioned by Ovid and other classical writers and listed by Estienne: in the 1541 edition of his Dictionarium, he adds ‘‘siue Augea’’ (75). Chestias is more difficult to explain, but presumably refers to Chesias, an alternative name of Artemis, which occurs in a passage in Apollonius of Rhodes’ lost Naucratis cited by Athenæus in his Deipnosophistoi; since this relatively obscure work was first published by Aldus Manutius in 1514, it is not inconceivable that Rolland could have known it. This would, however, suggest that he could read Greek, for which there is no other compelling evi-

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dence. But since Chesias is absent from all the most likely Latin handbooks, it is difficult to explain ‘‘Chestias’’ in any other way. The last, in some ways most problematic element of Rolland’s catalogue is the passage devoted to the Atlantides: Thair was Athlas seuin dochteris all but leis, To murne Hyas thair brother wald not ceis, Ambrosia, Pasithea, Eudora, Sithe, Pitho, Plione, Coronis . . . (3: 82–85)

This list seems not to correspond with any traditional enumeration of Atlas’s daughters. By specifying their mourning for Hyas Rolland indicates that he means the Hyades and not the Pleiades, but this is only partly helpful: although various versions of the names of the Hyades were in circulation by the mid-sixteenth century, Rolland’s version has some puzzling features. Three of the names are virtually ever-present: Eudora and Coronis (first mentioned by Hesiod), and Ambrosia, but thereafter the extant sources differ quite widely. Boccaccio’s list of the Hyades adds Phyto, Polixo, Pyidile, and Thyenes;16 Polyxo also occurs in the names given by Hyginus, ultimately derived from Pherecydes, but here the others are Phaisyle, Phaeo, and Dione.17 Ambrosius Calepinus’s list in his frequently-reprinted Dictionarium includes Eudora, Coronis and Ambrosia as usual, plus Pitho, Tythe, Plexaura and Prisithoe.18 It is tempting to conclude that Rolland did indeed have access to Calepinus’s Dictionarium, and that it was to this source that he owed Pitho and (by an obvious process of scribal corruption) Sithe; Pasithea might then be a misreading or misremembering of Prisithoe, leaving only Dione unaccounted for. At any event, the peculiarity of his list confirms the more general impression that Rolland’s classical knowledge was broad but shallow, and that much of it was probably acquired at second, or even third, hand. Rolland’s humanist concerns are also apparent in his stylistic choices, and in particular in the high proportion of Latinate neologisms he employs. While we have no explicit evidence in Scotland of the kind of lexical controversy that affected sixteenth-century England, it is clear that similar differences in practice existed; and there can be no question that Rolland implicitly places himself on the side of Sir Thomas Elyot and other advocates of the use of ‘‘inkhorn terms’’ rather than on that of their opponents like Sir John Cheke and Thomas Wilson.19 What is significant is not merely the very high proportion of words of Romance origin in Rolland’s vo-

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cabulary, but the number of unusual, often polysyllabic, terms he employs. Some of these, such as circumuene, conuallessit, exterminioun, ociositie and stupratioun, he derives from, or at least shares with, such other enthusiasts for learned borrowing as Gavin Douglas (whose Palice of Honoure is, as we have already noted, an acknowledged source for The Court of Venus), Bellenden, Lindsay, and Stewart; but he also goes further than they do in his extension of the Scots wordstock; and it is possible to identify at least thirty-three items for which the Court is the first—and often the only—recorded witness. A large proportion of these, moreover, are words derived from classical rather than from medieval or Renaissance Latin: confodiat; contemparaneane; depilat; enucleat; exertive; fluctuant; intoritive; laqueat; morigerate; obnubilate; obtemperat; occise; refrenatioun; transitive; tribulat; verecund; vespertine; vibrant; vltioun.

To these we can add the items which do come from later Latin sources, sometimes influenced by previous French borrowing: claustrall; condecent (widely used in sixteenth-century French); excandidate; faculent; hylair (the spelling indicates that the direct source is French rather than Lat. hilaris); interlaqueat; invincent; pomeridiane; preexcogitacioun; scientive (probably from French scientif ); suspensive; triumphatik; vivificative.20

A final instance is particularly striking, for the OF outrecuidance, a fairly common word since the thirteenth century, appears in the Court in Latin dress as ultrequedance, a spelling reminiscent of the ultrequidance found in England in 1541 but with no recorded French analogue.21 As with the display of classical names, and especially the supererogatory list of nymphs, this elaborate copiousness is doubtless intended to impress the reader with the poet’s erudition, and it is probably no coincidence that all three members of Rolland’s reading committee whose work survives show signs of the same preoccupations, albeit in more modest proportions. Rolland’s humanist philology is, then, wide-ranging but shallow; he draws on a great variety of materials whose recovery was the legacy of the scholarship of the past couple of generations, but there is little evidence that he was a critical user of the information to which he had access, and much of it may have been acquired via compendia and handbooks. The structure into which he incorporates this material is, moreover, thoroughly conservative in its allegorical patterning; and it is important to acknowledge that the humanism of the Court is essentially Christian. Two extended debates play crucial

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roles in the action: the first, between Esperance and Desperance over the desirability of love (1: 313–616), causes the former’s collapse and the prosecution of the latter, while the disputation between Venus and Vesta in the course of the trial (III, 199–909) embodies the fundamental argument over the relative merits of sexual and chaste love. In both cases, the participants make extensive use of biblical citations to support their claims, and the text is frequently quoted verbatim to reinforce the significance of the practice. Like humanists in France, the Low Countries, and England at this period, Rolland evidently sees no contradiction between his Christian themes and the classical apparatus in which he embodies them; and he emphasizes the point through the incorporation of scriptural quotations into his text. In book 1, the pattern of quotation is interesting: Desperance cites Exodus, Proverbs (twice), Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiasticus, Matthew (twice), and 1 Corinthians, while Esperance draws on Genesis, the Song of Songs (four times), and John. It is perhaps unsurprising, in view of Esperance’s insistence that ‘‘I lufe ay leill, and that weill lukis me,’’ that he should have such a strong preference for the Canticles, but Rolland ensures that Desperance repeatedly challenges his use of scripture to justify sexual love. This strategy emerges in the first exchange of biblical authorities, when Esperance meets his opponent’s quotation from Ecclesiastes with a daring, almost blasphemous, application of John 15:12, Hoc est praeceptum meum, ut diligatis invicem, sicut dilexi vos. Naturally enough, ‘‘the Saddest’’ (i.e., Desperance) objects to the suggestion that sexual love is intended here: Authoritie richt gude to me thow schawis, Bot wo allace, thow takis it in wrang kinde: Thow allegis the thing that thow misknawis. Lufe thy Nichtbour, & brek not Goddis lawis Be Fornicatioun, nor yit Adulterie; To schame & lak thir twa thair seruand drawis. (1: 450–55)

Faced with quotations from Exodus 20:14 and Matthew 5:28 to back up this uncomprising stance, Esperance resorts to the injunction in Genesis ‘‘crescite et multiplicamini,’’ only to be informed that this, too, has a significance different from that which he claims for it. The debate now centers on Solomon, with Esperance invoking a succession of texts from the Song of Songs in support of his contention that sexual love is authorized by biblical authority. Desperance’s first

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move is to counter with a verse from Ecclesiasticus (19:2) condemning fornication, and then, when Esperance insists that the whole book is in praise of women’s beauty, to offer the traditional allegorical reading which sees the subject of the Song as ‘‘the kirk militant, / Quhilk is the Spous of the blist trinitie’’ (1: 501–2). The trading of biblical texts, almost without exception from the books attributed to Solomon, continues for several more stanzas, until ‘‘the Saddest’’ ingeniously seizes his opponent’s ground by citing the Song on his own side: Si dederit homo omnem substantiam domus suae, pro dilectione quasi nihil despiciet eam (8:7). This does not end the argument, but it does have the effect of ending Esperance’s (mis)use of Scripture; from now on, until Esperance faints from an excess of fervor at 1: 641, the currency of the debate is rhetorical rather than theological. There can be little doubt that Desperance wins the match, but the inevitable consequence, at least within the rhetorical framework of Rolland’s poem, is that he should therefore be charged with crimes against the rule of Venus. Rolland’s biblical learning returns to dominate what is in many ways the intellectual heart of the poem: the forensic debate in book 3 between Vesta and Venus. The case against Desperance now seems to be forgotten, and the legal argument centers on the broader question of the legitimacy of sexual love. It is true that the excuse for this is Vesta’s opening defense that ‘‘All that he said it was of veritie’’ (3: 317), but her concern appears to be much more with her biblical authorities than with Desperance’s cause. After a preliminary skirmish over the rather obscure relationship between Reuben and his father Jacob’s concubine Bala (Genesis 35:22)—to which Venus not unreasonably responds that the fact that the Bible seems to accept the fact of Jacob’s keeping a concubine is surely a point on her side—Vesta produces a series of nine further authorities ‘‘Baith in the new, and in the auld Testament,’’ all tending to show how of lufe the rampand rage, The ardent lust, and the kendilland curage, The naturall cours, and eik the sauage blude, Will caus ane man dekay into dotage, Vnto the time that the lust be assuage: And takis no thocht to ressoun, nor to gude. (3: 388–93)

Once again, however, the champion of chastity does not have the argument all her own way. Venus repeatedly challenges her use of biblical authority, insisting, for example, that Joseph was culpable in

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his refusal to succumb to the desires of Pharaoh’s wife (3: 447–59), and eventually invoking a fundamental exegetical difficulty: the presence of three ‘‘fallen’’ women in Matthew’s account of Jesus’s genealogy. Vesta has invited this objection by citing the case of Thamar, whose alleged incest with Ammon is described in Genesis 38 (she mistakenly attributes the story to 3 Kings 13); Venus returns to this question later in the argument, pointing out that one of the twins borne by Thamar was an ancestor of Christ. Furthermore, she adds, several generations later Salmon ‘‘maryit Raab the commoun hure’’ (3: 671). Vesta’s first response to this contention is that Salmon, ‘‘ane nobill Prince,’’ is scarcely likely to have married a common whore, but Venus replies tersely, ‘‘Reid Mathowis first Euangell,’’ and adds that Christ’s ancestors also included ‘‘Bersabe,’’ the wife of Uriah from love of whom David had her husband killed: Now I begin agane quhair I best may, That ye consaif the storeis in certane: First I rehersit Thamar and Raab plane, And Bersabe, the quhilk ye can not nay, War all of sport ladeis venereane. (3: 716–20)

The presence of these three women, along with the convert Ruth, in Matthew’s genealogy of Christ had been much discussed by Patristic writers and medieval theologians alike. One of the most influential remarks was that of Jerome in his commentary on Matthew: Notandum in genealogia Saluatoris nullam sanctarum adsumi mulierum, sed eas quas scriptura reprehendit, ut qui propter peccatores uenerat, de peccatricibus nascens omnium peccata deleret.22

Other writers, such as Paschasius Radbertus, attempted to meet the difficulty by resorting to allegory, interpreting the women as types of the Church,23 while the summary provided by Aquinas gives a characteristically balanced account of medieval views: Notandum tamen quod in tota genealogia Matthaei non ponuntur nisi mulieres peccatrices, vel quae in aliquo fuerant peccato notatae, sicut Thamar, quae fornicata est (Gen. 38:24), et Ruth, quae fuit idololatra, quia gentilis, et uxor Uriae, quae fuit adultera (2 reg. 11:2ss), et hoc ad designandum, secundum Hieronymum, quod ille cuius genealogia texitur, intravit propter peccatores redimentos. Alia ratio tangitur ab Ambrosio, scilicet ut tolleretur confusio ecclesiae, si enim Christus ex

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peccatoribus nascui voluit, non debent infideles irridere, si peccatores ad ecclesiam veniant. Alia ratio potest assignari, credo secundum Chrysostom, ut ostendatur imperfectio legis: et quod Christus venit legem implere.24

In centering the legal debate upon this point, therefore, Rolland is alluding to an established hermeneutic problem. Vesta, interestingly, does not adopt the traditional line. She begins by reaffirming her denial of the women’s sinfulness: they were, she claims, ‘‘richt wise and full of grauitie,’’ included in Christ’s genealogy ‘‘For thair vertew and greit humilitie’’ (3: 744–47). By arguing in this way, she manifestly declines to associate herself with the mainstream interpretation with its implicit acceptance of antifeminist assumptions. She is supported in this by Chaistitie (3: 775–804), who invokes Nicholas of Lyra, John Mair and ‘‘the glois . . . interlinear’’ to the effect that the male ancestors of Christ were necessarily virtuous, adding that if this applies to the men it should also apply to the women: Heirfoir I say, Thamar and Bersabe, Raab and Ruth in the genelogie Of Christ ar put for prayer and gude deidis.

Venus, however, is still not beaten and draws on the passage in Jerome we have already noted in order to justify her claim that the women were of her party. Christ and Mary, she insists, ‘‘come of folkis friuolous’’ That we micht knaw his cherite ignite, Ardent and hait our sin to abolite, Did not disdane to tak mankinde of vs. (3: 813–16)

With this impeccably orthodox citation, Venus rests her case. It is striking that Rolland is careful to balance the arguments, and it seems that this is not merely a device to prolong his poem and maintain the reader’s uncertainty about the outcome. The rival claims of virginity and physical love are given equal weight, and it is not evident here, as it is in the earlier dispute between Esperance and Desperance, that either party is systematically distorting Scripture. Indeed, as we have seen, it is Venus who has Jerome on her side, and it is difficult to imagine a more respectable authority in biblical commentary. The ‘‘assise’’ that must judge the case against Desperance (whose

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fate, we may have forgotten, still hangs in the balance) also takes the two sides seriously, if we can judge from the list of biblical, juridical, and classical authorities they take into account (4: 1–23). Again, of course, Rolland is showing off, listing a range of legal sources which includes such recent figures as Nicholaus de Tedeschis (Panormitanus, 1386–1445), Alessandro di Imola (d. 1487), and Jason del Maino (ca. 1435-ca. 1519). A lawyer himself, he is evidently keen to let the reader know that he is aware of the most up-to-date authorities, and the legal humanism of fifteenth-century Italy is another element in the complex cultural mix which underlies his work. The verdict of the court is, as the balance of the debate may have led us to expect, carefully nuanced: Vesta’s superiority to Venus is acknowledged, but at the same time it is recognized that the world would quickly be emptied if everyone were to follow her. By the same token, the power of Vesta is no reason to ‘‘lichtlie’’ Venus, and this Desperance is found to have done. The sentence for his blasphemy is death, but the court recommends to Rhamnusia, its president, that his repentance should be taken into account, and he should be forgiven. Two issues thus come to dominate the closing stages of the poem: the priority of virginity over sexual love, and the possible commuting of Desperance’s sentence. Vesta does not go out of her way to help Desperance’s cause: on the contrary, she further enrages Venus by successfully demanding that henceforth her court be entirely independent of Venus’s (4: 292–310). Only after repeated entreaties, and (in a moment anticipating Isabella’s plea for Angelo in Measure for Measure) the intervention of Esperance on Desperance’s behalf, does she finally relent, agreeing to pardon him, renaming him Dalience (4: 554–62). The poem’s symbolic action, therefore, ends with the practical triumph of amatory values, whatever the theoretical precedence of sexual abstinence may be held to be. Rolland, however, has one more card to play: the narrator himself appears at Venus’s feast, begging alms, and is comprehensively rejected: Go way, said scho, ane fell freik thow hes bene That weill I knaw be thy beld, heid and ene: With thi gude wil thow hes done that thow may, Bot thy gude will without gude deid betwene Is not comptit in my court worth a prene. (4: 707–11)

The distinction between faith and works has, of course, powerful sixteenth-century resonances, but its effect here is to concede that

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whatever the narrator’s theoretical commitment to love may be, he is not currently active in the field. Although he offers a mild protest, reminding her that there was a time when ‘‘Ye wald haif thollit me to byid in your bour’’ (4: 717), he does not seem unduly upset by the rejection, kissing the gates of Venus’s palace, ‘‘thair neuer to come agane.’’ He ends, indeed, as Henryson’s narrator begins in The Testament of Cresseid, consoling himself with a good fire and sitting down to describe his vision. Once again the balance seems carefully struck: within the framework of the allegory, Venus prevails, but in the narrator’s own world her power has become irrelevant. Even the final, conventional stanza is double-faced, calling on female readers who feel slighted by the poem to forgive him in the names of Venus and Cupid, but ending with a prayer to Christ ‘‘till heuin vs for to bring / At our last end.’’ There can, it seems, be no single, simple solution to the issues which the poem confronts. As we noted at the outset, there are interesting parallels between Rolland’s thematic concerns in The Court of Venus and the debate about sexual love that caused so much interest in French court circles in the 1540s and that was known as the Querelle des Amyes.25 While Rolland’s humanism does not extend to the Neoplatonism that can be seen in such works as Antoine He´roe¨t’s La Parfaicte Amye (1542), the discussion that was triggered by Bertrand de La Borderie’s L’Amye de Court (1542) has obvious affinities with the careful balancing of the rival claims of Vesta and Venus, and the awareness of the rich heritage of classical philosophy that underlies, however thinly, the argumentation of the Scots poem. The Court shares, too, the conservative use of allegorical techniques that characterizes such contributions to the Querelle as Almanque Papillon’s Le nouvel amour (1546); and it is difficult not to see some grounds for applying to The Court of Venus McFarlane’s remark that ‘‘many of the compositions associated with the querelle barely stretch beyond versified prose, with little concern for poetic quality.’’26 To make this our final judgment on this neglected poem, however, would be less than just to the sheer breadth of Rolland’s humanist interests, or to the care with which he sets up his forensic debate. If his literary ambitions ultimately outran his talents, The Court of Venus nevertheless provides crucial evidence of the expanding interests of the cultured elite in Scotland in the second quarter of the sixteenth century.

Notes 1. Among other older Scots works to be printed (or reprinted) between 1565 and 1580 are Sir David Lindsay’s Warkis (three editions), Hary’s Wallace, Henryson’s

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Morall Fabillis (two editions), Barbour’s Brus, the anonymous Rauf Coilyear, Gavin Douglas’s Palice of Honoure, and Rolland’s own Sevin Seages; the majority of these works were printed ‘‘at the expensis of ’’ the Edinburgh bookseller Henry Charteris. 2. For a recent survey of Wilson’s career, see Dominic Baker-Smith, ‘‘Florens Wilson: A Distant Prospect,’’ in Stuart Style 1513–1542: Essays on the Court of James V, ed. J. Hadley Williams (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 1–14. 3. John Rolland, The Seuin Seages, ed. George F. Black (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1932), 1–2. 4. RSS, iii, nnn (nos. 2237–8, 2687, 3014). 5. Joyce M. Sanderson, ‘‘Two Stewarts of the Sixteenth Century: Mr. William Stewart, Poet, and William Stewart, Elder, Depute Clerk of Edinburgh,’’ The Stewarts 17 (1984): 25–46 (pp. 29–30). 6. A. A. Macdonald, ‘‘William Stewart and the Court Poetry of the Reign of James V,’’ in Stuart Style, 179–200 (p. 180). 7. Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae Medii Aevi ad annum 1638, ed. D. E. R. Watt (St. Andrews, Scottish Record Society, 1969), 132. 8. RSS, i, 543 (no. 3584) (Melrose); 479 (no. 3067) (Chapel Royal). 9. Protocol Book of John Foular, 1528–1534, ed. John Durkan (Scottish Record Society, Edinburgh, 1985), p. xix. 10. John Rolland, The Court of Venus, ed. Walter Gregor (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1884), 135. All references are to this edition. 11. Giovanni Boccaccio, De genealogia deorum, ed. Vincenzo Romano, 2 vols. (Bari, Italy: G. Laterza, 1951), 1: 394–95. Boccaccio refers in passing to Augustine, De civitate Dei, 4: 10, with which Rolland is also likely to have been familiar. 12. This assumes that ‘‘Daris’’ (Court, 3: 59) can be equated with Doris, the daughter of Oceanus and the wife of Nereus, who is mentioned in Virgil’s Eclogues and elsewhere. 13. Odo (or Eudes) de Fouilloy was tutor to Louis, duc de Guyenne; his commentary on the Ecloga Theoduli, beginning ‘‘Multi licet magna et excellenti ingenio uiri ad presentis libelli expositionem se applicauerunt,’’ was frequently reprinted, editions appearing in centers as widely separated as Paris, Cologne, Leipzig, and Zamora, as well as circulating in manuscript. 14. On Robert Estienne’s contribution to the development of classical dictionaries, and the relationship between his work and that of Hermannus Torrentinus, see DeWitt T. Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955); DeWitt T. Starnes, Robert Estienne’s Influence on Lexicography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 86–120; and Elizabeth Armstrong, Robert Estienne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). 15. The names included by Torrentinus are (the foliations refer to the 1498 Deventer editio princeps): Antiopa (A6v), Candaces (C2r), Deidamia(C7r), Erichto (D1v), Hypermnestra (E3r), Jocasta (E5r), Lara (E5v), Mirta/Myrra (E3v), Nicostrata (G1r), Nictimena (G1r), Octavia (G2r), Omphale (G2v), Pandora (G4v), Philyra (G7r), Phoemonoe (G7v), Sicoris (I1v), and Tomyris (K1r). Torrentinus also mentions Pasithea (G5r), but does not make her one of the Hyades, as Rolland does. All these names except, significantly, Nictimena can also be found in Estienne’s 1541 Dictionarium; she does appear in the 1545 Antwerp edition. This very high correlation of names compares favorably with that in the other principal handbook of the period, Ambrosius Calepinus’s Dictionarium (1502, and frequently reprinted thereafter), in which only half-a-dozen from this list occur. 16. De genealogia, 4: 31, ed. Romano, i, 189.

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17. See Hyginus, Fabulae, ed. P. K. Marshall (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1993). 18. I have used the edition of Calepinus’s Dictionarium published by Johann Gru¨ninger in Strasbourg in 1510, where the discussion of the Hyades occurs on sig. d5v. 19. On learned borrowing in sixteenth-century English, see for example R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford, CA: Oxford University Press, 1953), 3–31 and 68–141; and C. L. Barber, Early Modern English (London: Deutsch, 1976). 20. I am grateful to Lorna Pike, of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, for information from the Dictionary’s unpublished files. 21. See Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, viii, 545. 22. Jerome, In Matheum, 1: 8 (Turnhout: CCSL, 1969), 8. 23. Paschasius Radbertus, Expositio in Matthaeum, 1: 1, PL 120, cc. 54–67. 24. Aquinas, Super Evangelium Matthaei, 1: 2, Opera Omnia, ed. Roberto Buso (Stuttgart, 1980), vi, 131. Aquinas is referring to Ambrose, Expositio Euangelii Secundum Lucam, 3: 17–29 (CCSL, Turnhout, 1957), 84–97; Ambrose, like Aquinas, does not mention Rahab. Aquinas’s caution about the authority of Chrysostom is justified: the latter does discuss the problem twice in his sermons on the Gospel, in 1: 6 and 3: 4 (PG 57, cc. 2, 35), but does not use this argument. 25. On this exchange, see M. A. Screech, ‘‘An Interpretation of the Querelle des Amyes,’’ Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance 21 (1959): 103–30; and I. D. McFarlane, A Literary History of France: Renaissance France, 1470–1589 (London, 1974): 115–24. 26. Renaissance France, 121.

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In Praise of Dancing: A Paradoxical Encomium by Hendrik Laurensz. Spiegel (1549–1612) Marijke Spies

IN 1578, THE CITY OF AMSTERDAM, AFTER A SEVERAL YEARS’ BLOCKADE OF its harbor and the loss of virtually all its trade, at last took sides with the prince of Orange in his insurrection against the king of Spain, who at the time was sovereign of the Netherlands. During the eleven preceding years the town had been under direct control of the central government in Brussels and subjected to a strict Roman Catholic ordnance. During those years thousands of its inhabitants had been exiled or even executed for their belief. Nevertheless there was no strong reaction when things changed. One frantic Catholic priest, Jacob Buyck, was forced to leave town and his library was confiscated. But on the whole an atmosphere of mutual peace, tolerance, and freedom of conviction seems to have been predominant.1 Such an atmosphere was, of course, very much in the interest of trade, Amsterdam’s core business, and therefore actively sustained by the magistracy. One of the instruments of this policy was the town’s ‘‘chamber of rhetoric,’’ a literary and theatrical society that went under the name of The Eglantine and that had as its device ‘‘flowering in love.’’ Brotherly love in an Erasmian evangelical interpretation was indeed its professed ideology, as was expressed in several of its New Year’s songs. Head of this society, and as such author of most of these songs, was Hendrik Laurensz. Spiegel, a wealthy Amsterdam merchant, who had stayed with the Roman Catholic church. This too testifies to the tolerant ambiance, the membership of the Eglantine varying from convinced Calvinists to Catholics and even so-called ‘‘free-thinkers’’ as Spiegel’s friend Dirk Volkertsz. Coornhert. The most important way by which the chamber tried to forward this ideology was by popular education. Spiegel was convinced that the human ‘‘ratio’’ could, by means of sound reasoning, give insight 126

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into truth and falsehood, good and evil, and for this reason was the instrument ‘‘par excellence’’ to obtain civic harmony. He instigated, and probably realized personally, the publication in Dutch of a grammar (1584), a dialectic (1585), and a short rhetoric (1587). In this way he tried to teach those citizens who had not attended the Latin school, that is, most merchants, businessmen, shopkeepers, and skilled craftsmen who constituted Amsterdam’s established middle class, the rules of humanist persuasive communication and argumentation.2 The same ideas must have prompted the composition, over a span of nearly fifty years, of a small connected series of rhymed paradoxical encomia by Coornhert, Spiegel, their friend and colleague chamber member Roemer Visscher, and—several years later—Gerbrand Adriaensz. Bredero, a coming young playwright. According to Cicero in his Paradoxa Stoicorum the paradox—that is to say, the proof of a true thesis which is nevertheless at odds with generally accepted opinion3 —was the best means to achieve insight into truth, because it was the most Socratic way of argumentation. As such it was also considered an excellent exercise in argumentation itself. The tradition of pro and contra argumentation in the paradoxical school-declamations of the humanists testifies to that.4 The members of The Eglantine must have considered such concrete examples of sound dialectic reasoning, which at the same time presented more or less emancipatory opinions on social behaviour, an excellent complement to their theoretical lessons. The poetical form served in their opinion no other cause than to enhance the persuasive force of the whole.5 Of these paradoxes Spiegel’s Praise of Dancing (Het Lof van dansen) was undoubtedly the most controversial one. Coornhert had written his Praise of Prison (Lof van de ghevanghenisse, 1567) primarily to ventilate his ideas on the different categories of misbehavior nobody could possibly object to. Visscher came somewhere between 1580 and 1612 with argumentations for and against being in love and courting that, notwithstanding their social relevance, were nevertheless first meant to be amusing. Bredero also argued, respectively in 1613 and 1614, the advantages of wealth and poverty in a way that would not raise any protest. In these cases, the paradoxical conflict with the ‘‘communis opinio’’ was to be taken with a huge amount of salt. But dancing was something different. Dancing had been traditionally popular in all the ranks of Dutch society and a generally accepted way for young people to meet each other. There were dance halls everywhere, not only in the cities but

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also in the smaller towns and villages.6 From the side of the Roman Catholic church there used to be some opposition, but mostly not very outspoken. More vehement in their educational idealism were certain humanists. Erasmus devoted some depreciatory passages in his Apophthegmata to the question of dancing, and Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim fulminated over several pages in his De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium, atque Excellentia Verbi Dei, declamatio against its stupidity and insanity. Even Coornhert rejected in his play Der Maeghdekens Schole (School for Maidens, ca.1570–75) dancing at weddings as incompatible with the holiness of the occasion.7 But the Calvinist reformed church was most opposed of all. And since from the 1540s on Calvinism had gained a definitive footing its preachers did not stop arguing against what they considered an ungodly form of amusement. The influential spokesman Lambertus Danaeus, a Genevese theologian, published a Traite´ des danses in 1579, in which he adduced the full flow of his learning to prove that in all times wise men had spoken against dancing.8 But not everybody was as strict as that. Most noticeable, for instance, is the opinion of Philips van Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde, certainly in every respect a stern Calvinist, but also a nobleman from the court of William of Orange. In 1577 he defended himself in a letter to a Calvinist minister, Gaspar van der Heyden, against the allegations from the Calvinist side in favor of the happy, simple, and honest dances in which he himself loved so much to participate.9 The confusion seems to have been complete: the liberal and tolerant Coornhert, who so often ran into conflict with the Calvinists, against, and Marnix, fierce defender of the Calvinist creed, in favor.10 And, I may add, Spiegel, an intimate friend of Coornhert and certainly no adherent of Marnix, was in his turn writing a poem in praise of dancing. As a matter of fact, Spiegel uses nearly all arguments pro and contra that were put forward in the 1570s by authors such as Agrippa, Danaeus, and Marnix, to compose an exemplary dialectical argument in the form of a poem that shows the same rhetorical structure and poetical features as the paradoxical encomia by Coornhert, Visscher, and Bredero.11 The rhetorical structure divides the text into an exordium (stanzas 1–3), an argumentatio, consisting of a proposition (stanzas 4–7) and a series of arguments (stanzas 8–24), a refutatio (stanza 25) that turns into a final conclusio (stanzas 26–29), and a peroratio (stanza 30). The poem has an aabccb rhyme scheme but has no mythologies, allegories, elaborated metaphors, or complicated rhymes, so popular in the poetry of those days. Both Coornhert and

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Spiegel would some years later explicitly reject these forms of what they called vain literary pomp. Poetry had to serve the clear and direct expression of rationally substantiated truth, and nothing else.12 In the exordium Spiegel links his text explicitly not only to Erasmus’s Laus Stultitiae, but also to the paradoxical poems by his friends Coornhert and Visscher: Different authors praise different things, Some wisdom, art or good learnings, Others praise fighting and battles by change; The Praise of Folly one author sings, Others the prison or love’s misgivings, But now come and listen to the praise of dance. [Verscheyden luy prysen verscheyden hanteringe, Sommighe wijsheyt, const, ofte goede leeringe, Andere prysen vechten, stormen en schansen, Het lof der sotheyt hoortmen oock verbreen, Eenighe prysen een kercker of een blaeuwe scheen: Comt hier en hoort het lof van dansen.] (stanza 1)

In the following two stanzas he emphasizes the difficulty of the undertaking, because dancing is nowadays generally considered sinful. If that were really true, he remarks he wouldn’t think of praising it, but he will prove that the opposite is the case. In the exordium he makes the reader attentive by referring to his predecessors, docile by mentioning the subject, and benevolent by underlining its difficulty and moral quality. The foundation for his thesis that dancing is neither sinful nor harmful is established in the first four stanzas of the argumentatio, the so-called ‘‘propositio’’ (stanzas 4–7). Dancing, one should know, is in itself not bad, but either neutral or good. It may, however, have turned bad by those who practice it. The division in good, bad, and neutral was a well-known philosophical distinction used by Coornhert in his Zedekunst dat is Wellevenskunste (Ethics, that is the Art of Living well, 1586) and by Marnix in his apology.13 The examples of those evildoers are however not given by Marnix. The Israelites who danced around the golden calf, as well as the dancing of Herodias’ daughter, are directly taken from Danaeus. Also taken from Danaeus is the example that illustrates the first then following positive argument: the old Israelites used to honor and praise God by dancing.

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Dancing surely is worthy of praise, As David by dancing God’s honor raised, And ordered us to further in dancing God’s laudation; Moses’ sister also danced in honor of God glorious, And Israel often danced at an outcome victorious; So that dancing isn’t evil follows from this argumentation. [’tDansen in hem selven dat is seer pryselijck: Met dansen loofde David God jolyselijck, En ghebiedt ons met dansen Gods lof te verbreden. Moses Suster heeft Gods lof gedanst en gesprongen. Israel heeft haer victory dick ghedanst en gesonghen: Dat het dansen niet quaet is, volcht uyt dese reden.] (stanza 8)

Danaeus had refuted the validity of these examples, saying that modern Christians had developed far better forms of prayer and thanksgiving.14 Spiegel, however, expands on them and even refers to the dance of the heavens to prove the holiness of this form of jubilation. When the Israelites, and even the stars dance and the Bible approves of it, why then scold it? (stanzas 9–10) At this point the essential benefit of dancing has been proven, for in sixteenth-century dialectic examples, and ‘‘a fortiori’’ ‘‘biblical examples,’’ were considered to be empiric proof. Spiegel then proceeds with a counterargument: the Bible forbids amusement with female dancers (stanza 11). But given the principles laid down in the beginning of his argument, what is wrong or right depends on the dancer himself: The greatest fiend of all forms of art Is when the one who in practicing it isn’t smart: That is an old saying and very true; And that dancing is an honest exercise, That may be cultivated by one who is wise, Is by these arguments proven to you. [Alle Const voorwaer gheen meerder vyandt heeft, Als die, die van de selfde gheen verstandt heeft: Dits een out spreeckwoort, en seker warachtich, Dattet dansen is een eerlijcke exercitie, Diemen wel ghebruycken can sonder malitie: Dat blijckt aen alle dese reden eendrachtich.] (stanza 12)

There then follows a whole series of positive arguments (stanzas 13– 19). As with the dance of the heavens, they are mostly taken from

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Lucian’s dialogue De Saltatione (On dancing). In Greece, the Tessalians and Lacedemonians used to dance, as well as the priests at Delos. Plato had given laws to it, Homer had described the dancing of Meriones and Neoptolemus before Troy, and even Socrates had wanted to learn it. Castor and Pollux, Orpheus and Musaeus, had all been dancers in their times.15 Most of these instances are also given by Agrippa in is De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium, but not all, so there can be no doubt that Spiegel, who was a learned man, has deduced them from Lucians’s dialogue himself. That next to Lucian he nevertheless also consulted Agrippa’s declamation may be concluded from the fact that he begins this series of examples with the Roman actor Roscius, whose dancing would have inspired the public more than even Cicero’s speeches. This anecdote, and the mention of the Roman ‘‘salii,’’ priests who danced in honor of Mars, are of course not found in Lucian nor in Danaeus. As I have shown elsewhere, Agrippa’s text was well known by Roemer Visscher, and we may safely assume that Spiegel was acquainted with it as well.16 Most remarkable, however, is the twofold interruption by more argumentative stanzas that direct his interpretation. Dancing is joyful when it is practiced in an honest and honorable way (stanza 14), and it serves spiritual as well as corporal health (stanza 18). And from stanza 20 onwards, the argumentation continues in the same vein: dancing teaches moderation and self-control; it is a joyous pastime that prevents boredom, drunkenness, and other forms of misbehavior and has always been favored by our ancestors (stanzas 20–24) Although Spiegel expands on them far more, these are in essence the same points as Marnix had put forward: And I cannot think what harm there can be in round dancing, which testifies to simple joy in a happy soul, and a festive congratulation, when one leads the young maidens or the honorable ladies to the dance at the music of violins . . . Yes, I judge the dancing holy that is practiced in this country with great joy after banquets, to prevent drinking, dicing, gambling and the like . . . and I myself have often danced in gatherings by way of entertainment, especially to further my health and spirit. [Ende ick en kan oock niet bevroeden wat quaets daer soude zijn in de Reyen, in welck getoont wert een eenvoudige vrolijckheyt van een verheught gemoet, ende een Feestelijcke geluck-wenschinge, so men met de jonge Dochters, oft eerbare Juffrouwen op de maet van de Violen omwandelt ofte om-loopt . . . Ja ick houde alhier de Danssen voor heyligh, die men hier te lande houdt met groote vreught nae de maeltijden, omme voor te komen het droncken drincken, in-swelgen, dobbelen,

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spelen, ende tuysschen . . . ende [ick] dickmael Gedanst hebbe tot vermaeck van het geselschap daer ick by was, ende voornamentlijck om mijn gesontheyt ende met eenen om mijnen geest te verquicken.]17

It is only with the refutation of a final, very weighty objection that Spiegel returns to Danaeus. Danaeus had put emphasis on the attacks by the Fathers of the Church on dancing. Saint Basil, Saint Ambrose, Saint John Chrysostom all had linked dancing with loose living.18 Now, at last, Spiegel can make full use of the fundamental definition he had given at the beginning of his argument, that the moral quality of the deed depends on the doer. In the time of the Romans, pantomime players who danced may have threatened all virtues, but today we can prevent such dangers, he argued (stanza 25). This refutation leads to the sort of conditional conclusion that is characteristic for the deliberative genre the paradoxical encomium belongs to (stanzas 26–29). If dancing by couples bears moral dangers, that does not comment on round dancing. This also corresponds to Marnix’s opinion: I have found on the contrary that honest round dancing by men and women has been in use in all times and nearly with all people of the world. [Anders bevinde ick, dat t’allen tijden, ende schier by alle volckeren der werelt, eerlijcke Reyen en Danssen van Mannen en Dochters in swang gegaen zijn.]19

The positive examples from the Old Testament given by Danaeus are repeated: was not Israel dancing after the drowning of the Egyptians, after the defeat of Goliath, and after the victories of Jephthah and David?20 Spiegel himself adds to this the return of the prodigal son, but nobody could possibly misunderstand his purpose to rebuke Danaeus’s position in the first place. Plato demonstrated in his Laws that dancing brought about moral corruption that could be repaired. With this conclusion the dialectic argument comes to an end. But rhetorically, there remains the peroration. This subject could still be further explored, But my mouth is tired, I can not say much more, It has been enough for those who will listen all: Indecent dancing I will not praise, I only have some arguments raised, That honest dancing is surely permissible.

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[Hier sou noch wel meer te segghen vallen, Maer mijn mont is moe, ick can niet meer kallen, Daer is ghenoech gheseyt, diet wil verstaen, Het onmanierich dansen wil ick niet prysen: Maer ick heb alleen hier willen bewysen, Datmen wel eerlijck te dans mach gaen.] (stanza 30)

As in most of Spiegel’s literary work, his In Praise of Dancing was published only after his death. Together with some sixty other small poems from his hand, it was printed at the end of the first authorized edition of the collected poetry of his friend Roemer Visscher, Brabbeling (Babbling 1614).21 There is no reason to believe that their nonappearance during the author’s lifetime had anything to do with possible Calvinist objections. Such clerical influence was unthinkable in Holland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where truth, even paradoxical truth could—mostly—be openly spoken. But even up to the first decade of the seventeenth century it was often not considered very well-mannered to have one’s poems put in print. And dancing was perhaps not so important after all. As to paradoxical encomia in general: as we have seen, Spiegel’s lessons were a generation later taken to heart by the young Bredero. But with the advancement of the classicist poetical ideology the enthusiasm for dialectical argumentation in literary texts, and especially paradoxical dialectical argumentation, gradually diminished. Poetry increasingly came to occupy itself, at the exclusion of almost everything else, with beautiful descriptions and the evocation of emotions. And as the wealth and power of the reigning olicharchy increased, even the need for argumentative social skills as such slowed down. Now and then a paradoxical encomium was still written, but it was experienced as a burden, not seen as a public lesson in argumentation. It was only in the age of reason before the need for popular argumentative education was felt again.

Notes 1. Hendrik Brugmans, Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, 2nd ed., rev. I. J. Brugmans, 6 vols. (Utrecht, Netherlands: Het Spectrum, 1972), 2:75–127. 2. Marijke Spies, ‘‘The Amsterdam Chamber De Eglentier and the Ideals of Erasmian Humanism,’’ in From Revolt to Riches: Culture and History of the Low Countries, 1500–1700. International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Theo Hermans and Reinier Salverda, 109–18 (pp. 109–12) (London: Centre for Low Countries Studies, 1993); Marijke Spies, ‘‘Rhetoric and Civic Harmony in the Dutch Republic of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century,’’ in Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Histori-

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cal and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett, ed. Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloane, 57–72 (pp. 63–65, 71). (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1999). 3. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem. Facsimile reprint of Lyon 1561 edition. Edited and introduced by August Buck (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1964), 3.118, 164 b. 4. Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum, proeemium 4–5. See Cicero in Twenty-eight Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press London: Heinemann, 1960–1982), 4: 256–57; Marc. M. G. van der Poel, De ‘Declamatio’ bij de humanisten. Bijdrage tot de studie van de functies van de rhetorica in de renaissance (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf, 1987), 199–205; Spies, ‘‘Rhetoric and Civic Harmony,’’ 60–61, 65. 5. Marijke Spies, ‘‘Between Ornament and Argumentation: Developments in 16th-century Dutch Poetics,’’ in Rhetoric-Rhe´toriqueurs-Rederijkers: Proceedings of the Colloquium, Amsterdam 1993, ed. Jelle Koopmans, Mark A. Meadow, Kees Meerhoff, and Marijke Spies, 117–22 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1995). 6. A. T. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland, trans. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 7. Desiderius Erasmus, Apophthegmatum libri octo (Antwerpen, 1564), 586, 601; Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium, atque Excellentia Verbi Dei, declamatio (Antwerpen, 1531), 34v-36r; [D. V. Coornhert,] Der Meaghdekens Schole. Comedia, lines 2196–97. See Het Roerspel en de comedies van Coornhert, ed. P. van der Meulen (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1955), 319–401 (p. 400). 8. H. P. Clive, ‘‘The Calvinists and the Question of Dancing in the 16th Century,’’ in Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance. Travaux et Documents 23 (1961), 296–308. 9. Marnixi Epistulae: De briefwisseling van Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde, ed. Aloı¨s Gerlo and Rudolf De Smet, vol. 2 (1577–78) (Brussels: University Press, 1992), no. 81 (pp. 76–84). 10. H. Bonger, Leven en werk van D.V. Coornhert (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 1978), 71–72. 11. Marijke Spies, ‘‘ ‘Ick moet wonder schryven’: Het paradoxale lofdicht bij de leden van de Eglentier,’’ in Eer is het Lof des Deuchts: Opstellen over renaissance en classicisme aangeboden aan dr. Fokke Veenstra, ed. H. Duits, A. J. Gelderblom, and M. B. Smits-Veldt, 43–51 (pp. 44–45) (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1986). 12. Marijke Spies, ‘‘Hier is gheen Helikon . . .’’: Het rederijker perspectief van de zeventiende-eeuwse literatuur. Inaugural oration (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1995), 8–13. 13. The letter wherein Marnix defends himself was at the time translated in Dutch and published in Delft in 1577 under the title Brief, aengaende de kerckelijcke tucht ende het danssen (Letter on ecclesiastical discipline and dancing, 1577; repr., Antwerp 1598). See Marnixi Epistulae, 2:78 and 83–84. Spiegel must have known it, and this the more so, because some of the other arguments shared by both of them are not to be found elsewhere. I will return to that. 14. Clive, ‘‘The Calvinists and the Question of Dancing,’’ 298–99, 302. 15. Lucian in Eight Volumes, trans. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press London: Heinemann, 1913–1967), 5: 220–45. 16. Agrippa, De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium, 34v-36r; Spies, ‘‘Rhetoric and Civic Harmony,’’ 69–71. 17. Cited in J. C. M. Pollmann, Ons eigen volkslied (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1935), 78–80; Marnixi Epistulae, 2: 81–83. 18. Clive, ‘‘The Calvinists and the Question of Dancing,’’ 306–7. 19. Pollmann, Ons eigen volkslied, 80; Marnixi Epistulae, 82. 20. Clive, ‘‘The Calvinists and the Question of Dancing,’’ 299. 21. Roemer Visscher, Brabbeling (Amsterdam, 1614), 211–17.

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Early Texts of Donne’s ‘‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’’: Manuscripts and Their Omissions, and the Provenance of the Earliest Translation, by Constantijn Huygens (1633) Richard Todd

Introduction

WHAT LIGHT CAN TEXTUAL VARIANTS IN EXISTING SCRIBAL COPIES IN English, and Constantijn Huygens’s draft holograph August 31, 1633 translation, of ‘‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’’1 cast on our knowledge of how this poem was disseminated in its early years? This essay is an attempt to formulate such questions as usefully as possible and to suggest some answers. There are twenty-four existing scribal manuscript copies of the normative forty-two-line text of this poem henceforth referred to as GoodF.2 This paper will survey, in varying detail, all twenty-four. It will take account of the seven seventeenth-century printed editions from 1633 through 1669. It will also appraise the draft translation into Dutch of a scribal copy of the poem made by Constantijn Huygens and preserved in Huygens’s own working holograph in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) or Royal Library, The Hague, the Netherlands as ms. KA XLa 1633, fol. 4r. To date, no systematic collation of these scribal copies in English has been made, either involving all twenty-four or, indeed, any of the seven printed editions. As a result, although Donne’s editors from Grierson, 1912, onwards have recorded occasional variants, there has so far been no account of the entirety of the seventeenth-century forms in which this poem has survived. Nor has there been any systematic study of Huygens’s holograph draft ms., either as an artifact in its own right or as having been made from a (presumably now lost) scribal copy. No attempt has thus yet been made to read Huygens’s translation other than as having been made (mistakenly, as I intend to show) from the 1633 printing. 135

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As a result, the poem that has come down to us as Donne’s has been canonized from the 1633 imprint from the 1920s onward. Grierson regarded this imprint as authoritative, emending eclectically (as future editors were likewise to do) and consulting manuscript copy only where it seemed to diverge significantly from the 1633 imprint. While Grierson (it is true) consulted a commendably high number of mss., and recorded a commendably high number of variants, his apparatus is incomplete. No later editor prior to the Donne Variorum has taken the trouble to collate or record many more variants (except John Shawcross, although his apparatus is also incomplete).3 There has therefore been no systematic study of the various forms in which the poem exists, and as a result, no investigation into the various ways in which the poem was read by a variety of recipients, both identified and anonymous, during the first halfcentury of its existence. Accordingly this essay, which may in part be read as a preparatory exercise in the establishment of the Donne Variorum text of GoodF, will survey the poem’s major substantive variants, including the title; make some attempt in the present state of knowledge to contribute to a preliminary filiation of the existing artifacts; and argue which ms. tradition seems to have supplied Constantijn Huygens with his copy, and consider what Huygens himself made of the confessional stance of the poem he appears to have read. The ultimate object of the exercise is to demonstrate that the editing process is not an end in itself whereby an ‘‘ideal’’ lost original or revised holograph is postulated and, through a process of filiation and stemmatology recovered, but to urge that that very process of filiation and stemmatology can make genuine contributions to what Harold Love has recently termed ‘‘the culture and commerce’’ of the entire social matrix within which seventeenth-century texts were transmitted in both manuscript and print.4 There is an extensive scholarship in both Dutch and English on many of the separate issues touched on in this paper, but the particular synthesis I offer in what follows has never been made because no one has yet either examined all existing scribal copies of Donne’s poem in English—or been prepared to follow through the implications of the assumption that Huygens translated not from print but from manuscript.

The title The poem’s title, as indicated, takes several forms in the scribal tradition. These are set out in figure 1. Examination of the title’s

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Figure 1 Titles of group 1, 2 and 3 mss. of GoodF. The original spelling is kept, but other orthographical features have been normalized. Group 1 B32: Goodf[ ]day. 1613. Riding to Sir Edward Harbert in wales C02: Goodfriday. 1613. Ridinge towards Wales. C08: Goodfridaie. 1613. Riding towards wales. O20: Goodfriday. 1613. Riding towards wales. SP1: Good friday. 1613. riding towards wales Group 2 DT1: Good friday Made as I was Rideing westward that daye H04: Good Friday Made as I was Rideing westward, that daie WN1: Good Fryday Made as I was riding Westward that daie. CT1: Good friday Made as I was rideing westward that daye. B07: Good friday Made as I was ridinge westward that daye SA1: Good ffryday made as I was rideing westward that day. Group 3 B46: Good Fryday: 1613 H05: A Meditation vpon Good Friday. 1613. C09: Goodfryday: 1613: Riding towards Wales H06: Good fryday. 1613 Riding towards Wales The early prints A (1633): Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward B (1635): Goodfriday, 1613. riding Westward. G (1669): Goodfriday, 1613. riding Westward

forms strongly suggests that what Marriot used in producing his text was a copytext based not solely on either a group 2 or a group 3 source, but—on the basis of what has come down to us—an eclectic mixture of the two. The group 2 titles uniquely contain orthographic variations on the words ‘‘riding westward’’; the group 3 titles contain the date ‘‘1613.’’ The latter (the date 1613) is also a feature of the group 1 titles, and it is possible that they fed Marriot’s text,5

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but to include the group 1 titles in any discussion offers a less economic hypothesis for what Marriot confected: he need only have seen a group 2 and a group 3 title to have produced his own. For evidence emerging from other textual work being carried out under the auspices of the Donne Variorum suggests that some while after beginning to set his type, Marriot was approached by the owner of H6, and incorporated certain readings of this, the O’Flahertie manuscript, which he, Marriot, seems to have preferred:6 the date may have been one of these readings. At any rate, examination strengthens the argument that Huygens made his translation from manuscript rather than print. Figure 1 effectively lists the titles as found in the three major groups. Group 1 (consisting in this case of O20, SP1, B32, C2 and C8)7, read along the lines of ‘‘Goodfriday. 1613. Riding towards wales’’ (this is the form found in O20; SP1, C2 and C8 offer minor variations) or ‘‘Good Friday. 1613. Riding to Sr Edward Harbert in Wales’’ (B32). The group 3 readings are ‘‘Good Fryday: 1613’’ (B46), ‘‘A Meditation vpon Good Friday. / 1613’’ (H5), or the C9-H6 pair which substantively read (here I follow C9) ‘‘Goodfryday: 1613: Riding towards Wales.’’ Other mss. that include the 1613 date are H3 and H8 and are ‘‘traditionally associated with Group 3.’’ The title is omitted in C1 and B11. It is on the basis of this evidence that it seems most likely that Marriot coined an eclectic title, including the date, from a mixture of group 2 and group 3 material. HH1 and H7 simply entitle the poem ‘‘Good Friday,’’ and B13, the Skipwith ms., dated by Beal between 1620 and 1650, is unique not simply in attributing the poem to Donne but in incorporating that attribution in the form of the title, as ‘‘I: Dun¯’’. This rapid survey accounts for all the scribal copies that either include the date 1613, or omit the title altogether, or depart too radically from Marriot (omitting the words ‘‘riding westward’’) to be considered as a source for his version of the title: that is, sixteen mss. in total. Two further mss., one discovered in 1974 and both presented that year in a series of items in the Times Literary Supplement, not only omit the date but provide what is, when read against Marriot, a surplus of information in their subtitle.8 The single sheet PT2 reads ‘‘Meditation on a good Friday ridinge from London into ye west Countrey,’’ and P2 (also on a single sheet), possibly an imperfect copy of PT2—Beal follows those who argue that it is in the same scribal hand, that of Sir Nathaniel Rich (?1585–1636)—entitles the poem ‘‘Meditation vpon [a] Good Friday, ryding from London towards Exceter, westward.’’ The use in these two mss. of the word

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‘‘meditation’’ is unique to them and to H5, from which, since H5 is most likely the earlier, the latter may indirectly derive: in other words, PT2 and P2 would by these criteria (also) be ‘‘associated with Group 3.’’ Let us now recall the remaining six mss., which are assigned to group 2. They are WN1, CT1, B7, SA1, and DT1 and its copy H4. They are distinguished from the other eighteen mss. not simply by the absence of the date 1613, but by the remarkable similarity in wording: all, with minor nonsubstantive variations in orthography or spelling, read (spelling modernized): ‘‘Good Friday[,] made as I was riding westward that day.’’ Several observations may be made here. First, this form of the title is apparently restricted exclusively to the group 2 tradition. Second, because the early, at times authoritative, and fundamentally maverick, WN1 (which sometimes evinces group 1 copy) follows this form of the title, it may be considered as a group 2 artifact for the purposes of this poem. Third, on the evidence available, it is clear that group 2 copy on its own in no way provided Marriot (or indeed any of the other six seventeenthcentury imprints) for copy as far as at the very least the title is concerned—although Marriot, while ignoring or passing over the lack of date, may have been attracted by the wording ‘‘riding westward’’ (spelling modernized) confecting his title (as we have suggested) from a group 1 or group 3 ms. that did contain the date. And fourth, the translation of Constantijn Huygens, reading as it does in his holograph draft dated August 31, 1633 (NS) Goede Vrijdagh Rijdende Westwaert, and in its title at least showing no signs of cancellation, must surely derive from a lost group 2 exemplar, a group that, as I have just argued, cannot have been used, or at least used exclusively, by Marriot in 1633. For Huygens was obsessive about recording and dating his work to an extent, perhaps, unequalled by any other poet in early modern Europe, and so we may be certain that had the title in front of him contained a date, Huygens would decidedly have incorporated it.9 Indeed, it will be seen in what follows that Huygens’s readings elsewhere support group 2 and contra-indicate influence from any printed edition. Although not all variants adopted by Huygens are equally relevant to the present paper, my point thus far is to demonstrate from the outset that in establishing the provenance of the Huygens draft, and assessing the changes he made to it, we are in fact obliged to take the entire ms. tradition of scribal copy in English into account.

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Scribes It is at this point that we may usefully distinguish between what we may term ‘‘amateur’’ scribes, such as the translator Huygens, or (if it be he) Sir Nathaniel Rich (see above), and ‘‘professional’’ scribes. Amateur scribes will be collectors and/or owners of their ms. copy; we may well know their identity; and they will not regard their copy as sacrosanct: if they make changes, these will be conscious and deliberate. Professional scribes will be copying as an assignment, and possibly to deadline; we will likely not know their identity (a fine example is the unidentifiable ‘‘Feathery,’’ about whom Beal 1998 has written at length); if they depart from their copy this will be evident only in nonsubstantive matters of orthography or purely bibliographical errors such as eyeskip. In this last connection, it is worth bearing the distinction between amateur and professional in mind, since once the title of GoodF has been considered, the first feature of any examination of a raw collation of the various mss. to strike the textual scholar is the absence of certain lines in certain copies (see figure 2), absences that clearly assist the process of filiation and the deduction of a stemma. But in Figure 2 Omitted lines in Group 1: C02: 1 = = = = 21 [om 22===25] 26 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 42 C08: 1 = = = = 21 [om 22===25] 26== 30 [om 31==33] 34 = = = = = 42 O20: 1 = = = = = 23 [om 24=25] 26 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 42 SP1: 1 = = = = = 23 [om 24=25] 26 = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 42 Omitted lines in PT2 and PO2: PT2: 1 = = = = = = 16 [om 17=18] 19 = = = = = = = = = = = = = =42 PO2: 1 = = = = = = 16 [om17=====20] 21 = = = = = = = = = = = 42 Omitted lines in other extant mss.: B13: 1

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =35 [om 36==38] 39 = = =42

C01: 1-2 [om 3

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =42]

H03: 1 = = = = = = = = = =23 [om 24=25]26 = = = = = = = = = = =42

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reviewing these omissions, we need to keep in mind the distinction between amateur and professional scribes. We may be able to deduce that a given scribe altered on his own authority: we are very likely dealing, in such cases, with an amateur owner or collector. We may, on the other hand, find alterations or omissions to be traceable through mss. that can be shown to be direct descendants of each other or to derive from a common exemplar: in all likelihood we will be dealing here with a professional scribe, or a line of transmission involving such a scribe, whose task is to copy exactly what is in front of him. Against this background, I shall in passing note which variants are supported by Huygens’s draft and which are excluded, and I shall examine those changes Huygens himself made, changes unsupported by any existing ms. exemplar in English, but clearly made after he had completed his draft reading, a reading that is supported by the scribal tradition in English. In this way, we may postulate how Huygens himself seems to have read GoodF, the only religious poem of Donne’s out of the 19 he translated in total in August 1630 and during August through October 1633.

Omissions The normative text of GoodF consists of a ten-syllable iambic pentameter rhyming couplet ‘‘default’’ structure amounting to forty-two lines. Huygens’s rendering in forty-four lines appears to be deliberate, and to be based on a scribal version from which no lines were omitted—that is, examination of Huygens’s holograph draft does not support any evidence to suggest that he used a version that omitted any of these forty-two lines, nor that he suppressed any himself. One ms. fragment, C1, which is as we have seen untitled, consists only of the poem’s first two lines and will be of no further concern here. Otherwise the major omissions are as follows. These can be divided under two headings. There is, first, a cluster of omissions in the group 1 stemmatological tradition that is of considerable help in filiating the various members of this group, as well as substantiating the hypothesis that in working to produce an eclectic text, Marriot made no use of this group. O20 and SP1 omit lines 24–25. C2 and C8 also omit these lines, and omit the two preceding lines (22 and 23) as well. (C8 further omits lines 31–32, as we shall see.) These omissions are all the more interesting because it has elsewhere been shown that C8 is the work of a highly accurate and professional scribe. Together with C2,

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Figure 3 (stemma based on ElBrac) δ

λ

B32

C2

O20

C8

SP1

C8 shares a common progenitor, so that any eyeskip—the most plausible bibliographical explanation for these omissions—is most unlikely to have originated with these artifacts. It presumably did so with their progenitor, yet both C2 and C8 are generally considered to derive at one remove from B32, which contains no omissions (see figure 3). Whatever copy C2 and C8 used must therefore have derived from a copy that also led indirectly to O20 and SP1 (see figure 4). This point will be taken up again later in this paper. What was the nature of the eyeskip that provoked the omissions at 22–23 and 24–25? Whatever scribal copy was used by O20 and SP1 seems to have moved from the normative 23, which O20 and SP1 read almost identically as ‘‘Cold I behold that Endles Height [SP1: behould yt endless height], wch is,’’ omitting 24–25, and picking up again at 26: ‘‘The Seate of all our Soules, if not of hys [SP1: his].’’ Whatever scribal copy was used by C2 and C8 further omits 22–23, moving from ‘‘Cold I behould those hands, wch span the Poles’’ to Figure 4 (stemma based on GoodF ) δ

δ1

B32

λ

O20

C2

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26: ‘‘The seate of all our Soules, Yf [C8: if] not of hys, [C8: his.].’’ The deviant spelling of ‘‘Cold’’ (C2 and C8)/ ‘‘Colde’’ (O20 and SP1) for ‘‘Could’’ (along with the arguable presence of a page-break in their common progenitor10) has assisted in the process: the word provides the first at line 21 in all four mss. and that of 23 (in the form ‘‘Cold’’) in O20 and SP1. In other words, it seems on bibliographical grounds that both the C2 and C8 scribes worked from a copy that had picked up the form ‘‘Cold’’ from the common progenitor of O20 (which itself fed SP1) and imported it into the beginning of normative line 23 instead of line 21. As already indicated, there is a further omission in C8, not shared by any of the other three mss. in the group 1 traditions represented by O20-SP1 and C2-C8. This suggests a very rare independent instance of eyeskip on C8’s part: C2 and C8 follow a common progenitor, both of which omit lines 22 through 25, and C8 further omits 31 through 33 (see figure 1). Line 31 contains a word (here modernized for convenience’ sake as ‘‘partner’’ or ‘‘pattern’’ according to the ms. family in question) that offers the most significant substantial variant in the poem. Moving to the second area of omission, we find that lines 17 through 18 are omitted by PT2, and lines 17 though 20 by P2. Again, on bibliographical grounds, and assuming that these two artifacts are indeed in the same hand, this suggests scribal carelessness, especially as P2 appears to have been memorized from PT2, itself (as we shall see) a memorized text.11 In the title, a caret [ˆ] precedes the scribal insertion of the indefinite article; at line 2 an ‘‘e’’ has been clearly added before the elision so that the final reading is ‘‘The’Intelligence’’; and lines 9 and 10 have clearly been emended (‘‘this day’’ has been removed from line 9 and inserted as the opening foot of line 10; ‘‘goe vnto’’ has been changed to ‘‘trauayle vnto’’ at line 9, and the majuscule ‘‘W’’ that had opened line 10 has been altered to minuscule in order to accommodate the change). Yet PT2, the supposed exemplar, is not without evidence of memorial error either: at line 9, ‘‘that’’ has been added; at line 10 the first two letters of ‘‘day’’ have been written over; and at line 11 ‘‘sitt’’ has been canceled in favor of ‘‘sett’’ (this last either a scribal correction or—less likely—one in a later hand). Most strikingly, PT2 originally omitted lines 5 and 6 altogether, inserting them (presumably either on completion or during the writing) above line 4 on one line, punctuated clearly with a colon so as to make clear it is a couplet, but with no caret to indicate that the lines are inserted. If it was Sir Nathaniel Rich who copied P2 and PT2, one is bound to conclude that, as scribe or indeed owner of these artifacts, he was considerably more

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cavalier in his practice than a professional scribe might have been.12 These remarks are intended to give some indication of the nature of the evidence that would be needed to press the case that PT2 (itself as has been suggested above a memorial reconstruction, as the treatment of lines 5–6 suggests) has been memorially reconstructed to produce P2. Are we to make anything more of the omission of lines 17–18, shared by P2 and PT2? At line 17 the normative Donne text as rendered by Marriot in 1633 A reads: Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; What a death were it then to see God dye?

It is possible that the omission of 17–18 in PT2 and of 17–20 in P2 may reflect more than simply a bibliographical problem such as carelessness or (specifically) eyeskip—even though these two artifacts reveal more scribal carelessness than most other scribal versions of this poem that have survived. It is possible that the lost exemplar from which they derive was copied by a scribe who was genuinely troubled by the implications of seeing God’s face and dying, and by the manner in which the normative argument (which we may assume was Donne’s own) then takes this concept one dramatic step further, asking, with Marriot’s 1633 A text: ‘‘What a death were it then to see God dye?’’

Substantive verbal variants The substantive verbal variants in the twenty-three mss. under consideration here (excepting the two-line fragment C1) are as follows. To simplify matters, I here explictly omit inversions of word order—such as those at lines 5 and 11, as well as one or two instances where a ‘‘to’’/‘‘towards’’ variant affects or may affect the stress pattern of the line in question, or where the variant involves a singular or plural form, since these have no bearing on the argument of this paper.15 This exercise leaves us with two variants, and a third which is a borderline case in the sense that it is of clear interest in filiating within one group. First, the borderline case. At line 32, it is possible to distinguish all but one of the four group 3 mss. These read ‘‘the sacrifice’’ for ‘‘that Sacrifice’’ (Marriot’s 1633 reading): uniquely among this group, H5 also reads ‘‘that,’’ manifestly unaltered. Second, line 22 presents an editor of this poem with the variant of the most substantial interest from the purely bibliographical

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point of view. Establishing what Donne’s original reading was proves to be an almost insoluble conundrum. Unlike the group 1 mss. which, where the line is present, all read ‘‘tune,’’ as do all three group 3 mss except H5, all the group 2 mss. read ‘‘turn’’ (for Marriot’s ‘‘tune’’); WN1 reads ‘‘turne’’ and on these grounds as well as those of its title must be assigned to group 2 for this poem; HH1 has inserted a superscript ‘‘r’’ into ‘‘tune,’’ so someone clearly read it against a group 2 artifact. Each reading makes sense: the principle difficilior lectio potior can be used to support either reading. ‘‘[T]urne’’ may ostensibly seem the more difficult reading, but in maintaining this, one is obliged on the basis of the surviving evidence to argue that all other scribal artifacts trivialize (or do they, rather, sophisticate?) to ‘‘tune’’: this includes all the scribes in groups 1 and 3. It is unlikely that this reading will ever be established to universal satisfaction.14 Yet let us, for a moment, postulate (defensibly) that DT1 comes as close to Donne’s holograph as any surviving exemplar. The couplet of which the line in question is the second reads: Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, And turne all Spheres att once pierced with those holes[?]

It is easy to see how—not just paleographically through some kind of minim error or other form of confusabilia in secretary hand, but also in terms of sense—‘‘turne’’ could be read as ‘‘tune.’’ The scribe expects a collocation such as ‘‘the tuning of the spheres,’’ and is duly wrong-footed: yet the wrong-footing is subtle and produces an interesting reading. This is not the place to argue that the reading is more interesting. Yet to ‘‘turn’’ the spheres is necessarily to cause them to produce music, since music is what they produce when they move. I dwell on this variant briefly because it seems evident that Huygens read from a group 2 ms. here too, and not just in the title of his translation. What he read forms the first line (his line 25) of a couplet, from which I quote the first line. It is absolutely unaltered in his draft: En geuen met een draeij elck hemel-rond sijn toon?

The word draeij (a twist or a turn, cf. Mod. Du. draaien, to turn) indicates incontrovertibly that what Huygens read was ‘‘turn’’ or ‘‘turne.’’ Netherlandicists have, however, been puzzled by the final word toon, which they have read as supporting the idea that perhaps after all Huygens was reading against ‘‘tune.’’ But such readers are

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misled by the similarity between ‘‘tune’’ and toon; the latter word is cognate not with English ‘‘tune,’’ but with ‘‘tone.’’ I believe that what happened in this line is that Huygens read ‘‘turn(e)’’, found it to be unexpected but perfectly susceptible to sense, and so translated it as such nevertheless. Then instead of altering it, as one or more English-speaking scribes had evidently done or were to do, Huygens imported into his translation the thought behind the word, that if one sets the spheres in motion, they will inevitably sound a musical tone or toon. In this way it is possible to regard Huygens’s rendering of this line as a brilliant piece of learned and succinct improvisation. This argument is a necessary digression, since I am using it to support the idea that Huygens’s copytext can be proved, bibliographically, to derive from group 2 copy (and incidentally, therefore, not from print). If we follow this line of argument, we will be able to see that whatever Huygens does change, such changes should be discussed against what he actually read. He cannot have read a group 1 or a group 3 version, and he cannot have read the 1633 imprint. We come, third, to group 1’s most substantive variant, which as we have already seen is the line 31 ‘‘partner’’/‘‘pattern’’ reading in O20-SP1, and C2[-C8, where the line is omitted]. We shall see in a moment that in his group 2-based translation Huygens independently opted for a fascinating solution to the problem he seems to have been confronted with in reading ‘‘partner.’’ Paleographically speaking, to emend (not trivialize) ‘‘partner’’ to ‘‘pattern’’ (spelling modernized) cannot, on the evidence available, be seen as a misreading in the bibliographical sense, if ‘‘partner’’ were misread as ‘‘pattern’’ and spelled ‘‘patterne’’ by the scribe in question. All other mss. read ‘‘partner’’ and only WN1, P2 and PT2 capitalize the word. However, B32 (fascinatingly) retains ‘‘partner.’’ This reading obliges us to return to the abovementioned theory of the line of transmission leading from B32 to C2 and C8, and to O20 leading to SP1 (see figure 3). The B32 reading shows that the stemma produced for ElBrac (Stringer, et al. 2000: 46) does not hold for GoodF, for it is now clear that there must have been an intermediate stage ␦1, feeding O20 and SP1, between the postulated group 1 exemplar ␦ and the artifact ␭ that fed C2 and C8 (see figures 3 and 4). Stemmata of the kind the Donne Variorum constructs cannot, by their nature, be ‘‘wrong.’’ The stemma produced for ElBrac is the product of an immense amount of thought and a scrupulous marshaling of evidence. It is not necessarily to be expected that the group 1 ur-stemma for these early poems will be absolutely identical to that of a relatively late poem such as GoodF. Nor, indeed, is it to

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be supposed that each kind or sequence of Donne poem will yield exactly the same stemma. A scribal miscellany, particularly an extensive one, need not always derive from exactly the same progenitor in the case of every poem, particularly if the poems are generically different from each other. What is suggested here is that on the basis of the knowledge we have, it is possible to deduce that for the Elegies, B32 descended from a progenitor that also supplied (a) the copy from which O20 derived (and that SP1 derived from O20), and (b) the lost copy from which C2 and C8 each derived. The most economic explanation is the most preferable one. This particular model cannot be applied to GoodF. The bibliographical evidence shows incontrovertibly that there must have been an intermediate stage between the progenitor of B32 and (a) the copy from which O20 derived (and that SP1 derived from O20), and (b) the lost copy from which C2 and C8 each derived.15

Huygens’s alterations On the evidence of a close examination of his draft holograph, which shows signs of having been composed in unusual haste, Huygens made alterations in exactly half of the forty-four lines to which he expanded the normative forty-two lines of what he had in front of him. Some of these corrections are of a zofort nature; one remains as an open variant (Huygens’s practice was to underline a word he wished to return to, and occasionally, as at his line 16 behouden, the word remains underlined but unrevised). Others manifest minor felicitous improvements. There are perhaps half-a-dozen lines at which Huygens has labored, making at least three quite substantial attempts in each case, to find a formulation that satisfies him. Perhaps the most remarkable alteration in Huygens’s draft holograph is to be found not in these heavily altered and scored-through lines but at his line 33, which originally read: Hoe ’t met de Moeder stond, die deel hadd in dit doen. We may render this as ‘‘[did I dare observe and see] / How his Mother fared, who was implicated in these actions.’’ With die deel hadd in dit doen, Huygens is clearly following a ‘‘partner’’ exemplar: it is just not possible to see these lines as translating ‘‘pattern,’’ and from the bibliographical point of view this is what we would expect, since the latter is a reading confined exclusively to group 1. But Huygens did not leave his line as it stood: he canceled the words ’t met de Moeder stond and altered them to Sij te moede was, so that the sense of the line now becomes ‘‘[did I dare

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observe and see] / How She felt, who was implicated in these actions.’’ Three features strike one as of interest here. First, Huygens removes the word Moeder (‘‘Mother’’), which he had expressly capitalized, replacing it (second) with Sij (‘‘She’’), the pronoun also capitalized. The Virgin Mary is thus ostensibly excised from the poem in the sense that, having been named explicitly, she is now referred to only pronominally and implicitly, even though she is still revered enough to deserve a capital letter in the pronominal form. But third, and strangest of all, despite being expunged by name, the Virgin Mary leaves a punning textual trace in Huygens’s line: the word moede is cognate with English ‘‘mood’’ and its equivalent in its modern Dutch syntactical forms would relate to ‘‘brave’’ or ‘‘bravery.’’ The idiom Sij te moede was seems best rendered by ‘‘She felt’’ (i.e., ‘‘perceived’’ or ‘‘sensed’’). It is as though Huygens is troubled by Donne’s idea of explicitly bringing the Virgin Mary into partnership with God as Christ on the Cross, an idea acceptable in the teaching of both the Roman church of Donne’s upbringing and the English church he had become a part of by 1613. Instead Huygens constructs a meditative parallel whereby the speaker’s astonishment at his own audacity in contemplating these actions reflects the equally human state of mind of the Virgin as she is obliged to witness those very same actions. In a quite extraordinarily deft sleight of hand, then, the Virgin, along with all mankind, is redeemed, and the potential Mariolatry of the scene has been toned down to a meditative phrase in which the Catholic teaching of Christ’s mother having being immaculately conceived is, according to orthodox Calvinist doctrine, challenged.16

Conclusion As the Donne variorum project continues to show, previous editorial practice concerning Donne’s text has been marred by two major shortcomings. The first is the assumption, honorably but mistakenly put forward by Grierson in 1912, and unhesitatingly accepted by subsequent editors, that Marriot’s 1633 text is not just the editio princeps but in effect the editio definitiva against which the readings in all other texts or artifacts, whether ms. or later prints, should be judged. The second, even though Grierson himself only knew of a fraction of the manuscript material now known to exist, and collated what he knew more thoroughly than any editor until Shawcross in 1967, is that no full collation (even of a poem such as GoodF that

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exists in relatively few mss. versions) has yet been made, or made publicly available. (Although the present paper is the first to claim to be based on a full collation of GoodF, it does not, of course, claim to offer the definitive variorum text.) What has been presented in this paper leads to four conclusions. First, a group 2 artifact (probably, as it turns out, DT1) will prove to be the most admissible copytext of the lost original holograph of Donne’s ‘‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward.’’ Editing this copytext will involve a painful choice between the readings ‘‘turne’’ and ‘‘tune’’ at line 22. Second, the group 1 stemma for this poem is more complicated than can be illustrated on the basis of the Elegies.17 Third, Huygens used a (now presumably lost) group 2 artifact for his translation of this poem, and not a printed source. And fourth, although my discussion of the English scribal tradition has restricted itself to overwhelmingly to bibliographical matters, there is some evidence that Huygens, at least, was troubled by aspects of the poem’s confessional position, and felt that he could offer creatively ambivalent and indeed elegant solutions to what troubled him. In the end, however, it is of less importance to attempt to ‘‘label’’ confessional positions. Rather, this paper will have served its purpose if it has succeeded in indicating that, only with as full attention as we are prepared to give to the bibliographical evidence available, can we base any interpretative judgment on the poem that is worth serious consideration.

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Appendix LIST OF SIGLA REFERRED TO IN THE ABOVE PAPER. FILIATIONS INDICATED in the text above have dictated the order in which group 1, 2, and 3 mss. are listed here; others (‘‘miscellaneous’’) are listed in alphabetical order according to their Donne Variorum sigla. Beal sigla refer to individual artifacts even when these exist within collections to which Beal gives the combined siglum ‘‘⌬’’: for this reason Beal ‘‘⌬’’ sigla have been omitted here. Donne Variorum siglum

Traditional Beal siglum siglum1

Shelfmark/ call number

Manuscript name

Group 1: O20

D

DnJ 1408 Eng. poet. e. 99

Dowden

SP1

SP

DnJ 1412 49.B.43

St. Paul’s

B32

H49

DnJ 1409 Harley 4955

Newcastle

C2

C57

DnJ 1410 Add. 5778(c)

Cambridge Balam

C8

Lec

DnJ 1411 Add. 8467

Leconfield

WN1

DC

DnJ 1415 Dolau Cothi 6748

Dolau Cothi

CT1

TCC

DnJ 1416 R.3.12

Puckering

B7

A18

DnJ 1413 Add. 18647

Denbigh

SA1

Grey

DnJ 1429 7 a 29 (formerly 2 a 11) Grey

DT1

TCD

DnJ 1417 877

Dublin (I)

H4

N

DnJ 1414 Eng. 966.3

Norton

B46

S96

DnJ 1418 Stowe 961

Stowe I

H5

Dob

DnJ 1419 Eng. 966.4

Dobell

Group 2:

Group 3:

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B6

O‘F

DnJ 1420 Eng. 966.5

O‘Flahertie

C9

Lut

DnJ 1421 Add. 8468

Luttrell

B11

A23

DnJ 1426 Add. 23229

Conway

B13

A25

DnJ 1422 Add. 25707

Skipwith

C1

C

DnJ 1427 Add. 29

Edward Smyth

H3

Cy

DnJ 1423 Eng. 966.1

Carnaby

H7

S

DnJ 1424 Eng. 966.6

Stephens

H8

Hd

DnJ 1428 Eng. 966.7

Utterson

HH1

B

DnJ 1425 EL 6893

Bridgewater

P2

none

DnJ 1430 none

none

PT2

none

DnJ 1431 none

none

Miscellaneous:

1

As used by Grierson and subsequent editors prior to the Donne Variorum.

The initial letter or letters of the Donne Variorum sigla identify the location: thus B is the British Library; C the Cambridge University Library; CT the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge; DT the Library of Trinity College, Dublin; H the Harvard University Library; HH the Henry E. Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA; O the Bodleian Library, Oxford; P indicates private ownership; PT the Princeton University Library’s Robert H. Taylor Collection; SA the South African Public Library, Capetown; SP the Library of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London; and WN the National Library of Wales.

Notes This paper is an acknowledgment of Dominic Baker-Smith’s contribution to Donne scholarship and of his long-time residence in the Netherlands. Its particular challenge to humanism lies in the reassessment it offers of the tradition of editing Donne on the basis of print rather than manuscript. 1. This wording of the poem’s title may not be Donne’s (see what follows). It is given here in the form in which it appears in Grierson’s 1912 edition of Donne, which follows the Marriot edition of 1633 (Donne Variorum, siglum A). See The Poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1912) and Poems, By J.D. With Elegies on the authors death (London: [J]ohn Marriot, 1633. Facsimile reprint, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970). This, in turn, is the form in which the title is given (with minor variations in spacing) in all seventeenth-century printed editions down to 1669 (DV siglum G), and it is this form in which the poem has been canonized. Gary Stringer read an earlier version of this paper and made

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many useful comments: a later version was critiqued equally helpfully by Stringer along with Ernest W. Sullivan II and Dennis Flynn at a meeting at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, in their capacity as editors of the ongoing Donne Variorum project (see the Web site ⬍http://donnevariorum.tamu.edu). I am grateful to the humanities section of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for a travel and subsistence grant. A shorter version of this paper, omitting the Huygens material, appeared in the John Donne Journal. For assistance in deciphering the Huygens manuscript, I am indebted to Ad Leerintveld (KB, The Hague) and Nanne Streekstra of the University of Groningen. 2. These copies are listed in Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. I (1450– 1625, pt. I: Andrewes-Donne), compiled by Peter Beal (London: Mansell / New York: R. R. Bowker 1980). I follow the practice adopted in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, general editor Gary Stringer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995–). 3. The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. John Shawcross (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967). 4. In addition to Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, with a foreword by David D. Hall (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1993), the major works in this field are Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England, The Lyell Lectures, Oxford 1995–96 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 5. Although the presence of ‘‘1613’’ in the group 1 headings may have corroborated the 1635 imprint’s inclusion of that feature in the title. 6. Gary Stringer, private communication. 7. For DV ms. sigla, see appendix 1 below. Nonsubstantive orthographical variants other than superscriptions are silently omitted unless to do so would be to overlook a variant that might be regarded as substantive. 8. See Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, DnJ 1430 and 1431. See also R. S. Thomson and David McKitterick announced the discovery of P2, at first mistakenly believing it to be holograph. See ‘‘A Donne Discovery: John Donne’s Kimbolton Papers,’’ TLS, August 16 (1974), 869–73; Nicolas Barker reassessed PT2 in ‘‘ ‘Goodfriday 1613’: by whose hand?’’, TLS September 20, 1974, 996–97. Barker argued that it and P2 were in the same hand and that that hand was not Donne’s. Alton and Croft identified the hand as Rich’s, an attribution that has not, to my knowledge, been contested since Beal. See R. E. Alton and P. J. Croft, ‘‘John Donne,’’ letter to the TLS, September 27, 1974. 9. See also A. M. Th. Leerintveld, ‘‘Leven in mijn dicht: Historisch-kritische uitgave van Constantijn Huygens’’ Nederlandse gedichten (1614–1625),’’ (PhD diss., University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1997). 10. I owe this plausible suggestion to Gary Stringer. 11. This conclusion was reached in discussion with Stringer, Sullivan, and Flynn (see note 1). 12. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 103–9. 13. They will, however, be of importance in determining the Donne Variorum copytext of this poem. In this note I list only readings that are unique or nonfiliable (with the exception of one or two shared only by P2 and PT2); normative readings are as in Marriot’s 1633 imprint for convenience’ sake. At line 2, H8 reads ‘‘rules’’ (for ‘‘moves’’); at line 5, PT2 uniquely reads ‘‘hurled’’ and P2 ‘‘whyrled’’ (for ‘‘hur-

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ried’’); at line 6, H5 uniquely reads ‘‘course’’ (for ‘‘forme’’); at line 13, P2 reads ‘‘this day’’ and SP1 ‘‘the Cross’’ (for ‘‘this Crosse’’); in the same line, WN1 reads, distinctly but incomprehensibly, an uncorrected ‘‘an’’ (for ‘‘on’’); at line 15, the reading ‘‘am’’ (for ‘‘dare’’) is found only in SP1, PT2, and P2, whereas C9 has ‘‘did’’ for ‘‘do’’ (H5 corrects ‘‘did’’ to ‘‘doe’’); at line 21, B11 reads ‘‘from’’ (for ‘‘span’’); at line 25, H5 corrects ‘‘beneath’’ to ‘‘below’’ (this is unlikely to be a postimprint correction, since it is made in the scribal hand as though it has been read beside a normative reading: both words are enclosed, within the line itself, within square brackets); at line 29, B7 reads ‘‘those’’ (for ‘‘these’’); at line 30, B13 reads ‘‘wretched’’ (for ‘‘miserable,’’ a reading to be changed in all six seventeenth-century imprints from 1635 through 1669 to ‘‘distressed’’); in the same line SA1 reads ‘‘an’’ (for ‘‘mine’’); at line 33, P2 and PT2 omit initial ‘‘Though’’ and correct the meter by the insertion of ‘‘thus’’ between ‘‘as I’’; at line 35, P2 and PT2 omit ‘‘For’’ and correct the meter with an extra syllable (‘‘lookest’’); at line 36, B46 reads ‘‘on’’ (for ‘‘upon’’); at line 40, P2 and PT2 both read initial ‘‘Scoure’’ (for ‘‘Burne’’); and at line 41, P2 and PT2 both read initial ‘‘Renew’’ (for ‘‘Restore’’). 14. Ernest W. Sullivan II points out to me that the Donne Variorum copytext of Mark and BoulNar is based on group 2 copy. See The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 6. The Anniversaries and The Epicedes and Obsequies, Gary Stringer, gen. ed., et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 112–59. Similarly, ElAut, ElProg, and ElExpost in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 2. The Elegies, Gary Stringer, gen. ed., et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), are based on group 2 copy. If, as seems certain, group 2 copy (probably DT1) forms the Donne Variorum copytext of GoodF, the bibliographical choice will be between accepting ‘‘turne’’ or emending to ‘‘tune.’’ If the emendation is effected, it will be as a result of a decision not lightly taken: it cannot be stressed often enough that Donne Variorum textual policy is not eclectic. 15. As it happens, this revised stemma endorses that postulated for group 1 by Helen Gardner although the reasoning in this paper is fundamentally different from hers. See John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), lxii. 16. I am grateful to my Amsterdam colleague Theo Bo¨gels for reading these lines of Huygens with me and making me make better sense of them than I thought I could. 17. I am deeply indebted to Gary Stringer for pointing out the significance of what my examination of the collation of these manuscripts revealed.

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Sidney’s Critique of Humanism in the New Arcadia Donald Stump

THE STORY OF SIDNEY’S LONG AND UNHAPPY WAIT FOR A ROYAL PREFERment in the years 1577–85 is well known. Less fully studied are the effects of the wait in shaping his mature views of the humanist project that had prepared him to serve his Queen as a soldier, a courtier, a royal advisor, and a diplomatic envoy. Evidence from the two versions of Arcadia suggests that the effects were severe—that he had, in fact, lost faith in the system of education that had in so many ways defined his life until his return from his embassy to the court of Emperor Rudolph in 1577. It is often asserted that Sidney was himself a humanist, or at least that his views were deeply informed by humanism, and there is much to be said for this view so long as one concentrates on his early years or on specialized matters such as his poetic theory.1 Having grown up with the example before him of his father, the governor of Wales and lord deputy of Ireland, and of his uncles, the powerful Earls of Leicester and Warwick, he was bred to public service. His father was educated at Oxford in the days of the noted humanists Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham and founded grammar schools during his tenure in Ireland. Philip studied the classics at Shrewsbury and Oxford and adopted as his mentor and close friend the French humanist Hubert Languet. In letters advising his brother Robert and Edward Denny on their education, he concentrates on Greek and Roman classics, virtually excluding Christian texts other than the Bible.2 At pains to recommend the proper way to gain ‘‘worldly wisdom’’ through reading and travel,3 he stresses the importance of history and the liberal arts, with special emphasis on rhetoric, arithmetic, and geometry and considerable attention to physical training and the practice of martial arts.4 Preeminent in his recommendations to both men is the study of Greek moral and political philosophy and the application of its conclusions to public affairs. As Sidney reminds his brother Robert, ‘‘your purpose is, being 154

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a gentleman born, to furnish yourself with the knowledge of such things as may be serviceable to your country,’’5 and his notion of what is ‘‘serviceable’’ is grounded in the principles of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics.6 Humanism, in short, shaped both his aims and his most deeply held assumptions as he prepared for his own life of public service. In 1577, however, after completing his studies and his Continental tour, Sidney faced his first major test. Assigned a sensitive diplomatic mission to the court of Emperor Rudolph and the Counts Palatine to sound them out on the prospects of a Protestant League, he overstepped his instructions, meeting with the Jesuit Edmund Campion and entertaining successive offers of marriage to a German princess and the daughter of William of Orange. In the eyes of the Queen, he had failed his test, and her trust proved difficult to regain.7 Years of fruitless waiting for a suitable preferment followed, and by October 1580, he had, as he admits to his brother Robert, begun to write about such things as education and public service ‘‘as one that, for myself, have given over the delight in the world.’’8 The Old Arcadia, which was written in the years 1579–81, shows signs of second thoughts about the humanist project to bring about a better and more orderly world by educating monarchs and magistrates, soldiers and courtiers, in the wisdom of the ancients.9 By the time he composed New Arcadia—mainly in 1583–84, after he had endured years of humiliating financial distress and political frustration—he was prepared to go further, subordinating humanism to Protestantism as the dominant influence on his work.10 I would argue, in fact, that the revised Arcadia mounts a sustained and systematic critique of the very humanist ideals that critics from Kenneth Myrick to Nancy Lindheim and Karl-Heinz Magister have seen as central to Sidney’s view of the world.11 The New Arcadia seems to me too dark in its assessment of human nature and too acute in its attacks on the efficacy of a classical education to support such a reading. In the original version of the romance, humanist education lies in the background. We learn little about the early schooling of the heroes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, and though we are told somewhat more about their grand tour in Asia, even that part of their education is narrated only briefly in comparison with more elaborate accounts in the New Arcadia. The adventures in Asia Minor are rendered, not for their own sake, but as a way to woo Pamela and Philoclea. In the revised Arcadia, however, Sidney expands the accounts far beyond the requirements of the main action, concentrating instead on what a humanist education teaches the princes before their Asian adventures, the skills they command in conse-

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quence, and the efficacy of those skills in amending the evils of a fallen world. In book 2, the princes have mixed success, and in book 3, Sidney contrasts their active virtues with virtues of suffering that have little to do with their humanist education. Influenced by the women they love, the heroes pursue—not a five-act tragicomic progression that leads them from public achievement to private passion and from private passion to deception, calamity, judgment, and rehabilitation, as in the original Arcadia but—an epic journey that confronts them with the limits of their own education. The additions to books 2 and 3 raise questions, then, about the means employed by the humanists to prepare princes, magistrates, courtiers, and counselors for service to the state. Sidney first explores the value of the humanists’ program of paideia, interrogating its stress on the arts of the counselor and the persuasive orator and questioning its confidence that ‘‘worldly wisdom’’ and martial prowess can redress the injustices of a fallen world. In the process, he presents the classical ideal of sapientia et fortitudo as both unattainable and inadequate. At the end of the revised Arcadia, he presents an alternate view of heroism that has its origins, not in the humanist schoolrooms of his youth, but in the Protestant households where he languished after his loss of favor at court.

Paideia In the Old Arcadia, the kind of education that Pyrocles and Musidorus have received is not much discussed. We learn only that they ‘‘gave themselves wholly over to those knowledges which might in the course of their life be ministers to well doing’’ and that they finished their education by undertaking the equivalent of a Continental tour intended to increase their ‘‘worthiness’’ by putting their learning to the test (OA 10–11, 104).12 Having been called to visit Euarchus and having suffered shipwreck in Asia Minor, the young princes proceed to defend ladies from wrong and to restore ‘‘disinherited persons’’ to their rights (11). There is nothing much in Sidney’s sketchy comments on their education to call sixteenth-century humanism specifically to mind or to invite reflection on its merits. In a lengthy passage added to the New Arcadia, however, an elaborate, humanist educational system is spelled out, and questions about its efficacy arise from the start. In the passage on the education of Pyrocles and Musidorus, Sidney begins with a description of Euarchus (‘‘good ruler’’), who serves as the primary exemplar of manly excellence for his son and

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nephew. The settled habits of the Macedonian king include Aristotle’s master virtue, magnanimity, and the four classical virtues of courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice, which Sidney lays out schematically as if he were offering a textbook example: [He,] contenting himself to guide that ship wherein the heavens had placed him, showed no less magnanimity in dangerless despising, than others in dangerous affecting, the multiplying of kingdoms (for the earth hath since borne enow bleeding witnesses that it was no want of true courage); who as he was most wise to see what was best, and most just in the performing what he saw, and temperate in abstaining from anything anyway contrary, so, think I, no thought can imagine a greater heart to see and contemn danger. (NA 159; italics added)

Having held up classical virtues as the ideal, Sidney then lays out the well-known humanist means for attaining them: by the good order of Euarchus, well performed by his sister [the mother of Musidorus and foster mother of Pyrocles], they were so brought up that all the sparks of virtue which nature had kindled in them were so blown to give forth their uttermost heat [ . . . ]; for almost before they could perfectly speak they began to receive conceits not unworthy of the best speakers; excellent devices being used to make even their sports profitable, images of battles and fortifications being then delivered to their memory, which, after, their stronger judgements might dispense; the delight of tales being converted to the knowledge of all stories of worthy princes, both to move them to do nobly, and teach them how to do nobly, the beauty of virtue still being set before their eyes, and that taught them with far more diligent care than grammatical rules; their bodies exercised in all abilities both of doing and suffering, and their minds acquainted by degrees with dangers; and in sum, all bent to the making up of princely minds [ . . . ] nature having done so much for them in nothing as that it made them lords of truth, whereon all the other goods were builded. (NA 163–64)

Put to their lessons at an early age, subjected to training in grammar as a basis for the more important task of emulating ‘‘the best speakers,’’ taught to progress from literary narratives (‘‘tales’’) to historical narratives (‘‘stories of all worthy princes’’), exercised in body, engaged in games with serious lessons for the art of war, and gradually acclimated to suffering and danger—the education of Pyrocles and Musidorus has been a model of humanist preparation for service to the state. Underlying the program is the humanist assumption that ‘‘all the other goods’’ are built upon becoming ‘‘lords of truth.’’ The rationalism of the claim—its confidence that inner

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promptings of ‘‘nature,’’ informed by the outward discipline of education, are sufficient in themselves to lead men such as Musidorus to virtue—sounds an odd note in a work by an author who elsewhere laments the impediments to the ‘‘purifying of wit [ . . . ] which commonly we call learning’’ that arise from ‘‘our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings.’’13 Musidorus may believe that knowledge is the foundation on which all other goods are built and that classical education has the power to equip men—and it is men, not women, who are in question here—with all the truth they need, but one wonders whether Sidney does. Signs that we are meant to interrogate Musidorus’s humanist ideal are woven into the passage itself. That the young hero should so complacently assert that nature and education have made him one of the ‘‘lords of truth’’ is ironic, since even as he speaks, he is engaged in a tangle of lies involving his claim to be a shepherd named Dorus. Both he and Pyrocles are, moreover, utterly blind to the destructive forces that their deceptions are unleashing in Arcadia. Even if Sidney intended to reshape the last books of the romance as extensively as he did books 1–3, the retention and elaboration of the original Delphic oracle suggests that the princes are hardly destined to have the sort of salutary effects on the state envisioned by their humanist teachers. Although Musidorus praises Euarchus for making it ‘‘his first and principal care . . . to appear unto his people such as he would have them be, and to be such as he appeared’’ (160), the prince is not much concerned to follow his uncle’s example. Even more revealing is Musidorus’s attitude toward the second great formative influence on his childhood, namely the prophecies uttered at his birth. Although he has so far dedicated his life to Euarchus’s humanist agenda, the words of the soothsayers suggest the importance of powers with an agenda of their own that lies beyond human reason. Musidorus tells Pamela that, as an infant, scarcely was [he] made partaker of this oft-blinding light when there were found numbers of soothsayers who affirmed strange and incredible things should be performed by that child. Whether the heavens at that time listed to play with ignorant mankind, or that flattery be so presumptuous as even at times to borrow the face of divinity, but certainly so did the boldness of their affirmation accompany the greatness of what they did affirm (even, descending to particularities, what kingdoms he should overcome). (NA 162)

Musidorus’s remarks on the prophecies display the same sort of division of mind as his comments on the value of being what one seems

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and seeking to be a ‘‘lord of truth.’’ Even allowing for courteous selfdeprecation, his way of speaking of the higher powers is surprising, since it suggests that the gods play cruelly with human beings or that their prophets deceive and flatter them. In his skepticism about prophecies, moreover, Musidorus resembles another rationalist in the book, Philanax, who argues that oracles should never be consulted and, if they are, that their words should be ignored (NA 20– 21). Philanax is surely right to point out that, if the gods have ordained something and revealed it in an oracle, it is vain to attempt to circumvent their will. He misses, however, a larger question, which is why the gods reveal their will through oracles in the first place. In rejecting not only unwise human reactions to oracles but also the oracles themselves, which he terms ‘‘nothing but fancy’’ (21), he allows rationalism to blind him to their importance in revealing the existence of divine powers and the inevitability and justice with which they govern. The growing distance between Sidney’s own views and those of Musidorus appears clearly when we compare the passage above with the corresponding paragraph on the princes’ education in the Old Arcadia. There, the narrator gives God a good deal more credit than Musidorus does, remarking that the princes’ early desire for knowledge and virtue arose, not simply from ‘‘sparks of virtue which nature had kindled,’’ as the Musidorus of the revision says, but from the princes’ reflection that ‘‘the divine part of man was not enclosed in this body for nothing’’ (10). The shipwreck that begins their Asian tour comes about because ‘‘so pleased it God, who reserved them to greater traverses, both of good and evil fortune’’ (10). In the New Arcadia, however, the provident God who ‘‘reserves’’ people for good fortune and bad has been elided. Musidorus says of the favorable sailing weather just before the storm that ‘‘they had . . . as pleasing entertainment as the falsest heart could give to him he means worst to,’’ and he soon finds himself ‘‘as in a tumultuous kingdom,’’ with the ‘‘face of heaven’’ blacked over, ‘‘preparing as it were a mournful stage for a tragedy to be played on’’ (165–66). Once again, the prince leaves the impression that God is a mysterious and cruel being, a ruler with ‘‘falsest heart’’ who reigns over a tragic and tumultuous kingdom. The two alternative worldviews implicit in the passages on paideia in the New Arcadia—those of the humanist Musidorus and of the soothsayers—provide the poles between which, it seems to me, we are invited to navigate the ‘‘tumultuous kingdom’’ represented in Sidney’s epic. We should not assume that Sidney was equally opposed to all forms of humanism. The sort espoused by his devoutly

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Protestant mentor, Hubert Languet, would probably have been more congenial to him than the classical variety seen in Musidorus, with its tendency to worldliness, rationalism, and skepticism in matters of religion. Yet to the extent that all humanists relied on education in the pagan classics, with special emphasis on Greek ethical and political thought, Latin oratory, ancient and modern history, and the arts of counsel and war, his work bears on the movement in general. In the adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus, Sidney interrogates not only the humanists’ ideal of paideia but also the other means that they advocated to bring disordered kingdoms under rational control. Let me begin with two of these means, reasoned counsel and oratorical skill.

Counsel and Rhetoric Even in the Old Arcadia, giving advice to princes is a thankless job. When, ‘‘for fashion’s sake,’’ Basilius seeks counsel of Philanax concerning the proper response to the Delphic Oracle, he does so ‘‘rather for confirmation of fancies than correcting of errors’’ (OA 6). When the nobleman gives a well-reasoned reply—pointing out that prophecies are ‘‘either not to be respected or not to be prevented’’ and arguing that ‘‘wisdom and virtue be the only destinies appointed to man to follow’’—Basilius is irritated rather than enlightened, feeling ‘‘grieved to have any man say that which he had not seen’’ (7–8). Though Philanax accurately predicts most of the ills suffered by the royal family because of the king’s decision to retreat to his rural lodges, Basilius pays no attention. There are in Philanax’s speech, moreover, ironies that tell against him as counselor as well as against his master as ruler. Inveighing against Basilius’s impulse to lock up his daughters, Philanax points out that it will ‘‘argue suspicion, the most venomous gall to virtue’’ (OA 8). Later, when the prophecy is fulfilled in the apparent death of the king, Philanax (whose name means ‘‘lover of the ruler’’) is so aggrieved that he falls prey to suspicion himself, changing from a rational counselor to one of ‘‘vindictive resolution’’ who is ‘‘transported with an unjust justice’’ (287). Though of Stoic temper, he finds in the end that he is better at counseling others to be patient and rational in protecting those they love than he is at carrying out his own advice. Other instances of good counsel prove similarly futile or ironic. In both versions of the book, Musidorus’s advice that Pyrocles not demean himself by impersonating a woman is followed almost im-

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mediately by Musidorus’s decision to demean himself by impersonating a shepherd. In the New Arcadia, Pyrocles’ success in ending the Laconian civil war by counseling the Helots to make a truce with the aristocrats succeeds, but for the wrong reason, since the Helots are ‘‘as much moved by his authority as persuaded by his reasons’’ (39). Philanax’s sound advice that Basilius not knuckle under to Cecropia’s threats to kill his daughters and Zelmane unless the siege is lifted is also ignored. The king withdraws, not for reasons of state but because his wife has cast herself at his feet and because he secretly wishes to preserve Zelmane’s life in hopes of an adulterous affair (418). Nothing in either version of Arcadia suggests that offering carefully reasoned advice is likely to have beneficial effects. Even Euarchus, the model of humanist virtue, seems to have little use for counselors, preferring to make decisions by his own lights. Sidney’s inability to bring Queen Elizabeth to see reason about the need for a Protestant League, the danger of a French marriage, and the urgency of sending troops to the Netherlands may well have been on his mind as he devised such instances of the futility of giving good advice.14 In his critique of humanism, training in rhetoric fares little better than skill in counsel. When, in the Old Arcadia, a drunken birthday party for Basilius leads some of the humbler Arcadians to attack the royal lodges in order to force the King out of retirement and to register discontent at the growing influence of Pyrocles (in his guise as Zelmane), Pyrocles swiftly contains their violence, mostly by employing his extraordinary gifts as an orator. In the revised version, however, the incident has been altered in ways that call in question the very power of oratory that the passage once served to illustrate. For one thing, Pyrocles and Musidorus confront a less tractable crowd and quickly fall into an orgy of maiming and killing, only afterwards making use of the power of words.15 For another, Sidney has Musidorus offer admiring comments which suggest that the effectiveness of Pyrocles’ speeches depends largely on such things as his appearance, gestures, tonality, and skill in arousing emotions rather than on anything of substance in the speeches themselves: The action Zelmane used, being beautified by nature and apparelled with skill (her gestures being such that, as her words did paint out her mind, so they served as a shadow to make the picture more lively and sensible; with the sweet clearness of her voice rising and falling kindly, as the nature of the word and efficacy of the matter required), all together in such an admirable person . . . gave such a way unto her speech through the rugged wilderness of their imaginations . . . that instead of

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roaring cries there was now heard nothing but a confused muttering. (287)

Although sixteenth-century humanists were fond of saying that wisdom and eloquence are indivisible, that is not the case here.16 The commoners are more like beasts charmed by their senses than human beings persuaded by reason. The speeches of Pyrocles also raise troubling ethical issues. He begins by shamelessly flattering the rioters, telling them that they ‘‘show indeed in themselves the right nature of valure’’ and suggesting what he knows to be equally false, namely that they did not realize that their king was among the helmeted knights whom they assailed (NA 283). He proceeds by asking questions that divide them, provoking jealousy ‘‘by the acquaintance [he] had with such kind of humours’’ until he has succeeded in inciting bloody fighting within their ranks (285, 287–90). He does so, moreover, under a false show of fearing the very effects that he is seeking, addressing them ‘‘as though [he] took great care of their well-doing and were afraid of their falling out’’ (284). Finally, he allies himself with the faction most eager to receive Basilius’s pardon, thus pursuing his own self-interest by further ingratiating himself with the royal family and the King. In the process, the crowd forgets the two complaints that moved them in the first place: that their King has abdicated his responsibilities, turning rule of Arcadia over to Philanax, and that a foreign woman, Zelmane, has gained a dangerous degree of influence over the royal family. Though the citizens may be besotted, ignorant, and wrong to take violent action against their King, they are, in fact, quite right to worry and complain. Pyrocles’ skillful rhetoric thus distracts both King and commons from the issues that should be uppermost in their minds, namely Basilius’s inappropriate reaction to the Delphic Oracle, his abdication of his royal responsibilities, and his blinding by erotic desire. In consequence, the kingdom drifts unimpeded toward the calamities that the Delphic Oracle had foretold. That Sidney means us to have mixed feelings about Pyrocles’ extraordinary ability to move the crowd is also suggested by the introduction of a second orator in the revised version. The treacherous Clinias, who has fomented the insurrection, acts as an ironic mirror in which Pyrocles is reflected in a far less flattering light than in the Old Arcadia. Though the prince is nobler and better educated than Clinias, they are uncomfortably alike. While pretending to be moved by loyalty and respect for the King, both are pursing secret agendas that run counter to Basilius’s wishes and to the unity of his family

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and state. Both are also engaged in calming waters that they themselves first helped to stir up, Clinias by taking Basilius’s part in an insurrection that he himself fomented and Pyrocles by putting down a popular disturbance for which he, in his disguise as Zelmane, was a principal cause. Both use flattery, and both achieve their ends by moving people to violence. Both seem, moreover, to have been educated by humanists. As Sidney remarks, ‘‘This Clinias in his youth had been a scholar (so far as to learn rather words than manners, and of words, rather plenty than order) and oft had used to be an actor in tragedies (where he had learned, besides slidingness of language, acquaintance with many passions, and to frame his face to bear the figure of them), long used to the eyes and ears of men’’ (288). The allusion here is probably to the common practice of putting on student performances of classical plays in humanist grammar schools. Though of better moral character that Clinias, Pyrocles is also adept in the ‘‘slidingness of language’’ and understands the passions and how to ‘‘frame his face,’’ as the narrator suggests at one point when he describes his putting on a studied demeanor of ‘‘angerless bravery and an unbashed mildness’’ (285). Both Pyrocles and Musidorus are also fond of comparing themselves to actors in a stage tragedy.17 In their false shows and deceptions, they are becoming more like Clinias all the time. To an unusual extent, sixteenth-century humanists pinned their hopes for establishing a just and humane political order on the power of words. Sidney repeatedly shows, however, that the ‘‘infected wills’’ of his characters are reflected in their rhetoric. Amphialus is a case in point. In defending the rebellion begun by his mother, he buys time by crafting letters to potential supporters that make cunning use of the principles of classical rhetoric. First he analyzes his audience, ‘‘to each . . . conforming himself, after their humours: to his friends, friendliness; to the ambitious, great expectations, to the displeased, revenge; to the greedy, spoil.’’ Then he makes his case, ‘‘from true commonplaces fetch[ing] down most false applications’’ (324–25) and balancing arguments for the revolt with refutations of likely objections. Of this display of well-schooled rhetoric—undertaken in the knowledge ‘‘how few there be that can discern between truth and truthlikeness, between shows and substance’’—Sidney remarks that it had the desired effect, not just on naive listeners, but also on those sufficiently astute to see through its shoddy reasoning. He writes that ‘‘To this effect, amplified with arguments and examples, and painted with rhetorical colours, did [Amphialus] sow abroad many discourses, which, as they prevailed with some of more quick than sound conceit . . . , so in many did it

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breed a coolness to deal violently against him’’ (326). The temptation to employ the humanist linguistic skills honed for bad ends seems to have been much on Sidney’s mind, for in the revised Arcadia, nearly all the new references to oratory show its power to mislead and deceive. Of Plexirtus, he writes, ‘‘though no man had less goodness in his soul than he, no man could better find the places whence arguments might grow of goodness to another; though no man felt less pity, no man could tell better how to stir pity’’ (185). Of Pamphilus attempting to justify himself to the women he has wronged, we read, ‘‘he seeing himself confronted by so many, like a resolute orator went not to denial, but to justify his cruel falsehood,’’ using ‘‘jests and disdainful passages’’ to disarm their wrath—though not, as it turns out, successfully (NA 239). Sidney also makes a telling change in commenting on the power of words over the mob in book 2. Whereas, in the Old Arcadia, it is the narrator himself who analyzes the rhetoric, in the revised version it is the sly and despicable Clinias who explains how shrewd oratory achieves its remarkable effects.18 In interrogating the humanists’ emphasis on skill with words, the author invites us, then, to see not only disturbing similarities between Pyrocles and Clinias, but also—if we’ve read both versions, as Sidney’s sister and friends had—between Clinias and the original narrator, who takes a delight in the manipulative power of language from which the later Sidney prefers to distance himself. Sidney’s revisions do not, of course, call into question the need for wisdom in counsel or skill in rhetoric. It is the foolish and corrupt uses that human beings make of such abilities that concern him. Ultimately, his quarrel with humanism has less to do with its preoccupation with the ability to speak than with its optimistic appraisal of human nature and the virtues of which it is capable, to which I now turn.

Sapientia et Fortitudo In interrogating the humanist ideal of virtus, or manly excellence, Sidney does not deny the praiseworthiness of the ethical and political virtues to which his heroes have dedicated their lives.19 In the revisions to the New Arcadia, however, he does cast doubt on the prospect that any mere mortal will ever fully attain such virtues or that they will bring order to a fallen world. In the Old Arcadia, Sidney had shown more confidence in his heroes. The flashbacks to their Asian adventures present grand images of two extraordinarily able young men successfully righting wrongs

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in a barbarous part of the world. Other than Erona—whose final rescue Sidney saves for ‘‘some other spirit to exercise his pen in’’ (417)—not one of the deserving people whom Pyrocles and Musidorus assists comes to grief, and other than Erona’s captor Artaxia, not a single evil person escapes unpunished (OA 153–59). The original Asian episodes seem designed, then, to demonstrate the merits of Greek education and the values that it instills. The heroism of Pyrocles and Musidorus in defending the Arcadian royal family from a lion and a bear at the end of book 1 and from the rebellious mob at the end of book 2 suggests that, whatever darkening of reason or lapse in virtue their frustrated desires for the princesses may bring them to, Sidney is not questioning the premises of their education. The princes fall, but in a very conventional Greek way. One of the recurrent themes of Attic tragedy and its later Roman and Hellenistic imitations, to which Sidney constantly compares the Old Arcadia, is the power of eros to overwhelm temperance and to cloud moral and political judgment. In writing of men who turn aside from heroic quests to woo forbidden women, Sidney is simply following a well-established humanist tradition exemplified in such tragic myths as Aeneas’s truancy with Dido and Hercules’ lapses with Iole and Omphale.20 In the Asian adventures of the New Arcadia, however, the wisdom and fortitude required of the heroes are both harder to master and less efficacious,21 and the reasons have little to do with the effects of eros on the heroes. Just how thoroughly Sidney’s confidence in humanist remedies for the ills of the world had been shaken between the completion of the original version and the crafting of the revisions to book 2 can be measured by a comment offered by the original narrator. Tempted to relate the travels of his young heroes at greater length, he remarks, ‘‘what valiant acts they did, . . . how many ladies they defended from wrongs, and disinherited persons restored to their rights, it is a work for a higher style than mine’’ (OA 11). When, however, Sidney got around to adding new material to book 2 in a higher style, he did not pile one heroic rescue on another, as he seems to have intended. In fact, of all the victims of injustice that Sidney added to the revised Arcadia, only Leonatus is restored to his rights, and even he is not exactly an instance of the sort of poetic justice that the narrator of the Old Arcadia seems to have had in mind. Leonatus’s tormentor, his bastard half-brother Plexirtus, manages to avoid paying for his many crimes by putting on shows of false repentance, in one of which he lulls his generous-hearted brother into trusting him again and nearly succeeds in poisoning him. Plex-

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irtus then goes on to commit a long series of villainies and is never brought to justice. In situations where women are the subjects of abuse, we find a similar tendency to add episodes in which heroic virtue does not prevail. For example, Pyrocles’ attempt to save Dido from her enraged lover Pamphilus, who intends to have her killed before her father’s eyes, goes awry when her father, the miserly Chremes, discovers Pyrocles’ identity and turns on him in order to collect a bounty offered by Artaxia (NA 242–48). Subsequently, in an ambush prepared by Chremes, Dido does in fact die before her father’s eyes as Pamphilus had hoped, though Chremes is so consumed by other worries about his possessions that he does not much care. Dido’s undeserved death is made all the more disturbing by the fact that Pyrocles had earlier saved Pamphilus from her and other angry women whom he had seduced and abandoned (236–41). Hardly a ‘‘master of truth’’ in such complex situations, Pyrocles saves the wrong person, allowing Pamphilus to continue his villainies and leading Dido unwittingly to her death in her father’s ambush. In consequence, Pamphilus is free to seduce yet another unsuspecting victim, Leucippe, who is forced to live out her life in a nunnery (259–60). Although Pyrocles and Musidorus do extraordinary deeds in Asia, freeing the kingdoms of Phrygia, Pontus, and Paphlagonia from tyrants and ending the Bythinian civil war, Sidney’s revisions suggest that no system of paideia is adequate to prepare the young for evils of a more tangled and insidious kind. Signs of the princes’ delusion in thinking themselves equal to such challenges are evident almost from the start. When they decide not to join Euarchus in Byzantium and instead to undertake adventures ‘‘to the good of mankind,’’ they go privately to seek exercises of their virtue, thinking it not so worthy to be brought to heroical effects by fortune or necessity (like Ulysses and Aeneas) as by one’s own choice and working. And so went they away . . . , making time hast itself to be a circumstance of their honour, and one place witness to another of the truth of their doings. (179)

The overweening confidence in their own wisdom and prowess, the presumption that their education has prepared them to overgo even the greatest heroes of classical epic, the desire to make time itself go faster in order to gain honor as quickly as they can—these signs of hubris do not bode well, and the results are progressively more tragic. Early triumphs give way to later calamities, ending in the most pitiful of the misfortunes that beset them, namely the deaths of two

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blameless young members of the Iberian royal family, Palladius and Zelmane, who give their lives in helping them to escape from the fix that they have gotten themselves into with Andromana. As the narrator remarks, ‘‘private chivalries’’ are ‘‘more dangerous, though less famous’’ than public ones (186), and it is private entanglements that stymie the princes. It is no accident, I think, that Sidney’s own career suffered shipwreck because of honorable but ill-advised private dealings with persons in power. In attempting to strengthen the Protestant League by entertaining offers of marriage, in standing up to the Earl of Oxford rather than relinquish a tennis court, and in offering Queen Elizabeth unsolicited advice about her negotiations for a French marriage, Sidney set a brave but imprudent course not unlike that of Pyrocles and Musidorus, and by the time he returned to Arcadia to make revisions, he had paid a heavy price.22

Human Nature Beyond coming to terms with the ways of the world, Sidney seems to have been rethinking his assumption that human beings are endowed with what Musidorus calls ‘‘sparks of virtue’’ that only need to be fanned by education in order to develop.23 In the revised version of the princes’ adventures in Asia, evil characters are both more numerous and more depraved than they are in the Old Arcadia. Although the original Andromana is willful and incontinent, imprisoning Pyrocles and Musidorus in hopes of coercing them to have sex with her, Sidney complicates the reader’s view of her by making her a victim of even greater villainies by an Arabian prince who has seduced her on promise of marriage and has subsequently turned his army against her. Even after their ordeal in prison, Pyrocles and Musidorus still pity her and think her worthy of rescue. The Andromana of the revised Arcadia, however, has no such extenuating history. Having bedded the youthful Plangus and then seduced and married his father, she becomes enraged when Plangus rejects her offer of a me´nage a` trois. Poisoning his father’s opinion of him in ways so subtle and cunning that they call Shakespeare’s Iago to mind, she then drives Plangus from his home and his kingdom (NA 215–22). Besides reshaping such characters, Sidney also adds new ones who are equally depraved: Baccha, who, having married Pamphilus, proves a sexual predator even more heartless than he; Anaxius and his two brothers, who, having vainly proposed marriage to Pamela, Philoclea, and the disguised Pyrocles during their captivity,

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decide to rape them all; Tiridates, who, having been rejected by Erona, ‘‘wrote as it were sonnets of his love in the blood, and tuned them in the cries, of her subjects’’ (206); Artaxia, who, having lost her brother Tiridates, holds the innocent Erona hostage in order to bring Pyrocles and Musidorus to pay for his death. The extraordinary evils of which human nature is capable in the revised Arcadia are illustrated most memorably in the life of the bastard Plexirtus, on whom Shakespeare modeled the character of Edmund in King Lear. Having beguiled, dominated, and ultimately destroyed his own father, Plexirtus seizes power from his brother and, when forced to restore it, lays cunning traps to murder him and others who are sufficiently trusting to give him a second chance. So convincing is he in the role of a humble, reformed sinner that, even Pyrocles and Musidorus, who know all about his past treacheries— including a device by which he brought two devoted brothers, Tydeus and Telenor, to disguise themselves and kill one another— offer him their trust and friendship. His plot to assassinate the princes during their return to Greece calls in question their faith in humanist teachings about the tractability of human nature. There is no one quite like Plexirtus in the Old Arcadia. Tyrants and brutes play a part there, of course, but no one is so self-interested, so cunning and ruthless as he, hardened against all appeals to moral decency, familial piety, or fear of the gods. In the revised Arcadia, however, there are many who are similarly wicked. It is revealing of Sidney’s larger purposes in the revised Arcadia that he elevates the shipwreck caused by Plexirtus, making it the first image that we behold after the departure of Urania. It serves as a fitting emblem for his fictional world. Now it might be argued that it is misleading to regard the princes’ inadequacies in dealing with figures such as Pamphilus and Chremes, Andromana and Artaxia, Tiridates and Plexirtus as a reflection on classical education. The ancient Greeks defined their ideals in contradistinction to those of cultures in Asia Minor and never made much headway in defeating or assimilating such cultures. In the revised Arcadia, however, Sidney makes little distinction between the kinds of barbarity to be found beyond the Hellespont and those of Greece itself. Such differences as we see are of degree rather than of kind. Consider the many similarities between incidents involving the Greeks and those involving ‘‘barbarians.’’ The Bythinian civil war resembles that in Laconia, and Pyrocles and Musidorus end it by similar means. Antiphilus’s desire to enjoy two very different kinds of women—his submissive wife Erona and the martial Queen Artaxia—

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resembles Basilius’s desire to possess both the Amazonian princess Zelmane and his more domesticated wife, Gynecia. Erona’s rebellion against the god of love and her subsequent suffering when she falls in love with a man outside her social rank parallels Musidorus’s disdain for love and subsequent crossing of class lines to woo Pamela in the guise of a shepherd. Andromana’s dominance over her less clever husband, the King of Iberia, and her jealousy of her daughter’s love for Pyrocles resembles Gynecia’s relationship with Basilius and Philoclea. The difficulty that Pyrocles and Musidorus face when required to accord proper respect to the lascivious Queen Andromana without dishonoring her husband resembles the dilemma in which Pyrocles finds himself in dealing with Queen Gynecia. The cruel means employed by Erona’s father to force her to marry Tiridates—‘‘making a solemn execution to be done of another, under the name of Antiphilus, whom he kept in prison’’ (205)— foreshadows similar cruelties undertaken by Cecropia against Philoclea and Pamela. Asia and Greece are not, then, so very different. At the beginning of the book, Sidney invites us to ponder the similarities by having his Greek heroes assume Asian names. At the end, he shows us the similarity of characters from both sides of the Bosporus by having the Asian princes Anaxius, Zoilus, and Lycurgus take center stage in a rebellion originally undertaken by Greeks who are nearly as intemperate, ambitious, and lawless as they. Arcadia, once a stable and peaceful state sheltered in central Greece from the troubles that Euarchus has been dealing with on the northern and eastern frontiers, quickly develops its own version of ‘‘Asian problems,’’ first in the love intrigues of its royal family and then in its slide into civil war during Amphialus’s rebellion. In his revisions, Sidney sets aside the narrow tragicomic focus of the Old Arcadia in favor of a wider epic panorama in which Greek ideals are called into question by the prevalence of ‘‘Asian’’ vices, both at home and abroad. The civil war described in book 3 provides the final and most revealing test of the manly virtus idealized by Sidney’s heroes, and in the end, their abilities prove of surprisingly little use in resolving the conflict. Doing all that natural gifts and superb training allow, Musidorus manages to incapacitate Amphialus in single combat, yet just when it seems that martial heroism will win the war, Cecropia threatens to kill Basilius’s daughters and his beloved Zelmane, and the King lifts the siege. The focus then shifts from outward strength to inward wisdom as Sidney turns his attention from the lists to the inner chambers of Amphialus’s castle. With force of arms having brought nothing but spiraling cycles of violence, Pyrocles is left to

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succeed by other means. Yet he, too, fails. For all his ingenuity and prowess, he proves helpless to prevent Cecropia from pursuing a marriage between her son and one of the Arcadian princesses, much as Sidney found himself unable to forestall Catherine de Medici in her diplomatic initiative to match her son, the Duke of Anjou, with Queen Elizabeth in the fall of 1579.

Passive Heroism It is, I would argue, precisely Pyrocles’ humanist education that prevents him from responding appropriately to the sufferings inflicted by Cecropia. Pamela and Philoclea, who have not had the benefit of his classical paideia, do better. In trying their resistance, Cecropia begins by confronting them with cunning and irreligious arguments, then proceeds to whipping and other forms of physical abuse, and finally undertakes a savage campaign of psychological torture, forcing each to look on as her sister is apparently murdered. Though the princesses believe what their eyes tell them, neither wavers in her courage or her moral integrity. The one who breaks is Pyrocles. Although he has shared their captivity and some of their torments, the prince (whose name suggests his fiery temperament) can muster neither the calm nor the wisdom of the princesses. After the second scene of execution and the apparent death of Philoclea, he explodes in a ‘‘wild fury,’’ a fit of ‘‘madness,’’ which quickly leads from despair to attempted suicide. Before seeking to brain himself on the castle wall, he reveals just how far he has departed from Sidney’s ideal of true wisdom by indicting the higher powers, crying out, ‘‘O tyrant heaven! Traitor earth! Blind providence! No justice? How is this done? How is this suffered? Hath this world a government? If it have, let it pour out all his mischiefs on me’’ (431). It is one of the most notable features of Sidney’s revisions of Arcadia that he added numerous references to divine providence and the justice of the higher powers, calling attention to all the ways in which it is at work even when people least think it is.24 The attitude of Philoclea—the more timid and less philosophical of the royal sisters— offers a telling contrast to that of Pyrocles. When Cecropia threatens to kill her sister if she does not marry Amphialus, Philoclea calmly offers to die in her sister’s place. Fashioning her own resolve on the unchanging constancy of the gods, she tells her tormentor, ‘‘Do what you will with us. For my part, heaven shall melt before I be removed’’ (424). Her courage comes

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in part from imitating Pamela, who had earlier demonstrated similar courage, refusing to yield to Cecropia’s threats and carrying on a lengthy theological debate with her tormentor which has as one of its conclusions, ‘‘This world . . . cannot otherwise consist but by a mind of wisdom which governs it’’ (362). Philoclea, having witnessed what she thought was the execution of her sister, imitates her in her own hour of trial. Though Pyrocles urges her to temporize and mislead Cecropia about her feelings for Amphialus in order to preserve her life, she refuses. After surviving her own mock execution and witnessing Pyrocles’ attempted suicide, Philoclea then reproaches her lover for losing his ethical bearings. Of his suggestion that she deceive Cecropia, she says, Pyrocles, my simplicity is such that I have hardly been able to keep a straight way; what shall I do in a crooked? But in this case there is no mean of dissimulation, not for the cunningest. Present answer is required, and present performance upon the answer. . . . Trouble me not therefore, dear Pyrocles, nor double not my death by tormenting my resolution. Since I cannot live with thee, I will die for thee. (430)

That Philoclea and Pamela analyze their situation as clearly and face death as steadily and self-effacingly as they do is heroism of a high order. It is, moreover, a kind of heroism that their lovers, who approach life with humanist assumptions, are ill equipped to understand or imitate. The course of events in the Captivity Episode seems designed to point up contrasts between the worldview of the princesses, who ground their morality in religious faith, and that of the princes, who base theirs in rational calculation of earthly means and ends. Educated in Aristotelian ethics, which takes earthly happiness as its telos and regards the rational ordering of the state as essential to that happiness, the princes cannot see the point in their ladies’ willingness to die rather than temporize, to leave the state without heirs rather than hatch schemes for their own survival. For their part, the princesses see no point in compromising their principles to preserve life when the gods are watching over them, providentially guiding their lives to ends beyond their understanding. The contrast is part, I believe, of a larger pattern that Mary Ellen Lamb finds in Sidney’s works between the ethos cultivated in the humanist schoolroom and that prevalent in the circles of women who raised boys like Sidney before they began their formal education.25 We see the same contrast elsewhere in Arcadia, notably in the pivotal episode that brings the Asian adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus to a disastrous close and leads them to Arcadia. Impris-

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oned by Andromana, the princes manage to escape, but only because, unbeknownst to them, Zelmane, the daughter of Plexirtus, has fallen in love with Pyrocles and has risked her life to aid them. Like the princesses of Arcadia, Zelmane represents an ideal of wisdom and fortitude quite different from that of the princes. Unlike their active heroism, hers is largely passive, showing itself in suffering rather than in striving. Concealing her identity behind the attire of a page and adopting the name Daiphantus, she sacrifices her identity, her gender, and her place in the Iberian royal family in order to follow the man whom she secretly loves, revealing her identity to him only after sickness brings her near to death. So moved is Pyrocles by her self-sacrifice that he adopts her name and imitates her actions as a lover, first calling himself Daiphantus and later Zelmane and concealing his gender in order to be near Philoclea. Here, however, the similarities between Pyrocles and Zelmane end. As his conduct during the Captivity Episode reveals, he has taken her name without altogether assimilating her ethos. His desire that Philoclea should bend the truth and yield a little to Cecropia in order to survive reveals the problem. Raised on the inherently active and worldly ethics of Aristotle, Pyrocles has neither the willingness to suffer nor the faith in an order beyond human wisdom needed to relinquish earthly hopes and aspirations. As the entire course of his secret dealings in Arcadia confirms, he will go to almost any length—including bringing danger on the royal family and violent division to the state—in order to gain the woman he loves. Though he tells Philoclea that Zelmane’s self-denial moved him ‘‘with such grief that I could willingly at that time have changed lives with her’’ (267), his words are deeply ironic. He has had an opportunity to emulate Zelmane by concealing his love and serving patiently, and he has passed it by. Had he emulated her humility, refusing to put himself forward in the dazzling figure of an Amazon princess, he might have avoided the disruptions that he brings to Philoclea’s family and state. It is not, however, in his make-up to follow Zelmane’s example in submitting to higher powers and setting aside his own personal aspirations. One cannot imagine him speaking the simple prayer that she utters as she approaches her death, ‘‘Oh God! How largely am I recompensed for my losses!’’ (267), or feeling grateful, as Zelmane does, simply to be mourned by the one she loves. In this respect, Pyrocles is more like his old alter-ego, Musidorus, than his new one. Clearly, it takes more than the name and clothing of a woman to bring a humanist such as Pyrocles to the sort of heroic self-abnegation that Sidney holds up as his highest ideal in the revised book 3.

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Now it might be argued that Sidney is not abandoning the earlier humanist ideal but simply offering an alternative form of heroism adapted to the special conditions of a hostage standoff. If that is the case, the princesses do indeed have something to teach men about courage and wisdom, but only in circumstances where women’s traditional subservience gives them wisdom and experience that male heroes lack. According to this view, once the standoff is resolved, Sidney would have reverted to more traditional models of heroism. This view finds some support in the closing pages of the New Arcadia, where Pyrocles recovers his sword and kills Lycurgus and Zoilus, and also in the treatment of women in the Old Arcadia. As Jean Howard’s work on female literary characters of the early modern period who cross-dress or otherwise violate traditional expectations for their gender suggests, even in works where women transcend their traditional subordinate roles in society, there is usually a strategy of recuperation by which they are eventually brought back to something like their original positions.26 One thinks of Pamela and Philoclea in the original Arcadia, who rebel against their father’s control by attempting to elope and then are brought back to their traditional subordination when he awakens at the end of book 5. Jean Howard’s thesis can, in turn, be usefully related to the work of Thomas Lacqueur,27 Laura Levine,28 and others who have analyzed the defensiveness and stridency with which some Elizabethan writers—notably the Puritan critics of the theaters—asserted their sense of masculine difference. Such studies suggest that, instilled with the belief that biological and cultural differences between men and women are fragile, such writers felt vulnerable and were therefore all the more aggressive in defending their traditional masculine prerogatives. Here again, the Old Arcadia seems to offer a prime illustration. From Musidorus’s warnings to Pyrocles about the danger of losing his manhood by cross-dressing as an Amazon to the narrator’s subsequent stress on the ‘‘poison’’ of love and its effeminizing and subversive effects on men, the romance presents manhood as fragile and in need of careful cultivation. In the Old Arcadia, at least, one sees tendencies in Sidney very much like those of the male authors involved in the antitheatrical debates. By the time Sidney wrote the New Arcadia, however, his views had changed a great deal. Not only had he come to question the value of paideia in all the ways that I have been discussing, but as Margaret Sullivan,29 Katherine Duncan-Jones,30 and others have argued, he had also begun to represent women such as Pamela and Philoclea and cross-dressed figures such as Pyrocles and Zelmane in a more favorable light than he had in the Old Arcadia. In the period 1581–

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85, just before he went to the Netherlands to fight and die against the growing power of Spain, Sidney was also growing more and more preoccupied with religion, as we can see from his interest in translating du Bartas’ La Semaine, Mornay’s Trueness of the Christian Religion, and the Psalms. This turn away from classical models may have disposed him to an ethic in which religiously motivated selfsacrifice is valued over ‘‘worldly wisdom.’’ Certainly, his translating projects immersed him in authors for whom the depravity of human nature and the limited efficacy of rational schemes to amend it are fundamental assumptions. In the homes of his sister, of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, and of his father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, where Sidney spent much of his time between 1577 and 1584, the influence of Calvin and others who stressed such doctrines would also have been strong.31 One revision that Sidney seems to have made to book 4 of the Old Arcadia between 1581 and his death reveals his thinking in this period. Of Dametas’s key role in disclosing the elopements of the royal lovers and bringing the action to its final catastrophe, the narrator says, ‘‘The almighty wisdom ever more delighting to show the world that by unlikeliest means greatest matters may come to conclusion; that human reason may be the more humbled, and more willingly give place to divine providence . . . brought in Dametas to play a part in this royal pageant.’’32 Sidney was also growing increasingly concerned about the chances that Spain might successfully invade and subjugate England. As we can see from the positions that he adopted as part of the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic faction headed by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, and from the pains that he took as Master of Ordnance to prepare the naval defenses at Dover harbor, the possibility of actual captivity and martyrdom in a Spanish invasion of an English civil war was very real to him. The closeness of his relationship to his sister Mary, for whom Arcadia and some of the religious works of this period were written, may also have contributed to the seachange in his attitude toward the value of passive, feminine strengths in comparison with aggressive, masculine ones. It is significant, in this light, that Arcadia was dedicated to her and to the ladies of her circle. Whatever the reasons, in the revised version of books 2 and 3, the heroics of Pyrocles and Musidorus in Asia Minor and in the Arcadian civil war seem increasingly ineffectual as a response to the violence, corruption, and treachery of the world around them. By contrast, the heroics of Pamela and Philoclea in bravely enduring and resisting the torments inflicted on them by Cecropia have a powerful appeal—though not, perhaps, to a humanist bent on re-

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forming the state or subduing the world according to the dictates of human reason. The sort of heroism practiced by Philoclea, Pamela, and the original Zelmane offers a noble alternative to the unending cycles of violence in which the heroes of more traditional epics such as Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas are represented when they meet force with force. By contrast, the passive heroism of Pamela and Philoclea maintains the primacy of religious faith and personal integrity above all else, refusing to fight evil with evil, even when the consequence may well be political failure, personal suffering, and death. This change in the very conception of the heroic also warrants a reassessment of Sidney’s position in early modern reappraisals of gender roles. In his last great work, the sense that masculinity is fragile and mutable does not, as it does in the Old Arcadia and other works by male writers of the period, lead to a correspondingly strident defense of ‘‘manly’’ virtue but rather to an exploration of the value of ‘‘womanly’’ virtue. In this, moreover, there is no likelihood of ‘‘recuperation,’’ for the turn to a passive ideal of heroism seems deeply rooted in the author’s own outlook at this period in his life. Nothing, moreover, in the words of the Delphic Oracle in the New Arcadia or in the course of later events in the Old Arcadia suggests that he intended to question or supersede the kind of heroism displayed by the princesses in Cecropia’s dungeons. When unraveling the complexities of Elizabethan attitudes toward gender, cultural critics would do well to look closely, not just at medical and marital treatises and at works in the antitheatrical debate and the drama, but also at heroic fictions like Arcadia that idealize womanly suffering and endurance. If I am right about Sidney’s turn from active to passive heroism as he reshaped his youthful romance into a prose epic, prevailing views of his place in the development of heroic poetry also need to be reassessed. In writing about Samson Agonistes, Mary Beth Rose has identified a long and influential tradition of heroic literature that, unlike classical epic, celebrates patient endurance as of greater worth than martial aggression. In works such as saints’ lives, patient Griselda stories, accounts of the Protestant and Jesuit martyrs, and exempla embedded in Stoic treatises, Milton found models of ‘‘passive heroics’’ that were important not only for Samson but also for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.33 In such works, it is the virtues traditionally regarded as feminine that are idealized, rather than the masculine qualities celebrated in the Aeneid and other classical works that were more central to the educational agenda of Renaissance humanism. I would argue that Sidney’s revisions to the Old

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Arcadia transformed it into the sort of heroic poem that Milton realized much more consistently and perfectly nearly a century later.

Notes 1. See, for example, Arthur F. Kinney, ‘‘Humanist Poetics and Elizabethan Fiction,’’ Renaissance Papers (1978), 31–45; Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 176–80; Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), xiii-xiv; A. C. Hamilton, ‘‘Sidney’s Humanism,’’ in Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements, ed. M[ichael] J. B. Allen, Dominic Baker-Smith, Arthur F. Kinney, and Margaret Sullivan (New York: AMS, 1990), 109–16; An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965), introduction, 19–25. 2. See the recommended readings in his letter to Edward Denny of Whitsunday 1580, in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Oxford Authors Series, 287–90 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 3. See his letters to Robert of October 18, 1580, and ca. May 1578 (DuncanJones, 291–94 and 284–87). By ‘‘worldly wisdom’’ Sidney means that ‘‘which stands in the mixed and correlative knowledge of things: in which kind comes in the knowledge of all leagues betwixt prince and prince: the topographical description of each country; how the one lies by situation to hurt or help the other; how they are to the sea; well harboured, or not; how stored with ships; how with revenue; how with fortifications and garrisons; how the people, warlike trained or kept under.’’ He also means ‘‘knowing of religions, policies, laws, bring up of children, discipline, both for war and peace, and such like’’ (Duncan-Jones, 285). 4. In the letter to Robert of October 18, 1580, he stresses mathematics and ‘‘play at weapons’’—particularly training with sword and dagger and exercise ‘‘at the tournament and barriers.’’ Though he discounts Ciceronianism as ‘‘the chief abuse of Oxford,’’ he stresses the study of ‘‘orations e re nata’’ in Greek and Roman histories and the need to mark them ‘‘with the note of rhetorical remembrances,’’ presumably marginalia identifying the various tropes and figures. 5. Letter ca. May 1578 (Duncan-Jones, 284). 6. See the letters to Languet of February 4, 1574, to Robert ca. May 1578, and to Denny of Whitsunday 1580 (Duncan-Jones, 280, 284, and 288). 7. On the most likely reasons for Sidney’s loss of royal favor, see Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 133–35. 8. Duncan-Jones, Oxford Authors edition, 293. 9. See Andrew D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 54–100; and Richard Helgerson The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 133–41. Weiner identifies in the characters of the Old Arcadia ‘‘classical formulations of the nature of man,’’ from Epicureanism and Stoicism to Aristotelianism to Platonism, each of which is shown to be wanting. Helgerson argues that the work moves the reader from approval of ‘‘civic humanism’’ to ‘‘detached tolerance’’ for the prodigal princes and finally to a questioning of the justice of the humanist Euarchus. 10. See Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, 1560–1660 (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 23–39 and 55–63; and Franco Marenco, Arcadia Puritana:

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L’uso della tradizione nella prima ‘‘Arcadia’’ di Sir Philip Sidney (Bari, Italy: Adriatica Editrice, 1968), passim. 11. See Kenneth O. Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 7–13; Nancy Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney’s ‘‘Arcadia’’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 122–25; Karl-Heinz Magister, ‘‘Philip Sidneys Arcadia: Ein ho¨fisch-humanistischer RenaissanceRoman,’’ Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (Weimar) 117 (1981): 109–26. 12. Throughout this essay, I cite The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), here abbreviated OA, and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), abbreviated NA. 13. The Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, 82 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 14. On parallels between Basilius and Elizabeth that reflect Sidney’s experiences at court, see Duncan-Jones, Courtier Poet, 177–79. 15. It is not clear that Stephen Greenblatt is right to suggest that Sidney endorses the princes’ brutality here, since it is one of the writer’s favorite devices to lull his readers into accepting conduct in his heroes that is later shown to be wrong. Musidorus, not Sidney, narrates the incident, and earlier in book 2, even he shows more sense, condemning princes who delight in humiliating commoners and holding up the example of Euarchus, who ‘‘virtuously and wisely acknowledging that he with his people made all but one politic body whereof himself was the head, even so cared for them as he would for his own limbs’’ (NA 161). That, in showing off his skill and valor to impress Pamela, Musidorus should take an unseemly delight in the hacking off of the limbs of commoners shows more, it seems to me, about him than about Sidney. See Greenblatt, ‘‘Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,’’ Representations 1 (February 1983): 1–29. 16. See Shepherd, 21. 17. See my article, ‘‘Sidney’s Concept of Tragedy in the Apology and in the Arcadia,’’ Studies in Philology 79 (Winter 1982): 41–61. 18. See the passages beginning ‘‘Oh weak trust of the many-headed multitude’’ (OA 131, NA 288), ‘‘Public affairs were mingled with private grudge’’ (OA 127, NA 291), and the narrator’s subsequent analysis of the ‘‘humours’’ that led the mob to revolt. 19. On the classical tradition that located such excellence in the virtues of sapientia and fortitudo, particularly as they are represented in the epics of Homer and Virgil, see Ernest R. Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), 167–82. 20. On Sidney’s imitation of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid and his frequent appropriation of the myth of Hercules in delineating the character and actions of Pyrocles, see Josephine A. Roberts, Architectonic Knowledge in the ‘‘New Arcadia’’ (1590): Sidney’s Use of the Heroic Journey (Salzburg: Institut fu¨r englische Sprache und Literatur, Universita¨t Salzburg, 1978), 129–38, 149–50, and 153–58; and ‘‘Herculean Love in Sir Philip Sidney’s Two Versions of Arcadia,’’ Essays in Renaissance Culture 4 (Spring 1978): 43–54. See also Lindheim, 43–51 and 117; and Skretkowicz, ‘‘Hercules in Sidney and Spenser,’’ Notes and Queries, n.s. 27 (August 1980): 306–10. 21. See Roberts, 65–78 and 99–103. 22. Scholars have remarked on similarities between the sexually predatory Andromana and Queen Elizabeth, noting parallels between Philisides encounter with Lelius at the Iberian Queen’s annual birthday celebration and Sidney’s encounter

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with Sir Henry Lee at Elizabeth’s Accession Day tournament in 1581. Such allusions contribute to the impression that the Asian adventures of book 2 had autobiographical resonances. See James Holly Hanford and Sara Ruth Watson, ‘‘Personal Allegory in the Arcadia: Philisides and Lelius,’’ Modern Philology 32 (August 1934): 1–10; Frances A. Yates, ‘‘Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957): 4–25, reprinted in Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 88–111. 23. See Franco Marenco, ‘‘Per una nuova interpretazione dell’Arcadia di Sidney,’’ English Miscellany 17 (1966): 9–48, which argues that Sidney’s aim is at once Protestant and humanist in that he seeks to reflect both the fullness of glory and the depth of degradation of which human beings are capable. For a similar position, see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 91–108. 24. See Sinfield, 38–39; and Dorothy Connell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Maker’s Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 143–45. 25. Lamb, ‘‘Apologizing for Pleasure in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: The Nurse of Abuse Meets the Tudor Grammar School,’’ Criticism 36 (Fall 1994): 499–519. 26. Jean Howard, ‘‘Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl,’’ in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman, 170–90 (New York: Routledge, 1992). 27. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 125–42. 28. Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14–25. 29. Margaret Sullivan, ‘‘Amazons and Aristocrats: The Function of Pyrocles’ Amazon Role in Sidney’s Revised Arcadia,’’ in Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit, ed. Jean R. Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitz, and Allison P. Coudert, 62–81 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 30. Duncan-Jones, Courtier Poet, 260–66. 31. On the religious worldview of Sidney’s most influential relatives, friends, and allies, see Weiner, 5–18. 32. OA, textual apparatus to page 265. 33. Mary Beth Rose, ‘‘ ‘Vigorous Most / When Most Unactive Deem’d’: Gender and the Heroics of Endurance in Milton’s Samson, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Mary Astell’s Some Reflections upon Marriage,’’ Milton Studies 33 (1997): 83–109.

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Shakespeare, Henri IV, and the Tyranny of Royal Style Victor Skretkowicz

Shakespeare and Essex

IN 1589, THE HUGUENOT LEADER HENRI DE BOURBON (1553–1610), BETTER known as Henri III of Navarre, succeeded his brother-in-law Henri III as king of France. On July 25, 1593, Navarre declared himself a Catholic. He was finally crowned on January 14, 1594, and was assassinated on May 14, 1610.1 It is unlikely to be coincidental that, between 1595 and 1609, the years spanning Henri IV’s reign, Shakespeare creates a series of dramatizations representing a preference for popular, voluntarily limited monarchy. From Richard II to Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s tyrants employ a peculiarly detached, formal royal style in the manner cultivated and perfected by Henri III. Like Henri III, the last remaining son of Henri II and Catherine de Me´dicis, they knowingly use this rhetorical contrivance to distance themselves from their subjects. To their admirers, they assume the properties of demi-gods. To their victims, their unbounded arrogance legitimizes opposition, however violent. Henri of Navarre brought a new bloodline and Calvinist inspired ideas of reformed Christianity to the throne. Although by the time of his coronation Navarre had become a publicly avowed Catholic, he bucked the political and religious trends of his predecessor. He was a progressive and uniting king, implementing the Edict of Nantes (1598), which granted generous, though limited, rights of Protestant worship where none had previously been tolerated. And he maintained close links with those Protestant allies who for many years assisted him in his armed resistance to the repressive Catholicism of Henri III’s regime. These included James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth I of England, and the many Huguenot-supporting courtiers in the Essex-Sidney circle. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1566–1601), was the brother of Philip Sidney’s passion Penelope Devereux. He was a dyed-in-the179

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wool supporter of the tolerant, left-wing Protestant group that took shape under his stepfather, who was also Sidney’s uncle and Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532?-88). Leicester had intimate connections with the English supporters both of William of Orange (1533–84), as he fought to liberate the Netherlands from Spanish occupation, and of Orange’s immediate ally in France, Henri III of Navarre. Leicester’s group of spiritual and political brethren consisted of senior courtiers who, like him, had grown up in the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI. Second-generation English Protestant adherents to ‘‘the Church in England,’’ they included Leicester’s brotherin-law Henry Sidney; Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke, who married Sidney’s daughter Mary; and the Secretary of State Francis Walsingham, whose daughter Frances married Philip Sidney. These families became further interrelated when Leicester married Essex’s mother, Lettice Knollys, dowager Countess of Essex. In 1586, the young Essex served in the Netherlands under Leicester, along with Leicester’s nephews Philip (1554–86) and Robert Sidney (1563–1626). In 1587, Essex secretly married Philip Sidney’s widow, Frances Walsingham, and recreated himself as Sidney’s political and moral successor. When Leicester died in 1588, Essex assumed the leadership of a youthful group of militant Calvinist nationalists. In 1591, he led the English force fighting for the Huguenots at the disastrous siege of Rouen and met with Henri of Navarre. Even the death of his elder brother Walter at Rouen further integrated his political family, for Walter’s widow Margaret Dakin, or Dakins, (1571–1633) married Thomas Sidney (1569–95), the younger brother of Philip and Robert Sidney, and Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke. Essex’s clique ardently supported the tens of thousands of French Huguenots in their fight for the right to practice what they believed was the true Christian religion. Their determination did not diminish when on July 25, 1593, Navarre renounced Protestantism in order to succeed to the throne, though Shakespeare’s portrayal of Navarre in Love’s Labours Lost (1594–95) may dramatize their immediate concerns about the Huguenot leader’s apparent wobble.

Monarchomachia, Tyrannicide, and Respublica At least twelve months before writing Love’s Labours Lost, Shakespeare successfully insinuated himself into the Essex-Sidney circle. He did so by dedicating his challenging humanist poems Venus and

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Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to Essex’s passive Catholic prote´ge´, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron Titchfield (1573–1624). Nine years older than Southampton, senior to Essex by two, and younger than Robert Sidney by one, when Shakespeare gained admittance to Essex’s group, he adopted their antityrannical politics, placing tyranny and usurpation at the heart of The Rape of Lucrece. The English monarchist reformers were confirmed monarchomachists. Along with their Protestant counterparts in the German states, the Netherlands, and France, they believed that tyrants, be they kings, church leaders, or family patriarchs, should be opposed and killed. Essex’s group was encouraged by the examples contained in Sidney’s Arcadia. And Sidney’s romance in turn reflected arguments contained in the influential anonymous publication by Henri of Navarre’s allies, the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (Edimburgi [i.e., Basle], 1579). Its alleged authors, Hubert Languet (1518–81), Henri Estienne (ca. 1532–98), and Philippe du Plessis-Mornay (1549–1623), were well known among the English advocates of European Protestant union. Evidence of their support for—and dependence on—the left-wing English Protestants is that, despite their age differences, all three became admiring friends and mentors of Essex’s role model, Philip Sidney. The Vindiciae is specifically directed against Navarre’s enemy, Henri III of France. Its arguments for tyrannicide clearly and logically reiterate those long adduced by Catholic churchmen. Following this orthodox line, its authors vindicate the assassination of a tyrant who sins by usurpation, or a tyrant who sins by oppression. But the Vindiciae contains a sting in its tail. Its principal additions to the standard Catholic arguments are what Mousnier describes as the scripture-based ‘‘double covenant theory’’ and the ‘‘partial resistance theory.’’ The two-tiered ‘‘double covenant theory’’ invokes a spiritual covenant ‘‘between king and people on one hand and God on the other;’’ and a political covenant ‘‘between the king on one hand and people on the other.’’ The ‘‘partial resistance theory’’ opens the floodgates in a way that had not been anticipated by French Catholic thinkers. It was accepted that ‘‘a private person was free to kill his monarch without a trial if he was a tyrant by usurpation,’’ but the Huguenots and extreme papists felt that this license extended to any sort of tyranny. Tyrannicide was justified by God. Even a single individual, inspired by God, might act on his own to kill a king.2 Such a personal interpretation of divine inspiration is worthy of the most politically radical of the Romantics. Heinous acts

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might be committed on the basis of perverted concepts of Calvinist election, as in James Hogg’s The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The Rape of Lucrece demonstrates Shakespeare’s engagement with a group asserting the priority of divine goodness in kings over their divine right. The divinity of monarchy was a hotly disputed issue among Protestant factions. Extreme Calvinists asserted the divinity of republican government over monarchy, invoking the authority of 1 Samuel 8. Samuel describes how the Israelites’ demand to be given a king in emulation of their neighbors was a travesty of God’s noninstitutional political organism. God would not deny the Israelites’ insistent request, but they would suffer because, when their monarch became a tyrant, he would turn a deaf ear to their complaints. Monarchy was a despotic form of government, and monarchic tyranny the curse of God. More realistic Calvinists accepted the alternative interpretation that monarchy itself was a divine gift that later became corrupted. This view forms the basis of James VI of Scotland’s line-by-line analysis of 1 Samuel 8 in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598). There James asserts God’s role in the appointment of kings, emphasizing the sin inherent in opposing a king’s authority. The concept of king-killing was as repulsive to him as papal interference in monarchic autonomy.3 While continental humanist scholars had long been occupied in translation, the Church of Rome stood firm on the language of the Bible. Linguistically as well as spiritually liberated, Genevan Calvinists translated both biblical and ancient texts into French and glossed secular texts with politicized biblical commentary. Inspired by this Genevan model, the anglicizing process of ancient texts became integral to the expression of English political doctrine. Thus it was that, toward the last quarter of the sixteenth century, humanist learning in England increasingly became patronized by a group of philhellenists dedicated to achieving a western European Protestant reformation. Strongly influenced by Calvinism, they associated themselves with ancient Greek democracy and Roman republicanism, and encouraged translation and adaptation of Greek and Greco-Roman writers. English philhellenist Protestant representations of the ancient world are free from the ideology of the Catholic Church. In fact, many actively resist it. Sidney’s Arcadia, written in two versions between 1579 and 1584, was first published in 1590. The expanded ‘‘complete’’ edition came out in 1593, the year of Venus and Adonis. Sidney determinedly and consistently opposes the Council of Trent’s assertion that kings are the political subjects of the pope. Through the actions of his monarchomachist Greek heroes, the

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princes Pyrocles and Musidorus, he deposes tyrants, reinventing kings as the subjects of their people. Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece is yet another illustration of how, during Elizabeth’s reign, representing ancient history, literature, philosophy, and politics in the vernacular had become more than an assertion of the capability and dignity of the English language.

The Birth of the Roman Republic Both Sidney and Shakespeare, who promote nationalism through linguistic and rhetorical sophistication, portray kings who remain defiantly independent. They must also be responsible, and responsive to public opinion. Almost a representation of the Calvinist political theory that underpins this position, The Rape of Lucrece portrays the advent of monarchomachism and, as its corollary, the development of the Roman republic. In the Argument, Shakespeare describes how the Roman people suffer under the harsh misrule of Tarquinius Superbus, their seventh and last king, and a usurper: Lucius Tarquinius (for his excessive pride surnamed Superbus), after he had caused his own father-in-law Servius Tullius to be cruelly murdered, and, contrary to the Roman laws and customs, not requiring or staying for the people’s suffrages had possessed himself of the kingdom, went accompanied with his sons and other noblemen of Rome to besiege Ardea.4

Tarquinius Superbus, whose grandfather was fifth king, came to power violently. Married to the elder daughter of the popular sixth king, Servius Tullius, he also enjoyed a liaison with his wife’s sister, Tullia. Inspired by Tullia to remove the obstacles to their marriage and the throne, Tarquinius murders his wife and Tullia’s husband. He then dispatches Servius, over whose body Tullia drives her chariot.5 Significantly, in adapting this legend to a monarchomachist perspective, Shakespeare astutely avoids all reference to the brutal, erotic motivation behind Tarquinius Superbus’s accession. Focusing solely on Tarquinius as a totalitarian usurper who bypasses legal and democratic processes, Shakespeare’s Argument offers no hint of the familial libidinous disposition of Tarquinius Superbus’s son, Sextus Tarquinius. Nonetheless, it is Sextus’s rape of Lucretia that provides the justification to repudiate a usurping king’s authority and changes the political structure of Rome. Collatine and the legendarily virtuous Lucrece share an idyllic

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marriage. The concord of their domestic government metonymically represents the civil ideal. The configuration that Shakespeare creates for their marriage is described in terms of a symbiotic feudal relationship. Man is on top, honored and supported by his wife. This is not through defeat and submission, but rather, according to the natural law of the chain of being, through love and good will: Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue A pair of maiden worlds unconquere`d, Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew, And him by oath they truly honore`d. (ll. 407–10)

What Shakespeare describes may be reminiscent of Sidney’s Argalus and Parthenia, ‘‘he ruling because she would obey—or rather, because she would obey, she therein ruling,’’ but the perspective suggests vulnerability.6 However much Lucrece accepts and honors Collatine’s authority, her ‘‘maiden worlds unconquere`d’’ invite invasion and predation. Like Milton’s envious Satan, Sextus Tarquinius aspires to assert his tyrannical disposition over this Edenic couple. Shakespeare opportunely politicizes their personal and domestic realms, linking the moral outrage of rape—in particular the rape of a wife—with transgression against the divine right of kings: These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred, Who like a foul usurper went about From this fair throne to heave the owner out. (ll. 411–13)

Tarquin’s subversion of Roman domestic political order shakes the entire rotten monarchy. His act initiates a democratic decision to banish the Tarquinii and leads to the commencement of Roman republicanism: bearing the dead body to Rome, Brutus acquainted the people with the doer and manner of the vile deed, with a bitter invective against the tyranny of the King; wherewith the people were so moved that with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled and the state government changed from kings to consuls.

In denouncing tyranny and commemorating the beginning of the Roman republic in The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare demonstrates his worthiness—perhaps even his desire—to succeed Philip Sidney

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as the main literary spokesperson of the English monarchomachists. Shakespeare at a stroke made good Essex’s principal deficiency. Essex could emulate Sidney’s heroic militant Protestantism, but he spectacularly lacked Sidney’s talent for writing large-scale politicalhistorical fiction in the Greco-Roman mode.

France and Scotland As monarchists, the English philhellenist Protestants with whom Shakespeare became associated in the 1590s acknowledged that the formation of a European republic on the Swiss model was an unattainable goal. What they did support was popularly and constitutionally limited monarchy, on the model advocated by Sidney in the New Arcadia. Sidney’s ideal national political structure consists of popularly supported, heritable or elected limited monarchy. Internationally, such free Protestant monarchies should best be linked through marital bonds, creating blood relationships that in the long term offer the possibility of pan-European-Asian stability. It is a theory that Sidney’s niece Mary Wroth develops tenfold in The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621). As the following genealogical mapping illustrates, all that was required to develop a union of Protestant monarchies was a change of emphasis. The thrones of France, Scotland, Spain, and England were already interconnected through the children of Henry (Tudor) VII and Elizabeth of York. Their daughter Margaret Tudor’s first husband was James IV of Scotland, the father of James V. James V’s first wife Madeleine de Valois, daughter of Franc¸ois I, died in July 1537, shortly after their marriage. His second wife Mary (1515–60), the daughter of Claude, Duke of Guise of the house of Lorraine, gave birth to Mary, queen of Scots. On April 24, 1558, Mary, queen of Scots, niece of the Duke of Guise, married the dauphin Franc¸ois, the son of Henri II of France and Catherine de Me´dicis. Catherine was the daughter of Lorenzo de Me´dici, Duke of Urbino. Her uncle Giulio de Me´dici served as Pope Clement VII from 1523 to 1534. In 1533, she married Henri of Orle´ans, Henri II of France, who belonged to the house of Valois, a descendant of the Capetians. Henry VIII’s daughter Mary Tudor became the second wife of Philip II of Spain. She died on November 17, 1558. On June 21, 1559, in a joint celebration, Henri II and Catherine de Me´dicis’ daughter Elisabeth (1546–68) was married by proxy to Philip II of Spain, and Henri II’s sister Marguerite de Valois became engaged to

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the Duke of Savoy. A festive tournament turned to tragedy when Henri II received a mortal wound. He died on July 10, 1559. His son Franc¸ois II, husband of Mary, queen of Scots, was crowned on September 18, 1559. Mary’s Guise uncles enjoyed only a brief reign of tyranny, for Franc¸ois died on December 5, 1560, to be succeeded by his brother Charles IX (1550–74). On May 30, 1574, Charles was succeeded by Henri III. The widowed queen of France, Mary, queen of Scots, married her first cousin, Henry Lord Darnley, on July 29, 1565. Their son James was born on June 19, 1566. His godparents at his christening on December 17 were Charles IX of France, his uncle the Duke of Savoy, and his distant cousin Elizabeth I of England. They were all related, for Darnley’s grandfather Archibald Douglas, sixth Earl of Angus, was Margaret Tudor’s second husband.7 Held apart by opposed interpretations of the politics of the church, Mary, queen of Scots, was executed on February 8, 1587.

Henri of Navarre and Love’s Labours Lost The central figure in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost is Ferdinand, king of Navarre. His living counterpart was Henri III of Navarre, the recently crowned Henri IV of France. When on August 18, 1572, Charles IX gave his sister Marguerite de Valois (1553–1615) in marriage to Navarre, he became third in line to the crown of France. Those in front were Henri, duc d’Anjou (1551–89), and Franc¸ois, duc d’Alenc¸on (1554–84). When Charles IX died in 1574, Henri succeeded as Henri III, and Franc¸ois assumed the title of Anjou. This is the title under which he courted Elizabeth I from 1579. Anjou died on June 10, 1584, leaving Navarre as heir to the throne. Navarre’s wedding led on August 22, 1572, to the Guise-inspired St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre. In June 1587, Henri of Navarre sent the poet Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas to Scotland to propose marriage between his sister Catherine of Navarre and James VI. The political climate in France changed during the following two years. By December 1588, the Guises’ extremism led Henri III of France to arrange the murders both of Henri, third Duke of Guise, and his brother Louis, second cardinal of Lorraine. The backlash drove him in April 1589 to reconcile his differences with Navarre. Whether or not James was influenced by this appeasement, by May 1589 he decided against marriage to Navarre’s sister. But though he opted for the younger and more attractive Anne of Denmark, whom he mar-

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ried by proxy on August 28, 1589, he did not keep Navarre and the Huguenots at arm’s length.8 From at least the spring of 1589, James supported Navarre with Scottish soldiers who, under an arrangement with Elizabeth I, fought under English pay.9 On August 1, 1589, four weeks before James’s marriage, Henri III of France, deemed by Catholic monarchomachists to have become a tyrant, was assassinated.10 His choice of Navarre as his successor met stiff opposition. For years Henri had engaged the Catholic establishment in an expensive religious war. In 1585, his Protestantism led the Guises, in collaboration with Philip II, to exclude him from the succession. Pope Sixtus V deprived Navarre of his kingdom and lands, and forbade him to hold the throne of France. Further, he was subjected to accusations of having an illegitimate claim by descent, for he was only related to Henri III through the male line in the twenty-second degree.11 Henri III of Navarre was the son of Antoine de Bourbon, duke of Vendoˆme, and Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre. Jeanne’s father was Henri, king of Navarre, and her mother Margaret d’Angouleˆme. Sister of Franc¸ois I of France, Margaret is best known as the reformist author Margaret of Navarre. After her first husband Charles d’Alenc¸on died in 1525, she married Navarre in 1527. As her grandson, Henri III of Navarre was regarded by Catholic nationalists as a Capetian usurper, with only a questionable claim to the throne. The Huguenots moved dexterously to hold their ground. Henri appointed influential Huguenot courtiers such as du Plessis Mornay to his council.12 Calvinists, desperate to support the coronation of a Protestant king, strenuously tried to legitimize Henri IV’s pedigree. The lengthy panegyric, Carolus Magnus redivivus (1592), by Johan Guilielmo Stuck (Stuchius) of Zurich, hails him as the new nationalist savior Charlemagne. The book, published by Joannes Wolphius, exudes European Protestant propaganda: ‘‘Charlemagne Lives Again! A Comparison of Charlemagne, the greatest king . . . in the world, with Henry the great, the most eminent king of France and Navarre.’’ The title page portrays Carolus M[agnus] looking at Henricus M[agnus], whose eyes fix on the reader. Both are armed. Charlemagne’s sword is drawn; Henri holds the butt of a lance. (See illustration 7.) To emphasize Henri’s role as savior, the subtitle and running title announce, ‘‘Carolus Magnus Redivivus in Christo, Vivat, Valeat, Vincat’’—‘‘Charlemagne lives again in Christ, he will live, he will be powerful, he will triumph.’’ Through Carolus Magnus redivivus, Stuck seeks support for Henri from his powerful eighteen-year-old dedicatee, Frederick IV (1574– 1610), the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. In the eyes of similar-

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7. Carolus Magnus Redivivus (1592). Courtesy of Victor Skretkowicz.

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minded Calvinists, Frederick was one of the principal guardians of the Christian Republic. It was only in January 1592 that he had succeeded his uncle John Casimir, who had been Philip Sidney’s friend. When Casimir visited England in 1579, he brought with him Sidney’s old mentor Hubert Languet, and in 1583 he nominated Sidney as his proxy during his installation as Knight of the Garter. Casimir had brought Frederick up to be a staunch Calvinist. In 1593, he confirmed his belief in the pan-European Protestant cause when he married William of Orange’s daughter, Louisa Juliana. They became the parents of the Elector Palatine Frederick V, who in 1613 married James’s daughter Elizabeth. The four ambassadors appointed by James to escort them to Bohemia were Robert Sidney, the Earls of Lennox and Arundel, and John Harrington.13 The relationships within this nexus of tireless Protestant reformers thus extend from Elizabeth’s court into that of James, embracing the German Protestant states, the Netherlands, and the France of Henri IV, Henri of Navarre. The efforts of Stuck and other like-minded Calvinists to create a Protestant momentum that would sweep Navarre into popular favor failed. The French court and city fathers of Paris remained hostile to Protestantism, refusing to accept his regal authority. But Henri knew well when to duck and when to weave. The St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre, August 22, 1572, following Henri’s wedding to Marguerite of Valois, pressured him to renounce his atheism in order to survive and, while necessary, to declare himself a Catholic. He would not now permit his own truculence to divide his country further. On July 25, 1593, Henri of Navarre accepted that he had to convert to Catholicism for a second time. This time his rejection of Protestantism proved to be the act of political reconciliation that won him his kingdom. In England, Elizabeth I was rocked by Henri IV’s conversion. She sent Robert Sidney as her ambassador to seek reassurance that Henri would continue to protect the Protestants of France. Sidney met Henri frequently between February 8, 1594, and the end of March. They went hawking, and they remained friends. Sidney’s regular reports to Robert Cecil confirm that Henri asked for three thousand soldiers to support the Huguenots.14 Sidney remained with Henri throughout the period of his coronation on February 27, 1594. Then, after Henri decreed his allegiance to the Catholic faith on March 20, Sidney joined him in his momentous and unexpectedly peaceful entry into Paris on the twenty-second. Finally, on September 17, 1595, Clement VIII granted Henri’s request for absolution, and among great festivity he was proclaimed the ‘‘most Chris-

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tian King of France and of Navarre.’’15 It was a title much earlier accorded to him by Stuck and the Huguenots (fol. 79 verso), to whom its inverted application now would have spelled the triumph of the antichrist. Shakespeare’s dedications of The Rape of Lucrece (1593) and Venus and Adonis (1594) to Southampton demonstrate that, by this time, he was closely affiliated with the philhellenist Essex-Sidney Protestant circle. His consciously obtuse allegory in Love’s Labours Lost (1594–5) overlaps and resonates with Henri’s tergiversation in 1594. In the play, Navarre is unsympathetically portrayed as a grandiose poseur who changes his mind. Navarre and his courtiers—Dumaine (de Mayenne), Biron, and Longueville—make an ascetic, quasimonastic vow to devote themselves to study and to abjure the company of women for three years. They become distracted on the arrival of the king of France’s daughter and her entourage. She brings a demand that Navarre, rather than receiving half the compensation owed him for his father’s military support, should instead pay that amount to the king. (2.1.127–51) Navarre and his men engage in courtship games with the princess and her ladies, but when the king of France dies, the princess is recalled. The multiple dalliance is postponed for a year. Navarre and his associates accept the test of passing the year as hermits, with the courtier Biron further challenged to set aside his cynicism and learn how to bring happiness to the dying. Love’s Labours Lost criticizes the ease with which Navarre and his court break their promises and their laws without the least compunction. It captures and parodies a historical moment. Biron corresponds with one of Henri’s known Protestant courtiers. But the presence of the comic figure Don Adriano de Armado, a Spaniard, and Navarre’s friendship with Mayenne, who historically was at the helm of the hard-line, anti-Navarre, Holy Catholic League, implies that the play post-dates and satirizes Henri’s abrupt change to Catholicism. This suggests that Love’s Labours Lost emanates from the Essex-Sidney group around the time that the antityrannical The Rape of Lucrece is being written and published. Within the play, major allegorical significance must attach to the king of France’s death. If the real Navarre was already crowned, those of Essex’s circle who had engaged in war on his behalf now probably viewed him as a thoroughly fickle dastard. Certainly Henri’s renunciation of Protestantism worried Elizabeth and split his Huguenot supporters. At that moment, he seemed to be a lost cause, and effectively dead. Perhaps in Navarre’s ascetic vow Shakespeare reflects a notion, or a hope, that the real Navarre would never last

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out the year as a Catholic. He did. However, he did not disappoint his allies. By including both Protestants and Catholics on his council, he set the precedent that James would follow in creating a balance for the irreconcilable oppositions of Christianity.

The Royal Style The royal style that Shakespeare employs for tyrants during the period corresponding to Henri IV’s reign is cold and detached. In its balanced clauses, rhythmic repetitions, and lengthy periodic sentences, it exudes Ciceronian artificiality. To an audience steeped in the simplifying tendencies of the Calvinist philhellenist Protestants, it sounds reactionary and authoritarian. As likely as not it is a parody of the artificial ‘‘style royale’’ that Henri III consciously developed for his important state speeches. By adopting this style, it is as if Shakespeare is restating the political contrast between the Roman republicans and the tyrannical Tarquinii, pitting the Calvinist influenced Henri IV against his enemies, the Papist successors of Henri III. In doing so, Shakespeare dramatizes the political agenda of the EssexSidney group, with its resonances of the monarchomachism of the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. The royal style that becomes the butt of Shakespeare’s satire carries significant political baggage. It was developed in France through the impetus of the nationalist movement. In the Projet d’e´loquence royale (1579), attributed to Henri III’s tutor Jacques Amyot, French humanism becomes interrelated with a nationalist linguistic reformation. Amyot attempted to beautify French with the modest application of Greco-Roman rhetorical formulae in his translations of Heliodorus’s An Ethiopian Story (1547), Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (1559), and Plutarch’s Lives (1559) and Morals (1572). But Amyot in Paris was out-done by the exiled nationalist Calvinists. In Geneva, the indefatigable Huguenot publisher Henri Estienne took humanist learning to new heights. His scholarly Greek edition of Plutarch, and his publication of Amyot’s translations of Plutarch with Simon Goulart’s Huguenot commentaries, struck at the cultural heart of the French court. The English court was not oblivious to these developments. In 1574, following the death of Charles IX and the accession of Henri III, Roger North was sent as ambassador to the court of France. North, an activist within the English philhellenist Protestant group, took with him his brother Thomas, who translated Plutarch’s Lives from Amyot’s version. It was published in 1579, the year of Anjou’s

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courtship of Elizabeth, of the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, probably also of Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth protesting against the Anjou marriage proposal, and of Amyot’s Projet d’e´loquence royale. In his Projet d’e´loquence royale, Amyot advises Henri III to develop a style of rhetorical address that is peculiarly ‘‘royal.’’ It should be detached, dignified, and clearly distinguishable from any known style. In the same year, at Henri III’s invitation, Henri Estienne attended at court and published his own Projet de l’oeuvre intitule´ de la pre´cellence du langage franc¸ois (1579)—‘‘a plan for a work called the superiority of the French language.’’16 Estienne was carefully walking a political and cultural tightrope, for only months earlier he completed and anonymously published Deux dialogues du nouveau langage franc¸ois, italianize´ et autrement desguize´, principalement entre les courtisans de ce temps (Geneva, 1578), satirizing the Italianate fashions and loan-words of Henri III’s court.17 Estienne maintains a consistent position in his Projet, promoting nationalist, religious, and linguistic puritanism on humanist grounds. He argues that the ancient French language possesses linguistic affinities with, and is capable of the beauties of, ancient Greek. Building on this thesis, Estienne’s dedicatory Epitre ‘‘au Roy’’ proposes that Henri III should learn to speak ‘‘royalement.’’ This would be a distinctive royal style, created by adopting the rhetorical sophistications of ancient Greek. True French, unadulterated by the Italian of Catherine de Me´dicis’ papist court, is fully capable of answering his needs.

The Philhellenist Protestant Reaction Estienne’s nationalistic ideals made an impact on English philhellenist Protestant literary figures such as his friend Philip Sidney, and Sidney’s early associate Edmund Spenser. Sidney parallels Estienne’s satirical mode, and his ideas for modifying religion and politics through language and literature, in A Defence of Poetry, written about 1580. In this Protestant parody of stuffy humanist criticism, he emphasizes the divine origins of poetry, the poet’s divine gift, and the poet’s responsibility to serve the reformation. He also represents the philhellenists’ nationalistic determination to purify the mother tongue by reinstating disused or unfashionable diction. In 1579, Spenser joined Leicester’s household and dedicated his Shepheardes Calendar to Sidney. Adopting a position that very closely resembles Estienne’s, E.K.’s prefatory epistle praises Spenser’s attempt to purge English of unwanted foreign loan-words: ‘‘he hath

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labored to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as haue ben long time out of vse and almost cleane disherited.’’18 English Celtic-British monarchomachists, many of whose Norman names retained vestiges of their Gallic roots, remained conceptually flexible over what constituted their mother tongue. The common factor between Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s modern English, Spenser’s artfully antiqued English, and James’s anglified Scots, is their adoption of a clear, lightly figured GrecoRoman style. Neither Sidney nor Spenser associate the revival of a national diction with the abandonment of moderately stylized rhetoric. In addition, Sidney purposefully introduces several Greek forms of versification, accompanied by their patterns of scansion, into the Old Arcadia. They become part of his case for demonstrating, in the manner of Estienne, that English is adaptable to ancient forms in a way that other languages are not. It cannot be an accident that the languages to which Sidney compares English, finding his native tongue more versatile, are those at that moment under the political domination of the Catholic church: Spanish, Dutch, French, and Italian.19 In the Faerie Queene of 1590, Spenser moderates his use of the ‘‘old rustic language’’ of The Shepheardes Calendar. While retaining the alliteration that gives it an antique ‘‘English’’ flavor, he writes in a comparatively free-flowing, modestly figured style that is quite stunning for its clarity. It is this Atticized style, combined as in book 5 with a nationalistic allegory supporting the war against Philip II of Spain (as Grantorto), that in 1596 confirms Spenser’s continued adherence to the goals of the philhellenist Protestants. If there is no discernible shift in the rhetorical style of his narrative, it is because Spenser, like Sidney, had always been a committed adherent to the Greco-Roman principles of Plutarch and the sophistic novelists, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus. But more significant for an appreciation of Shakespeare’s representation of the ‘‘style royale’’ as the voice of tyrants is its contrast with the public style adopted by Elizabeth I. When Elizabeth delivers her antityrannical address to her troops at Tilbury on August 8, 1588, she speaks in a lightly figured Greco-Roman style. Where Henri III intends to distance himself from his people, Elizabeth makes a calculated effort to create a close personal bond with her subjects. Her use of ‘‘we’’ must not be mistaken for the affected Victorian ‘‘royal ‘we’.’’ On the contrary, Elizabeth thoughtfully uses ‘‘we’’ and ‘‘I’’ to distinguish between her public role as queen, and her commitment to her people as an individual:

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My loving people, We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects.20

The warm confidence that Elizabeth tries to inspire could hardly be a greater contrast to the rhetorical distancing that Henri III contrives to achieve through his ‘‘style royale.’’ Contemporary reports of his address to the Estates-General in October 1588 confirm that his audience reeled with delight at his unexpectedly regal, and otherworldly eloquence. His style represented the pinnacle of achievement in perfecting a distinctively ‘‘royal’’ style. It was a conscious rhetorical affectation that raised his status to that of demi-god and confirmed his regal superiority.21 Henri III’s advocating religious toleration in this speech no doubt contributed to the rage in those reactionary quarters that branded him a heretic. Far from being an isolated gesture, it was symptomatic of the attempt at accommodation that only ended with his murder. On December 23, 1588, after Philip of Spain’s armada failed to capture the English throne, Henri III had the extremist third Duke of Guise, and his brother Louis, second cardinal of Lorraine, executed. His position was further eased on January 5, 1589, when his mother, Catherine de Me´dicis, died. He was last of the Valois kings and childless. In April he established a partnership with his heir Navarre, even though Rome had declared that Navarre’s Protestantism barred him from the crown.22 In the eyes of the church, the king exceeded his privilege by associating with the anti-Christ. On August 1, 1589, he was assassinated as a tyrant.

Plainness Encoded Within the Huguenot-supporting Essex-Sidney circle, the rhetorical excesses associated with Henri III’s detached, Greco-Roman, French royal style came to represent tyrannical extremism. As early as 1592, when Mary Sidney Herbert published her 1590 blank verse translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, the denigration of decorative rhetorical style, and the politique associated with it, becomes overt. Garnier wrote his allegory on the wastefulness of the French religious wars in heavily figured neoclassical Alexandrine couplets.

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Sidney Herbert systematically reduces Garnier’s style from one exuding Ciceronian and Senecan richness to one resembling Plutarchan simplicity. Further, her patronage and encouragement of like-minded philhellenist Protestant writers ensured that decorative restraint became the hallmark of the English Huguenot supporters. Her prote´ge´ Samuel Daniel, for example, takes the clarity of Plutarchan plainness to an extreme in his Cleopatra (1594) and The Civil Wars (1595; entered October 11, 1594). A similar marked tendency toward rhetorical simplicity characterizes Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). These poems emanate from the Essex wing of the philhellenist Protestants, which include Robert Sidney. It is noticeable that, as Shakespeare comes increasingly under the influence and patronage of Essex’s Huguenot supporters from the mid-1590s onwards, his sensitivity to the politicization of rhetorical style substantially increases. Rapidly adopting the role of the literary figurehead of Essex’s philhellenist Protestants, Shakespeare soon begins to mimic Henri III’s ‘‘style royale’’ in order to ridicule tyrannical behavior. The contrast between abusive kingship expressed through the royal style, and good government through a plainer style, remains a regular feature of his plays from Richard II in 1595 through to The Winter’s Tale in 1609.

The Politics of Plain Style Sidney Herbert published her ascetic, rhetorically simplified rendering of Garnier as the second piece in a volume that opens with her translation of Philippe du Plessis-Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death. There can be no doubt that this publication was a major political gesture, and that she intended her radical alteration of Garnier’s style to signal this. Her late brother Philip Sidney had worked closely with du Plessis Mornay. Now, in January of 1592, du Plessis Mornay came to England with his wife, urgently seeking military support for Essex’s beleaguered troops at Rouen. The siege was going badly. Essex had lost his brother and issued a challenge to the commander of Rouen. The bulk of his soldiers were sick. In exchange for unknown quantities of aid, Elizabeth managed to secure Henri IV’s permission for his recall. Sidney Herbert published her book shortly after du Plessis Mornay’s departure. Her openly associating herself with the Huguenot cause would have encouraged further support from the Queen. Navarre’s position remained desperately precarious. His right to the

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succession was flatly rejected by the Catholics of Rouen, Paris, and other strongholds of the Holy League, and he required international assistance. This is the crisis that prompted Stuck’s Carolus Magnus redivivus (1592), with its title page optimistically claiming that ‘‘Rex Gallus Gallos protegit’’—‘‘the French King protects the French.’’ It was a slogan designed to reassure the Huguenot faithful, to muster the support of Frederick IV, and to demonize the Catholic establishment as traitors to their nation. The aspirations of the Huguenots and their supporters suffered a body blow with Henri’s conversion politique in 1593. Nonetheless, the pessimism brought about by Henri IV’s renunciation of Protestantism proved to be unjustified. From the conservative perspective, his court contained a disturbing number of Protestants. By 1606 he permitted Protestant worship at Charenton in Paris, defying the Edict of Nantes (1598), which conditionally legalized Protestantism in parts of France and excluded Paris.23 But like King Macbeth, Henri IV continued to be regarded as a tyrant by usurpation. In the eyes of papists, he ‘‘had acquired by force of arms a kingdom to which he had no legal right,’’ and defied the Council of Trent. In 1610 he was duly assassinated by a Catholic monarchomachist.24

James I’s Plainness Like Henri IV of France, James VI of Scotland regarded himself not so much a Protestant as a Catholic reformer. His Basilicon Doron, an uncompromising manifesto on the divine right of kings, was first printed in 1599. On his accession to the English throne in 1603, an expanded version was reprinted virtually throughout Europe. And by the time Henri IV was killed, James had long been engaged in a pamphlet war with Rome, criticizing corruption in the Roman church. More significantly, he openly rejected the usurping powers granted by the Council of Trent, which gave the Church the right to maintain authority over kings. As king of England, James’s opening salvo against Rome’s interference in the state comes at the end of his first speech to Parliament, on March 19, 1603. With regal immodesty, James paraphrases the order of marriage, and Elizabeth I, St. Paul and Jesus Christ: ‘‘What God hath conioyned then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the head, and it is my Body; I am the Shepherd, and it is my flocke.’’25 James couches this part of his speech in ancient biblical rhythms and imagery, but he rapidly abandons their sophisticated beauty. He quickly slips into

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the less rhythmic Plutarchan / Calvinist style used by Mary Sidney Herbert, Daniel, and Shakespeare in order to denounce Romanist subversives: ‘‘At my first comming, although I found but one Religion. . . . Yet found I another sort of Religion, besides a priuate Sect, lurking within the bowels of this nation.’’ These are not ‘‘the trew Religion, which by me is professed.’’ They are ‘‘the falsly called Catholikes, but trewly Papists,’’ and ‘‘the Puritanes and Nouelists.’’26 James had every right to be wary of Catholic activists. Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) required Catholics in England to ensure that the crown went only to a Catholic, and as a result, ‘‘James I stood condemned as a tyrant by usurpation.’’ Little wonder that the papistinspired monarchomachia of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 led directly to James’s demands for the Oath of Allegiance (1606).27 In his speech to Parliament in 1603, James parries charges of having a weak claim to the throne. Such accusations became a commonplace in the Papist-Protestant struggle—they were leveled at Henri IV, then valiantly refuted by Calvinists such as Stuck. James takes the initiative by arming himself with a defense of his ancestral right to the throne, exploiting the English side of his family tree to justify possession of the crown. He also claims that he can bring internal peace to England and Wales, and that he alone holds the key to the peaceful unification of mainland Britain through the union of the kingdoms of Scotland and England: by my descent lineally out of the loynes of Henry the seuenth, is reunited and confirmed in mee the Vnion of the two Princely Roses of the two Houses of LANCASTER and YORKE. . . . which, as it was first setled and vnited in him, so is it now reunited and confirmed in me, being iustly and lineally descended, not onely of that happie coniunction, but of both the Branches thereof many times before. But the Vnion of these two princely Houses, is nothing comparable to the Vnion of two ancient and famous Kingdomes, which is the other inward Peace annexed to my Person.28

The conclusion of this speech is most unusual in having a rhetorical focus. In it, James confirms a belief in the association between pretentious, indirect Ciceronian style and the rhetorical evasiveness of tyrannical politics. His strong commitment to plainness binds him rhetorically to the politics of the Huguenots, and to the aspirations of the old Essex-Sidney philhellenist Protestants, reformers anxious to achieve a greater say in Elizabethan government. Among those who carried on that tradition, and whom James brought into the center of his court, were Shakespeare’s old patron Southampton, as

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well as Robert Sidney, and Sidney’s nephews William and Philip Herbert, who in 1623 became the patrons of Shakespeare’s First Folio. James’s remarks on plain style become intertwined with a statement on monarchic responsibility. His conscious use of clear, native English diction would have been music to the ears of Calvinist linguistic nationalists. There is also a possibility that the Northern/ Scots linguistic ring in the past participle ‘‘throwne,’’ meaning ‘‘twisted,’’ reinforces his concept of a united ‘Great Britain’: it becommeth a King, in my opinion, to vse no other Eloquence then plainenesse and sinceritie. By plainenesse I meane, that his Speeches should be so cleare and voyd of all ambiguitie, that they may not be throwne, nor rent asunder in contrary sences like the old Oracles of the Pagan gods. . . . That as farre as a King is in Honour erected aboue any of his Subiects, so farre should he striue in sinceritie to be aboue them all, and that his tongue should be euer the trew Messenger of his heart: and this sort of Eloquence may you euer assuredly looke for at my hands.29

James defines the plain style as representing the honesty and responsible government called for under the double covenant theory proposed by the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. Through this link between plainness and Calvinist principles of good monarchy, in the manner of Mary Sidney Herbert, Daniel, and the followers of Essex, James declares his affinities with the English supporters of his spiritual and regal brother, Henri IV of France.

Shakespeare, Royal Style, and Tyranny By the time of Elizabeth’s death and James’s accession in 1603, Shakespeare had represented the styles of regal speech in many different modes. The early declamatory Henry VI plays, written prior to his affiliation with Essex’s group, make little distinction between kings and their advisors. This homogeneity of style continues through 1592–93, when Shakespeare writes Richard III. The plot concludes with Richard losing his throne in battle against his successor Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who is crowned Henry VII. With Henry VII’s marriage to Elizabeth of York, and the amalgamation of the houses of Lancaster and York, this play marks the end of the Wars of the Roses, a fact which would not have been lost on James I. By necessity, Shakespeare gives the final speech to Henry. It is lightly metaphorical, rhythmically measured, notably clear, and the royal ‘‘we’’ does not dominate the end-stopped pentameters:

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Proclaim a pardon to the soldiers fled That in submission will return to us, And then—as we have ta’en the sacrament – We will unite the white rose and the red. (5.8.16–19)

The play then concludes with Henry’s metaphorically laden, though verbally unpatterned, prayer for peace: Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord, That would reduce these bloody days again And make poor England weep forth streams of blood. Let them not live to taste this land’s increase, That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace. Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again. That she may long live here, God say ‘‘Amen.’’ (5.8.35–41)

Ten years later, but only one year after the third quarto edition of this popular play, in his first speech to Parliament James I recalls this moment of England’s rebirth. His particular outlook on monarchy allows him to identify it as a nation where Peace, personified in his own self, would choose to dwell—and this desirable locale would become even more especially inviting to Peace if it were united with Scotland. Shortly after writing Richard III, during a period that corresponds with his becoming an acolyte of Essex and his circle, Shakespeare develops the detached, Ciceronian royal style that characterizes his tyrants up to 1609. There is a stark contrast between the tyrannical Saturninus in Titus Andronicus (1592–93), who still forbears to use the affected royal ‘‘we,’’ and the particularly artificial style adopted for Richard II, written about 1595. Richard’s rhetorical style stands out as peculiarly regal, even by contrast to the dying John of Gaunt’s well-larded eulogy on England. Gaunt’s rhythmic style represents the gentler courtliness of a bygone era: ‘‘This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi paradise . . . This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,’’ and so forth (2.1.40–51). Its repetitive anaphora heaves with metaphors expressed in half-lines, end-stopped lines, and effective enjambment. Its emotive, exaggerated claims nevertheless contain an earnest lament for the passing of honorable monarchic standards of behavior. In contrast to Gaunt’s humanist decorum, Richard’s heavily embroidered declamatory style sets him apart from his nobles. His style

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is a code that instantly identifies him as a tyrant. As he sentences Mowbray and Bolingbroke to exile, the royal ‘‘we’’ predominates. The sounds of Richard’s tyranny are embedded within a disproportionately long Ciceronian period. To create this special effect, Shakespeare embroiders a monosyllabic matrix with repetitious, balanced conditional clauses; complex, slowly evolving metaphors; and an unusually high frequency of compound epithets: Draw near, And list what with our council we have done. For that our kingdom’s earth should not be soil’d With that dear blood which it hath fostered; And for our eyes do hate the dire aspect Of civil wounds plough’d up with neighbours’ sword; And for we think the eagle-winged pride Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts, With rival-hating envy, set on you To wake our peace, which in our country’s cradle Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep; Which so roused up with boisterous untuned drums, With harsh-resounding trumpets’ dreadful bray, And grating shock of wrathful iron arms, Might from our quiet confines fright fair peace And make us wade even in our kindred’s blood; Therefore, we banish you our territories. (1.3.123–39)

The remorseless forward movement of these rhythmically protracted clauses imparts a distinctively pretentious royal flavor. Its exaggerated hyperbole continues beyond all meaningful rhetorical function and is little more than decorative copiousness. This prolonged and empty proclamation adapts and parodies the stylistic excesses that raged through Elizabeth’s court during the 1570s and 1580s. Coming from Richard’s mouth, such rhetorical flaws become all the more poignant to Mowbray and Bolingbroke. They realize that their sentences of banishment come from a hollow-brained tyrant. A monarchomachist audience would call for Richard to be deposed and executed and see its ambitions fulfilled. The king’s assassination in this play de facto categorizes Richard II as a monarchomachist statement of monumental proportions. It remained meat and drink to Essex’s Calvinist supporters. After a sustained campaign and many squabbles with the queen, on March 25, 1599, the plain-speaking Essex was appointed lieutenant and governor-general of Ireland. It

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was around that time that Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar. In February 1601, Essex’s idealistic monarchomachist beliefs led him to attempt a coup and got him executed. If it was not Shakespeare’s Richard II, then certainly another about Richard II’s deposition was intended to have been staged on the eve of his rebellion. In Julius Caesar (1599), Shakespeare demonstrates how easily the quasi-republican principles represented by plain-speaking political figures can be thrown into turmoil. Throughout the play, the style used by Shakespeare’s Brutus reflects the historical Brutus’s plain republican rhetoric. At a key moment in the play—the turning point, as it happens—during Brutus’s prose eulogy over Caesar’s body, Shakespeare silences republican plainness. He makes Brutus’s eulogy contorted and singularly unattractive to the massed citizens, and goes on to demonstrate how easily the glib Antony misappropriates plain style in order to subvert republican values. Shakespeare creates an ironic perspective in Brutus’s tyrannical imperative, ‘‘Be patient till the last. / Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my cause, and be silent that you may hear’’ (3.2.12– 14). This is a far cry from Elizabeth’s appealing opening at Tilbury, ‘‘My loving people.’’ For all its beguiling duplicity, the freely flowing, lightly metaphorical style that Shakespeare gives Mark Antony’s, ‘‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’’ (3.2.70) is far more successful. In this play, however, Shakespeare is not representing a simplistic opposition between a failing, poorly articulated republicanism and the tyrannical inclinations of those who employ the decorative ‘‘royal style.’’ Instead, Julius Caesar is used to map out a very specific rhetorical direction. It is the final speech of the play, Octavius’s consciously plain eulogy for Brutus, which confirms that Shakespeare has not suddenly abandoned the propagandist function of rhetorical style: According to his virtue let us use him, With all respect and rites of burial. Within my tent his bones tonight shall lie, Most like a soldier, ordered honourably. So call the field to rest, and let’s away To part the glories of this happy day. (5.5.75–80)

To Essex and his Calvinist followers, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Octavius offers hope for a plain-dealing, antityrannical, constitutional monarchy. This, they anticipated, would arrive with James’s succes-

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sion. King Lear (1604–5), written for the King’s Men, reflects the reformers’ ongoing concerns about tyrannical power and succession. In a play where the dominant royal style smacks of proclamation, the misguided tyrannical Lear infelicitously condemns his daughter Cordelia’s plainness: Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her. I do invest you jointly with my power, Pre-eminence, and all the large effects That troop with majesty. Ourself by monthly course, With reservation of an hundred knights By you to be sustained, shall our abode Make with you by due turn. Only we shall retain The name and all th’addition to a king. (1.1.127–34)

Here the second person plural pronoun as a characteristic of an unfavorable royal style persists. Shakespeare continues to use it in The Winter’s Tale (1609–10). There the gradual transformation of Leontes’ clipped speech into a full-blown ‘‘royal’’ style establishes it as the rhetorical imprimatur of a tyrant. Leontes even adopts the distancing tone and rhythms of a royal proclamation as he commands Antigonus to abandon Perdita: We enjoin thee, As thou art liegeman to us, that thou carry This female bastard hence, and that thou bear it To some remote and desert place, quite out Of our dominions; and that there thou leave it, Without more mercy, to it own protection And favour of the climate. (2.3.173–79)

Failure, he threatens, is ‘‘On thy soul’s peril and thy body’s torture’’ (2.3.181). By contrast, the more direct styles utilized by Paulina and Hermione identify them as representatives of the peace and truth. Paulina’s clever equivocation saves her skin: ‘‘I’ll not call you tyrant; / But this most cruel usage of your queen . . . something savours of tyranny’’ (2.3.115–20). No statement could be clearer, more controlled, less pretentious, or a stronger confirmation of Shakespeare’s symbolic use of rhetorical style. Among the series of tyrants whose identity is signified by their royal style, Macbeth (1606?) perforce remains an anomaly. Shake-

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speare creates in Macbeth a misguided tyrant of both usurpation and of oppression, ‘‘an untitled tyrant bloody-sceptered’’ (4.3.105). Macbeth is inspired, and his seizing the throne is justified, first, by the antichrist in the form of a coven of witches, and second, by his ‘‘fiend-like queen.’’ Under their guidance, he ascends the ladder from loyal monarchist hero to absolute tyrant, a ‘‘butcher’’ who, as master of ‘‘cruel ministers,’’ exercises his ‘‘snares of watchful tyranny’’ (5.11.33–35). Macbeth’s Hamlet-like self-consciousness inhibits his rhetorical presentation, making him an atypical Shakespearean tyrant from this period. Even within Shakespeare’s repertoire, as an individual, Macbeth is an aberration. But the rhetorical style associated with tyranny is ever in his ear. His wife’s assertive rhetorical prowess, with its metaphorical subtlety, and unanticipated integration of unusual diction with figured sound patterns, easily compensates for his moderation. Forceful enough to scold Macbeth into regicide, the most substantive example of Lady Macbeth’s other-worldly regal style is her rhythmic, treble invocation of diabolical powers: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood, Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry ‘‘Hold, hold!’’ (1.5.38–52)

Macbeth, distinguished by its hero’s psychotic megalomania and perverted regicide, closes with a justified monarchomachist backlash. It demonstrates cooperative resistance engaged in tyrant killing. The play’s Scottishness, and its prognostication of the kingship passing to Banquo’s line (1.3.65), believed to be that of James’s Scottish ancestors, prefigures the nationalistic panegyric that Shakespeare repeats in Cymbeline (1609–10) and All is True (or Henry VIII, 1613).

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James I, Sovereignty, and the Conclusion of Cymbeline In Triplici Nodo [. . .] or an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (1607), a denunciation of papal authority, James condemns the atrocity perpetrated by papists against Henri III of France. For all his faults, he was James’s mother’s brother-in-law by her first marriage, and a king. Like Henri IV, Henri III had upheld the tenets of the Gallican Church, the national church of France, which accepted papal authority only in spiritual matters. The understanding Henri III achieved with Henri of Navarre by 1589 made him the target of a Catholic extremist. In 1605, the same conflict between church and state would lead to an attempt on James’s life in the Gunpowder Plot. On May 14, 1610, Henri IV, who never confirmed his adherence to the Council of Trent, and was a tyrant by usurpation in the eyes of Rome, fell victim to a papist. It was one day after his second wife, Marie de Me´dici, niece of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was formally crowned. They had married in 1600, following the annulment of Henri’s marriage to Marguerite of Valois. In 1601, Marie gave birth to Henri’s successor, Louis XIII.30 Henri IV’s rule was compromised from the outset by papal tyranny. The same demand for papal control over political as well as spiritual matters equally undermined Elizabeth I in England and James VI in Scotland. With Henri IV’s death in 1610, James was left as the principal leader of the Protestant nations. He was the only king left to espouse Protestantism, the only one to defy the Council of Trent by maintaining the independence of his monarchy from papal control. Now more than ever, he made himself the target of rogue monarchomachists from both extremes of the religio-political divide. In his memoirs, Henri IV’s Protestant minister of finance, Maximillien de Be´thune, duc de Sully, records that the king he served aspired toward the creation and leadership of a peaceful European Christian union. It is a goal not far from James’s own. In 1609 James furnished the second edition of Triplici Nodo with an extended preface, A Premonition to all Most Mightie Monarches, Kings, Free Princes, and States of Christendome. He dedicated his work to the elected Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and all the other kings and princes of Europe, to whom he sent copies. By circulating his treatise, he assumed the intellectual leadership of the princes of Christendom. He also defended his personal interests in maintaining political independence from Rome. In Triplici Nodo, James urges all Christian princes to defy Pope Paul

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V (1605–21). James summarizes the pope’s totalitarian demands in fourteen propositions. They begin, ‘‘1. That I King James, am not the lawfull King of this Kingdome, and of all other my Dominions. 2. That the Pope by his owne authoritie may depose me,’’ either himself or by any other means. A Premonition continues James’s defiance, refuting arguments put by the pope’s spokesman, Cardinal Bellarmine. Its publication embroiled James in a European controversy that only reinforced his long-held belief in the divinity of kingship.31 He predictably rejected Bellarmine’s defense of the papal right ‘‘to intervene in the temporal affairs of states, to deprive monarchs of their kingdoms and bestow them elsewhere, and to make and unmake laws.’’32 James remained the sole obstacle to complete papal authority in matters between a king and his state. Isolated in this way, he publicly associated himself with Henri IV of France. That he held Henri in the highest esteem is clear from the preface to his De´claration in defense of le droit des rois, et inde´pendance de leurs couronnes (1615), translated by R. B[etts]. as A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings, and the Independance of their Crowns (1616). There James recalls his ‘‘late entire affection to K. Henry IV. of happy memorie, my most honoured brother, and my exceeding sorrow for the most detestable parricide acted vpon the sacred person of a King, so complete in all heroicall and Princely vertues.’’33 Nor, it should be noted, was James at this point hostile toward Henri III, another king who promoted Christian reconciliation within a national church. Around 1609–10, Shakespeare abandons the cynical ‘‘style royale’’ associated with authoritarian rule. Cymbeline, which closely follows The Winter’s Tale, marks a clear break from nearly fifteen years of rhetorical practice. In this play, Shakespeare introduces a fresh royal style that symbolizes tolerant moderation. Lines flow freely into one another as the syntax requires. The tone is characterized by sophisticated polysyllabic diction, used unpretentiously and without negative connotation. Shakespeare continues to use this new royal style in The Tempest and in the play on Henry VIII. It also happens to be James’s own preferred style, adopted about the time that he takes on a new role in European politics. James’s fraternal bond with Henri IV lay in their insistence on the sanctity of kingship. On August 18, 1609, Henri’s ambassador to the pope conveyed a message from James. It effectively echoes Henri’s own position as head of a national church, though it is one on which Henri maintained a discreet silence. In his message, James adopted a position that was at once conciliatory and confrontational. He ‘‘was prepared to recognize the pope as first bishop and head of the

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Church in spiritual matters provided the pope would renounce his power to depose kings.’’34 The pope’s perspective was that his doing so would make him a heretic. They had reached stalemate. The pope’s response to James’s proposal in August 1609 suggests that Cymbeline, a masque-like panegyric, may be an optimistic propagandist representation relating to this exchange. Portraying the strength of a unified Great Britain, Cymbeline combines the themes of nationalist independence with the possibility of conditional reconciliation with Rome. The plot revisits the simple demand for payment that forms the basis of Love’s Labours Lost. In Cymbeline, Rome demands overdue tribute, attacks Britain, and is then defeated. When Lucius presents the case for paying tribute to Augustus Caesar, and King Cymbeline replies, the discussion is conducted in measured tones, separating the issue from personalities (3.1.60–81). The debate is brief, but clear, forceful, and formalized. While Lucius’s demand is colored by the echoes of a binding legal document, it is definitely not characterized by the declamatory style used earlier by Shakespeare in political exchanges with tyrants: When Julius Caesar—whose remembrance yet Lives in men’s eyes, and will to ears and tongues Be theme and hearing ever—was in this Britain And conquered it, Cassibelan, thine uncle, Famous in Caesar’s praises no whit less Than in his feats deserving it, for him And his succession granted Rome a tribute, Yearly three thousand pounds, which by thee lately Is left untendered. (3.1.2-10)

At stake here are principles, not personalities. An aggressive portrayal of either side in the ‘‘style royale’’ would be an unwelcome intrusion. The entire play forms a many-sided argument leading only to a single conclusion. It requires a thoughtful rhetorical sophistication that, unlike Shakespeare’s parodic royal style, does not in itself carry the burden of allegorical significance. Cymbeline’s reply is therefore equally measured: You must know, Till the injurious Romans did extort This tribute from us we were free. Caesar’s ambition, Which swelled so much that it did almost stretch The sides o’ th’ world, against all colour here Did put the yoke upon ’s, which to shake off

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Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon Ourselves to be. (3.1.44–51)

Having defeated the Romans, Cymbeline offers to ‘‘submit to Caesar / And to the Roman empire, promising / To pay our wonted tribute’’ (5.6.460–62). This paradoxical conclusion of Cymbeline has to be understood in the light of A Premonition, as well as the exchange between James and the pope in August 1609. From that perspective, the play’s allegory is perfectly clear. James reasserts the Huguenot and English philhellenist Protestant acceptance of the original, uncorrupted form of Christianity as it existed under the Augustan Roman republic. But he also rejects any trace of political subjugation to Rome. James will extend his hand to Rome, but Rome must first accept defeat on the issue of sovereignty. In real life, James would not have his way. But Shakespeare’s shift in register after 1609, from the rhetorical posturing of a monarchomachist toward the mellower tones of an international diplomat, can be read as a reflection of how the king’s own acting company supported his life-long endeavor to reform papal tyranny, and to assert British independence.

Notes 1. Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV, trans. Joan Spencer (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 111–13. 2. Ibid., 94, 104. 3. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain, Harvard Political Classics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 53–70. 4. Shakespeare’s texts are quoted from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 5. Piero Treves, ‘‘Brutus (1),’’ ‘‘Lucretia,’’ ‘‘Servius Tullius,’’ ‘‘Tarquinius (2) Superbus,’’ and ‘‘Tullia (1),’’ in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprie`re Hammond and Howard Hayes Scullard, 2nd ed., 183, 622, 981, 1038, 1098 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 6. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (the New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 372. 7. Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (1969; repr., London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1989), 116, 336–37; Caroline Bingham, James VI of Scotland (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), 7–8, 22. 8. Bingham, James VI of Scotland, 105, 114–16. 9. Julian Goodare, ‘‘James VI’s English Subsidy,’’ in The Reign of James VI, ed. Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch, 110–25 (118 n.) (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). 10. Mousnier, Assassination, 110–11.

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11. Ibid., 106. 12. Ibid., 155. 13. Millicent V. Hay, The Life of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester (1563–1626) (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984), 218. 14. Ibid., 147–51. 15. Mousnier, Assassination, 111–15. 16. Henri Estienne, Projet de l’oeuvre intitule´ de la pre´cellence du langage franc¸ois, ed. Edmond Huguet (Paris, 1896). 17. Henri Estienne, Deux dialogues du nouveau langage franc¸ois, edited with an introduction by Pauline Mary Smith (Geneva: Slatkine, 1980). 18. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. E. Greenlaw et al., 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–58), 7:8. 19. Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 120. 20. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Meyer Howard Abrams, 6th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 1:999. 21. Jacques Amyot, Projet d’e´loquence royale, ed. Philippe-Joseph Salazar (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), 15–16, 26–30. 22. Mousnier, Assassination, 111. 23. Ibid., 112, 140, 153–55. 24. Ibid., 107. 25. James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 136. 26. Ibid., 138. 27. Mousnier, Assassination, 171. 28. James VI and I, Political Writings, 134–35. 29. Ibid., 145–46. 30. Compare Mousnier, Assassination, 152, 158 ff. 31. The Political Works of James I, lix–lxiii, 86. 32. Mousnier, Assassination, 103. 33. The Political Works of James I, 169. 34. Mousnier, Assassination, 176.

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I

IT HAS LONG BEEN ASSUMED THAT JOHN MILTON REPRESENTED SPENSER’S most pervasive influence on early modern England. I want to argue that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) represents a deeper and more enduring influence, not only in terms of Bacon’s texts but more significantly in terms of Bacon’s framing of his own mythological structures. These structures became the heart of Bacon’s vast scheme of science and technology that, for all its fundamental ideological differences, starts, as I shall show, with the same epic and social intentions Bacon would have read in Spenser’s poetic texts in the 1590s, and in his letter to Raleigh. Bacon especially responds to Spenser’s profound originality in inventing his hero, the plural Arthur. What is perhaps more important to note is a larger context for this intertextuality. All three—Spenser, Milton, and Bacon, unlike Shakespeare or Sidney for that matter—intended to write epics that had a direct relationship to history and to society, to what St. Paul in Ephesians 5:19 (Geneva translation) calls ‘‘redeming the time.’’ They were, in short, ideological. With differing visions but starting with the same premise of the breakdown in their own time of history—meaning a new burning of Troy, a new Fall—each of these contemporaries marked labor (or labors) as the method for the restoration of order.1 In Bacon’s terms, this serial labor would be revealed in the hexemeral program of his Instauratio magna (the Great Instauration), published in 1620, at the height of Bacon’s immense power as Lord Chancellor.2 Furthermore, the originating model for all three, as it was not for Shakespeare or Sidney, was, as I argue, Virgil. What each sought to reinvent then was nothing less than the Virgilian project of recovering communal order from collapse and chaos. This recovery, at least Virgil’s, entailed not only heroic ethical and personal disciplining but virtual social engineering. In Augus209

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tan Rome’s political and moral empire, as R. R. Bolgar has remarked, ‘‘Virgil was to replace a legion.’’3 Whether Virgil’s Rome became in later texts the empire within or the empire without, epic representation of Virgil’s Rome for Bacon, Spenser, and Milton meant redeeming a disjointed time. Just as with Virgil after the mid-century civil wars of his time, so all three English masters shared a particular historicity. That is, all three responded to the dominating historical dilemma of their time that would eventually lead to England’s own Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. This was the cultural breach initiated by Henry VIII that the modern British historian Scarisbricke calls ‘‘a remarkable act of national amnesis’’ a 1,000-year-old culture—and that Eamon Duffy and others have recently and fully documented.4 The breach bespeaks an effect clearly evident in a collective sensibility. All around remained a landscape, internally and externally, of, in Shakespeare’s line, ‘‘bare ruined choirs’’—a line that Shakespeare borrowed from a famous recusant poem possibly written in the late 1580s or early 1590s by the grandson of the poet Earl of Surrey, Philip, Earl of Arundel, whom Elizabeth I imprisoned in the Tower where he died a Catholic martyr.5 Thus, however one considers the good or evil of the ‘‘ruined choirs,’’ the cultural disaster left a void in English humanists, whatever their religion. From the ex-Carmelite monk John Bale onwards, in varying ways, they posed the central question: how to mythologize a new society (or an old culture newly stripped) and give it purpose?6 The Protestant Bale and his friend John Foxe both began early, when they were refugees at the house of the Duchess of Richmond, Surrey’s sister, to look at this question of re-mythologizing their fragmented culture. It was a cultural rehabilitation the Reformers took on with complete consciousness, especially Foxe in his evolutionary and primitivist theories, as, a millennium before, their earlier culture had shaped its own mythological unity, whatever political and social diversities, out of another collapse, the fall of Rome. In differing ways, then, Bale, Foxe, and reforming contemporaries like Bishop Jewel undertook active programs, especially building on what Erasmus had already indicated in his famous call to arms in his dedicatory epistle to Leo X: ‘‘Ad fontes.’’7 Significantly, this call appeared in Erasmus’ 1516 dedication to the Roman pontiff of his new Latin translation from the original Greek of the Christian New Testament. This new text had the effect of an earthquake on Luther. It was hardly accidental, therefore, that when Luther and the early Protestant reformers found a radical primitivism in Erasmian texts and methods, their own texts of radi-

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cal transformation would make it their own. Thus, so they could argue, out of the deepest primitive past (or the most remote for modern Europe) could come surprisingly contemporary and original ‘‘redeming’’ texts. These writings could offer what they considered solutions for the corruption of their time and their inherited historical chaos. Inevitably and logically, the question of how to transform the past in terms of a desired future led Bale, Foxe, and countless other early English reformers to social and political answers. The question, in its many variants, would have equally variant answers, the English Civil War giving the most conclusive in the middle of the seventeenth century. Sadly, the ambiguity and complexity of earlier variants were lost in the absolute ideologies that led to the final dismantling not only of a 1,000-year-old culture but of the Henrician and Jacobean and Caroline political and cultural solutions to the disaster. The pretenses of early modern England effectively collapsed with this war. After that traumatic event, a new model of culture— largely rising from Bacon and his ideological masterpiece, the New Atlantis—began to dominate the Restoration and Enlightenment, whatever their nostalgic echoes, with new undercurrents and subversions.8 But in that period of uncertainty before the annealing force of the English Civil War, a fertility of solutions rose from the very dilemma and ambiguity early modern England had discovered in itself. The Civil War showed, in fact, that these solutions had never fully answered the profound complexity of the original question Henry VIII had opened up. But in this interim Spenser, Milton, and Bacon did dramatize their own solutions to this question of what constitutes a valid cultural frame. Despite different genre and literary strategies, they all sought to represent an absolute basis for prerevolutionary English culture, such as one had existed, for better or worse, before Henry VIII. Ironically, their language and metaphor, their own textual solutions, became more permanent than the ideologies and destruction of civil war. Remarkably, their conclusions were similar for the development of a new society out of their own. The strategies of all three were essentially Virgilian, and particularly for Spenser and Bacon, it was the Roman poet’s own specific remedy of georgic labor for the building of a new empire out of the breakdown and disjunction of the old destroyed culture (the burning of Troy). Virgil’s were texts all three knew from their earliest humanist training. The question then of what renovatio would serve England—as the new Rome had Virgil—became their question. Virgil’s texts at the heart of the Western culture of their time could lead

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them to face questions that were haunting that time and to put their solutions into literary texts in the mode of Virgil. But seeking cultural solutions had been in the works in the 1530s and 1540s, when the question of cultural identity was first asked. The earliest reformers like Bale and Foxe had themselves confronted the question of how, in their own modern England, a past like theirs, which they saw as disgraced and diseased, could become a present model, much less a future one, for the development and building of their own history. How could it ‘‘redeme the time’’? The Renaissance and humanist early modern England could provide enough Greek myths and Roman narratives but they were hardly credible in themselves as models for society. In place of the forbidden prayers to the Virgin Mary, and the like, where did the new English citizen go for a frame to his world? Most of all, what had happened to all the English heroes that used to define ideals of human existence, especially those of the Arthurian legends, still the most popular fiction read in Elizabethan England?9 It was to these questions that Virgil offered Spenser, Bacon, and Milton the hope of an answer, namely, a means to write their own texts of renovatio, as he had written his at the beginning of a new empire with the hero of Aeneas.

II By no accident, all three—Spenser, Milton, and Bacon—faced, at one time or another, the metonymic paradox of an old Arthur for a new England. How could the old culture’s Arthur of the Round Table become the new hero of an epic in a culture with totally different concepts of time and history? Spenser and Bacon still saw around them medieval England in its fresh ruins (and what remained, Oliver Cromwell in Milton’s time would wipe out), but the cultural supports for its systems had vanished. Thus, with humanist and Protestant goals, like Virgil’s, how to restore a true living history? Each began with a simple equation. Labor in building a new society or a new Rome—even a collection of labors—could have no meaning unless it was conjoined, as in the Virgilian epic, with a hero or, more likely, a heroic center, to unify such labor or labors. There could never be, of course, a return to the myth of transcendence that surrounded the original Arthur and his own Round Table of collectivity. Time and the nature of subjectivity could never be the same after the Ochamite split of the Thomistic synthesis of grace and time or Nicholas of Cusa’s determination of the one and the many or Erasmus’s own concepts of language and communication

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building on these shifts, among others.10 There could never be a return to any Arthuriad that focused on the personal hero himself, who uniquely represented the community as a whole, as Aeneas had for Virgil. Tudor or Jacobean society could not agree on such a composite heroic figure as ancient Rome had; philosophical and theological tables could no longer be round because, in the first place, around one, so few would sit together. Most crucially, Lutheran and Calvinist concepts of time and history had built on a cosmology of a fallen humanity, a broken hero, that only Christ could redeem. Human institutions and certainly representative personal heroes were as cursed and fallen as society itself. Thus, the old transcendent Arthur as unifying hero, if brought forward, could only be a cultural anachronism. If a new Arthur, his signifiers could not be structured through a 1,000-year-old communal process, as had the old Arthur. Most of all, the individual textmaker may want to respond to the losses of community in his own culture, but the response could only be his, his own text to create the right community. His could never be the community so centrally figured as Virgil’s. For their fragmented world, then, the only hero could be plural, never the centrally conceived hero of a unified Rome. Such an invented hero would have to face, in the ideologies that either directly or indirectly entered his text, the limitless perspectives of Renaissance painting. These would translate into the perspectives of Spenser’s endless narrative or the wide turbulent ocean surrounding Bacon’s island utopia. Even in the most absolute of the redemptive early modern texts built on Virgil, Milton’s hero is surprisingly plural and his antihero actually the nearest to the old Arthur of ideological certainty. But long before Milton, Spenser, and Bacon had made major originating choices in revising their own Arthurs. It is these choices I want to analyze here and so demonstrate not only the profound originality of Spenser in inventing Arthur but the universalizing Bacon brought to Spenser’s plural Arthur.

III Spenser’s choice could be nothing if not anachronistic. For one thing, the Elizabethan poet had been born in the reign of Mary I and had spent his first crucial years in a world shaped by her cultural imperatives, so many of which—including the primitivist motto from Erasmus, Veritas temporis filia—her sister would employ. Spenser had known from the start there could be no return. After all, as a boy and young man, had he not walked amid the broken-down institu-

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tional buildings of monasteries and churches all over London, which the Spanish ambassador had commented on during those years?11 The young Spenser had also known first-hand what mythic appeal the old systems still held for Tudor England, not least the extremely popular corpus of Arthurian legends. Thus, the task of the poet was to turn around the anachronism of Arthur, if he wanted that figure to center his epic poem. His strategy would be paradoxical and, no doubt, for his audience as shocking as a modernist avantgarde text at the beginning of the last century. Spenser’s Arthur would be reconstituted out of old England precisely to indicate a new progressive history at work. Whatever the appearance of nostalgia that thus formalized Spenser’s re-invention of the lost culture, Spenser’s Arthur was designed to be a true ‘‘once and future’’ hero, with the emphasis on a future leading out of the destruction. Centered on the national hero, his epic would build, as his prefatory letter to Raleigh makes clear, on a genuine prolepsis. What Spenser here announces as his anticipated first twelve books emphasizes the proleptic nature of the epic. His heroic structure would thus have clarity and direction, whatever the disjunction of his Tudor world. But then Spenser faced a question of convincing such an audience in the actual ‘‘delivering . . . forth’’ in Sidney’s phrase: how to build a convincing proleptic text, a prophetic epic, out of the ‘‘bare ruined choirs’’ early Tudor culture had brought forth? Spenser knew quite well there were texts of anachronism being written around him. Queen Mary herself had sought to transform, as the poet knew, the new English culture, which was irrecoverably broken, as she recognized wisely, from its past. Her method, with the aid of the English Cardinal Pole, himself of royal blood, was to bring to their native land the dynamic mythology of the Counter-Reformation sweeping Europe—their own ‘‘once and future’’ history. By no accident, it was she who moved Chaucer’s remains to Westminster Abbey and founded Poets’ Corner. With her progressive ideology, the real hero of an English epic dedicated to her might indeed have been a beneficent Lancashire Grantorto. Her sister also had no such illusions about the past, but Elizabeth I also knew the new English mythology had to be grounded in that most central social phenomenon of her time and early modern Europe, as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Bloch have shown: genealogy.12 It was by no accident, therefore, that two great sociological and political texts written in the first decades of her reign—Spenser’s youth—asserted a new genealogy for the new ideology of Elizabethan England. John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments argued that new English martyrs and their Protestant Christian culture had recovered true religion. So did Bishop Jewel’s

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Defense of the English Church. Translated from the Latin by Bacon’s mother, Lady Anne Bacon (for C. S. Lewis, ‘‘the best of all sixteenthcentury translators’’13), Jewel’s Defense had extraordinary influence on all forms of English Protestantism. It argued that the Elizabethan settlement had purified the Church by returning to its earliest traditions.14 Both Foxe and Jewel wrote originating primitivist texts that operated, as Spenser could read, on a principle of anachronism. So a new hero had to be found amid the chaos if a young poet of the late 1570s and 1580s wanted to write an epic to ‘‘redeme the time’’ and build a lasting empire like Virgil’s. Whether inspired by a dynastic epic like Tasso’s (or, for that matter, Virgil’s last six books) or whether Spenser did indeed want the Earl of Leicester to be represented as the Arthur who might marry Gloriana as Elizabeth and produce great offspring, he had a problem. He had to reconstruct something more than a discredited medieval figure centralizing a Holy Grail and the knights seeking it. If the labors of these knights constituted an earlier English version of Virgil’s georgics, Spenser could certainly not authenticate the ridiculous miracles associated with those labors. Almost sixty years ago, Josephine Bennett traced the steps by which the young Spenser elected to choose Prince Arthur. Bennett caught the unusual nature of Spenser’s anachronism.15 As she documents, Arthur had generally been written off by modern English culture. Certainly by the 1570s and 1580s, when all the major choices for Spenser’s epic had been made, Erasmus, More, Ascham, and countless humanists, especially Protestants, had shown courtiers that the Arthurian material was not respectable. To go back then meant confronting the bad taste of anachronism, agreeable in amusing entertainments like, say, Shakespeare’s comedies, but problematic, not for a serious epic. Only in the last two decades of Elizabeth I’s reign did the reputation of Arthur ascend, as Bennett shows, when culturally and historically any lie might work to glorify the success of the Tudor queen and her marvelous ability to build a breakthrough up from the nightmare she had inherited in 1558. As later generations would learn, Elizabeth’s seeming political success was only tenuous. The new horror and nightmare known as the Stuarts and the violence of the English Revolution soon descended. But in the 1570s, if the young poet desired to follow, as Cuddie says, ‘‘the Romish Tityrus [Virgil]’’ and ‘‘sing of warres and deadly drede, / So as the Heauens did quake his verse to here,’’16 then he would need such a national hero, anachronism or not. At this point, trying to work around the problem of cultural disjunction, the

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young Spenser might indeed have re-read Virgil and recognized the epic dialectic the Roman poet composed when he finished the Georgics around 30 bc and began the Aeneid. That is, as the unfinished text of Virgil’s epic asserts, cultural disjunction could become a source of cultural solution. The point was to identify the hero with a cultural hero like Augustus and a salvific ideology, with more emphasis on the second than on the first. If the breakdown of Roman civil wars could lead, so Virgil textualized, to the breakthrough of an imperial Rome figured in Augustus, so a young Tudor poet reading Virgil might dream of his own revolutionary text that could quake the heavens and, as prolepsis, indicate a future for his culture.17 But how to create the right ‘‘antique image,’’ in Spenser’s phrase, so that it would be credible for a modern audience and centralize an innovative text for glorifying a new empire and promising a new pax romana? Empires were built on such texts, and, for a text maker in Ireland, the need to find a proleptic text even greater. Spenser’s answer was that this past ‘‘Image’’ could be recovered, but only ironically. That is, the right ‘‘image’’ could be recovered or rewritten from the past, but only in a plural epic designed to ‘‘fashion,’’ as Spenser says in his letter to Raleigh, future heroes. In this letter, the emphasis is on the heroes but only as they exist in a dialectic with a hero. Thus, any ‘‘image’’ would have to build on plurality. Aristotelian probability—the heart of Sidney’s argument in his Defense of Poesie—could only be realized in quite an original text suited to the way Tudor society now viewed its time. This meant a text for Tudor audiences built on a concept of fallen history that called for action that could never be complete or transcendent but must always be serial and ongoing, a new kind of collectivity built, like Bacon’s inductive logic, on diffused parts. This meant a text built on a process of ellipsis or diffused action, a serial narrative, an epic of plurality whose ‘‘endlesse worke’’ represented redemptive labors both centrifugal and centripetal. At no point, unlike the Arthurian legends, however, do they meet at a Round Table. Whatever the originating or concluding points outside of the narrative, in the text the line of Spenser’s plot is linear, forward, singular, and the hero ‘‘pricking on the plaine’’ is ‘‘war-faring’’ (or in Milton’s variant in the 1644 Areopagitica, ‘‘way-faring,’’ Milton’s whole passage directly invoking Spenser). The power of Spenser’s example could be found in the famed elliptical style and language of the Bacon of the 1597 Essays and the very calculated aphorisms of Bacon’s Novum Organon, not to mention the vast catalogues of his Historiae and elsewhere throughout Bacon’s vast canon. The point is not so much exact parallels (al-

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though these exist) as that Spenser’s ideological and dialectical uses of the method of ellipsis within a proleptic or prophetic English epic gave Bacon permission, so to speak, to develop his own originating structures. Spenser had built his elliptical method through a method of deliberate parody, as Bacon would also use this method. Thus, in another primitivist example of ironic reversal, Spenser parodies not only the diffuse narratives of the Round Table but those of the old Catholic but now despised Golden Legend. Both types of medieval narratives were elliptical in structure, and Spenser blatantly appropriates the term of Legend for each of his wandering knights. So, like the reformers such as Foxe, Spenser uses a primitivism renverse´e. Ellipsis in these earlier narratives served the purpose Spenser would now appropriate. He, too, would interrupt, shorten, so that the whole can be seen. It is this strategy Bacon would appropriate. Bacon also saw, in his own texts of ellipsis and prolepsis, just how Spenser sets up his dialectic of presentation. That is, in Spenser’s strategy, absence was necessary to see the presence of the transcendent whole, the movement of the whole toward meaning. Such a whole could never be reached, or meaning fully recovered, unless through immanent individual acts—Legends—of heroism or sanctity. These acts could be endless but were always collective, proleptic in their promise. Thus, a dialectic was needed to direct the relationship of this one and the many, and it needed to be actualized, made alive, in a literary text working at both ends of the spectrum. As with the centrifugal old Holy Grail legends and knights, Spenser needed a centralizing figure. Only another Arthur could promise closure, if not achieve it, in the centripetal movement of Spenser’s epic. The Elizabethan poet did not need any figure with a sacramental monarchial presence or any kind of potential stasis as center—but a catalysis for the centrifugal and centripetal appearances and disappearance that formed the plural labor, the real subject of his epic. In this active process, it is hardly a surprise that Spenser’s Arthur is a prince, a becoming, never a king. Thus, this interplay of processing center and part, absence and presence, helped to produce for the Tudor reader a believable cultural myth, at least an Aristotelian probability. In this sense, disjunction, the experience of Tudor life, could always be placed in a process of linguistic, metaphorical, and ideological certitude—at least for the moment of reading the text. Such experience and strategies of disjunction and conjunction would translate directly, as I have noted, into the texts of Bacon. As many commentators on Bacon’s Essays and Instauratio magna have noted, central to his

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canon are both Bacon’s theory and practice of the aphorism and its own dialectical representations.18 It was Bacon’s reading, I believe, of the greatest and most originating poet of his age that led him, among many influences, to rethink and develop his own sense of elliptical style and prophetic history. But the main point for both Spenser and Bacon is that within the texts, the plural heroes—the human frames for the readers—exist only in community or not at all. Wayne Erickson’s observation on the actual ellipsis in the text Prince Arthur is reading in the House of Alma is helpful here: ‘‘Spenser excises the historical Arthur from his poem and from chronicle history; the historical Arthur ceases to exist except as an inference born of an absence in the minds of readers whose conscious or unconscious cognizance of cultural myth instinctively mends the gap that stands open at the end of Briton moniments.’’19 Spenser’s Arthur is thus ironically present in the poem and distant at the same time. By his very name and the legends accruing to it, Spenser’s hero can bring old history forward. But through Spenser’s powerful parody of the old medieval genre, especially its method of ellipsis, that is, its form of disparate georgic labors, Spenser can set up a new equation: ellipsis is prolepsis, and prolepsis is ellipsis—at least as Spenser defines his method in The Faerie Queene. There can be no completeness, except through a series of endless labors and ever-new perspectives, a world suited to Bruno, Galileo, and Renaissance painting. Thus, if a hero like Arthur were to embody a solution to the Tudor cultural dialectic—that is, as an English hero who continues the past in its metamorphosis into the future—the new Arthur had to represent a genuine textual probability. This meant a literary text, no matter how social the epic or soteriological the ideology Spenser held. Poetic artefact alone could embody such a plural hero. Only language could transform—deliver ‘‘forth’’—an abstract hope into a living mythic reality for the whole of society. As Sidney wrote in the Defense of Poesie: ‘‘the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea [Sidney’s emphasis]’’ and ‘‘that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them,’’ so that we have not just ‘‘a particular excellency, as nature might have done, but [may] bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him.’’20 This defense of the universalizing force of poetry by the young hope of the Dudley family leads us finally to the meaning of Spenser’s method. We can now see the validity of Arthur as anachronism in Spenser’s epic that Bacon would creatively transform. Thus, such

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figuration as Spenser’s plural Arthur arises only in a dialectic between history and probability, in a gap that allows us not only to have Sidney’s ‘‘particular excellency’’—a nationalist hero, a product of legend and fact—but ‘‘to bestow’’ an Arthur or probability ‘‘upon the world to make many’’ Arthurs. This bestowing will be in an elliptical method that represents another georgics of labors, both within the text and within its readers. This parodic method in The Faerie Queene operates as a series of actions in a collective and proleptic text, as does Spenser’s one probable Arthur and the many ‘‘Arthurs’’ representing ‘‘endlesse’’ Legends. Only such a text for a Tudor poet in Ireland can bring prophetic meaning to what James Joyce calls ‘‘the nightmare of history.’’ With such a text, the young Spenser could rewrite the Virgilian solution to historical disjunction and originate a new kind of history and culture for his time and place. In this intention, as with Virgil’s in Augustan Rome, past and present and future have meaning only in the poet’s myth, the probability, the text itself and its centralizing hero. The new plural Arthur is defined textually by a process of history: prolepsis as its ellipsis and its ellipsis as prolepsis.

IV Bacon’s final major work, the utopia New Atlantis, shows how the Jacobean lord chancellor transformed Spenser’s epic form and produced for the first time, at least textually, the modern idea of progress and a new mode of science fiction. The center of this transformation focused on Arthur as anachronism and took, at least in Bacon’s last work, an amazing transfer from Virgil and Spenser. Bacon’s first published work in 1586 was entitled ‘‘The Misfortune of Arthur’’21 and his final utopia, The New Atlantis can be viewed, I now suggest, as a collective Arthur redivivus. From it, in the guise of science and technology and an updated Round Table in the Solomon’s House of Bacon’s imaginary utopia, another Arthur entered and dominated the mythology of the modern world. I have argued that Spenser’s anachronism of Arthur in the 1580s was central to his o’er-leaping the cultural break of his time—to make his Arthur modern, pluralistic in a world separated from the medieval by Cusanus, Giordano Bruno, and others. As with Spenser, time and history are for Bacon not merely more horizontal than vertical (meaning: transcendent) in their trajectory but exist in an infinite universe with its own ‘‘endlesse worke,’’ an enormous ocean like the un-

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charted South Pacific where islands of the future like Bensalem are waiting to be discovered. In this difference of time and history, Bacon took another important step that built on the past but was radically original. The New Atlantis represents an utterly new future, immediately, as Bacon’s audiences saw, different from all previous utopias they had known. What was remarkable for them was that Bacon’s text actualizes the idea of progress in a new setting. The future as controlling a text was hardly new. In Virgil, the concept of a future determining a present occurs in the words of Jupiter himself in the first book of the Aeneid. There is then, from the beginning of this intertextuality, a sense of promise. With it comes also an idea of progress or progression of history toward some fulfillment. Such an idea of progress informs, as Bacon saw, Spenser’s own originating text. Spenser’s entire structure of laboring knights wandering centrifugally and centripetally is one of hope. For Bacon, the shift toward hope is more dramatic. Bacon’s entire canon, especially all of the Instauratio magna, is driven, one might say, by such a ‘‘once and future’’ concept of time and history. It should be further noted that Bacon, too, derives his idea of progress in a kind of root-primitivism, the truly archaic or remote that would displace the immediate corrupt past—what he had inherited from earlier humanist texts. From Lorenzo da Valla to Erasmus to John Bale to the English Protestants, Bacon utilizes this central humanist method whose ideology his mother had translated into the Tudor world at the time of his birth. Ironically, such primitivism becomes more pronounced as each of the three masters devises his epic solution to the disjunction of their history. Spenser’s recall of a medievalism less than fifty years old turned the Virgin Mother into a redemptive Gloriana with her own secular forms of intercession; Bacon’s Platonic island in the uncharted South Pacific was found largely by old texts of discovery of every kind, including geographies of the mind; and finally Milton’s ultimate human archaism describes the fall in the Garden as a remythologized Virgilian georgics in the midst of a civil war that had stripped the illusions of the Henrician settlement. In this method of humanist primitivism, nostalgia or the anachronism of Arthur translates into action and the building of a new society. In the Virgilian paradigm of burning Troy becoming new Rome, Milton’s heroes Adam and Eve descend from the lost Garden into the plain; Bacon’s new convert leaves the collective world of the hidden island to announce its superior technology; and in Spenser, wandering knights ‘‘pricking on the plaine’’ always return, after instauration in a special house or garden or mountain-top, to the ‘‘endlesse worke’’ that

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contains the promise of restoring a fallen time. In this sense, in both Spenser and Milton, and especially in Bacon, a utopia exists to inform a broken world. The result is, as the Marxist Frederic Jameson defines all such utopia making, that hortatory and communal agenda as in Spenser, Bacon, and Milton ‘‘betray a complicated apparatus’’ that displaces the poet’s own time in terms of a special narrative history. A dialectic of two histories follows. What Jameson calls ‘‘the topical allusion’’ of the author’s historical society is juxtaposed to a language of probability about that society whose words and myth finally subsume it—and replace the society itself.22 As Bolgar notes, Virgil would replace a legion in building an empire.

V Thus it should be no surprise that the young ambitious lawyer of the early 1590s, Francis Bacon, must have read Spenser’s epic immediately on its appearance, as did most of London. There is clear evidence that he incorporated its structures into the early masques he was composing for the Earl of Essex.23 As Raleigh had faded, Essex, who had married the widow of Sir Philip Sidney and was building on Sidney’s beatified image, became one of Spenser’s court hopes. This was not least because he represented a counterforce to Burleigh, Bacon’s uncle by marriage, and his son Robert Cecil, both of whom impeded Bacon’s career, as the father had Spenser’s. With his constant anxiety about the court, Spenser would have known of Bacon, the son of a lord chancellor, from the 1580s onwards and no doubt knew of the later crucial intellectual event of the appearance of Bacon’s Essays in 1597. Their rhetorical structure and inscription had announced a new type of humanist courtier. Of course, for Bacon, it was precisely the difference of his new kind of antiRomance hero—the courtier of his Essays—from a figuration like Spenser’s Sir Calidore, for example, that conversely made Spenser so valuable as a source of parody and origination. Bacon could view Spenser as Spenser had the medieval Arthurian epic: that is, through the distancing that produces composition, the dialectic of a new myth-making. For both epic makers, this dialectic was built on parody, an ancient process useful at times of historical dislocation, particularly where there arises, as Bacon names it in a scientific work, the ‘‘tabula abrasa’’ of a broken culture and another to be written in.24 In Bacon’s case, the statesman and politician of Stuart England had seen all too clearly his world on the edge of civil war. Indeed, such a

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method of parody has recently been seen by Bacon scholarship as a viable means to interpret Baconian science. Paolo Rossi makes this point, for example, in discussing Bacon’s 1609 De sapientia veterum (The Wisdom of the Ancients), where Bacon parodies Greek myths to explain scientific and social reality—Cupid as the atom; Orpheus as natural philosophy; Diomedes as religious zeal. Rossi also elaborates the value of parody for Bacon in his discussion of Bacon’s 1622 De principiis atque originibus (Things and Origins). In that text, to prove his structural theory of the atom, amazingly like those of modern physics, Bacon uses the myths of Cupid and Coelum. Both, notes Rossi, are ‘‘allegorical, mythological works and contain the most coherent and complete renderings of Bacon’s thought in its materialistic phase.’’25 Thus, Bacon’s parody is constructive and not destructive, as Bacon himself defines the method in his private notebook of 1608, Commentarius solutus: ‘‘To consyder wt opynions are fitt to nourish tanquam Ansae and so to grift the new upon the old, ut religiones solent’’ (11:65). Even Bacon’s specific use of Virgil’s Georgics operated with this same constructive method of parody. He takes the Roman poet’s second major work and uses it in the 1605 Advancement of Learning to justify a theory of labor Bacon is developing for the mind itself: ‘‘to instruct and suborn action and active life, these Georgics of the mind, concerning the husbandry and tillage thereof, are no less worthy than the heroical descriptions of Virtue, Duty, and Felicity’’ (3:419). Bacon’s utopia begins with the same kind of opening as the Aeneid and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a condition of loss that needs a soteriological act of intercession. In the Aeneid, a storm has forced Aeneas’s fleet to Africa and Carthage; at the start of the narrative of Spenser’s epic, a storm drives the Red Crosse Knight and Una into the Wandering Wood and so initiates the conflict. The New Atlantis opens with a storm at sea, the kind of imitation of Virgil Bacon would have seen recently reenacted at the 1612 wedding of James I’s daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Bacon too funded and may have written parts of his own rather Spenserian dramatic presentations for James I in the next three years).26 In Bacon’s short narrative, the terrible storm has driven a group of European sailors to a strange island in the uncharted South Pacific—the kind of standard popular first-person explorers’ narrative familiar to both Bacon and Spenser. Bacon’s transformation of this popular form, like Spenser’s, is remarkable. He elaborates in his text this device of subjectivity and the method of a central consciousness—easy for a reader to identify with—for a central irony: through this subjectivity, the most objective series of scientific and technological wonders can

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be revealed. An enormous elliptical catalogue at the end of Bacon’s epic offers glimpses of just what Europe’s future might be. The revelation of this new Faeryland develops with a single driving narrative intent of conversion. Such had also been the intent, one way or another, of each of Spenser’s six labors, a turning away and then a turning toward the ultimate reality of Gloriana. Like the catechesis in the House of Alma or the House of Caelia or the visions of Scudamour at the temple of Venus or of Calidore on Mount Acidale, Bacon’s confessional fiction develops its narrative by a series of events-qua-teaching. Bacon’s method is realistic, not allegorical, but symbolic and mythic discourses surround the events of the story. Thus, as soon as the strangers are allowed to enter the island, the governor of the House of Strangers, arrayed with a vast turban, narrates, as they visit special places of the island, the wonders of an earlier ruler, King Solomon. He established the center of the island, an institution of science and research that led both to Experiments of Light and Experiments of Fruit, the dialectic for Bacon of all human activity and knowledge. It is soon clear that Bacon is operating with a number of parodies here, not least of the Bible. These strange aliens use Jewish customs, rituals, dress, and names from the Old Testament, but their most remarkable parody comes from the New Testament, as the governor relates. They are Christians, of a third kind beyond Protestant and Catholic, and they were evangelized in a miracle by that one apostle whose name would always rouse English Protestants, Saint Bartholomew.27 A small ark floated near the island miraculously identified by a vast ‘‘cylinder of light’’ and inside were ‘‘all the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments’’ sent by the apostle (3:137–38). These texts form the ideological center of the island and operate in a kind of fundamental dialectic to the community of holy scientists and to the social alien celebrations like the Feast of the Tirsan, with its sexual imagery celebrating males ‘‘who have 30 or more descendants of their body’’ (3:147) and to the narratives and appearance of Joabin the Jew, an inscription significant in the evolution of modern European society. The narrative concludes with the grand appearance in Bensalem of the Father of Solomon’s House. The Father singles out the young sailor for a special catechesis and final healing. The Father is not only an Arthur Redivivus, head of a new round table, but director for a group like that collective which Bacon admired, the most avant-garde collective in early modern Europe, the fiercely active celibate Jesuits. This new holy Father will teach the convert-son how to redeem society. He will first be given a vast listing of specific

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achievements of Solomon’s House (including new medicines, strange fruits and vegetables, inventions like the telephone) and then, most important of all, the aggregate and dynastic method by which knowledge is processed, a model of corporate organization which Marxists have praised. But not only is the new convert sent out to reveal these tidings of great joy. He is given what runs the whole system and fires its research and technology: capital, money in this case from the state. A new social technology has evolved: ‘‘And so he left me,’’ says the charged young man in the last line of this unfinished epic, ‘‘having assigned a value of about two thousand ducats, for a bounty to me and my fellows’’ (3:166). The sailor’s subjectivity has thus been transformed into social and, one assumes, political action through a narrative, a myth. The convert now carries this message of the myth, as does Bacon’s utopia, to all society, to all readers. Spenserian Faeryland thus allowed Bacon the imagining not only of an archaic utopia, Aristotelian probabilities Spenser had built his epic upon, but Bacon could now appropriate this most seminal of modern English epic to create a myth and narrative of collective hope in the midst of a common ‘‘aboriginal calamity’’ and a specific cultural ‘‘tabula abrasa.’’ It is precisely this emphasis on collectivity which Bacon found in Spenser that the Marxists have admired in Bacon and that distinguishes Bacon’s theory of science and technology from that, for example, of the mathematical and abstract physics of Galileo or the solipsistic conclusions of Descartes.28 Thus, what Bacon parodies in Spenser is not so much specific detail as larger mythic structures—exactly, one might add, the relationship of Milton to Spenser. Clark Hulse takes this point about mythic structure in Bacon and Spenser a step further and sets it in a more georgic frame: ‘‘Within the problematics of the interpretation of myth, each found a key to the relationship of learning to politics.’’ The key was in the concept of the labors of knights, as Virgil had dramatized choices to his ancient audience who needed the probability of myth to direct political action from civil wars and build an empire. ‘‘Only when [Bacon],’’ continues Hulse, ‘‘has subjected Spenser’s mythological discourse to the criticism of the politiques does Bacon make a last attempt to reformulate it in Machiavellian terms.’’29 Those terms would be to formulate a new science within a public and social domain, setting a House in his New Atlantis, Solomon’s House. Here technocrats can train young knights or seamen so they may better redeem the time. Bacon would thus institutionalize Spenser’s labor with the clarion cry Bacon took from Virgil and the Habsburgs of ‘‘plus ultra,’’ the call to progress. Less than fifty

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years later, the utopic Solomon’s House had become the actual Royal Society, and in Cowley’s famous ode to it, Bacon is called its new ‘‘Moses.’’ For the next three centuries, Bacon’s idea of progress based on collective and organized labor described in the New Atlantis began to dominate European and then global intellectual life. Once more, a new Virgil would replace a legion and build an empire far more vast than ancient Rome’s. It is therefore hardly surprising that many historians of science have seen Baconian myth as establishing the modern social concept of science and technology. Bacon’s fictional image of collectivity and technology has led to the envisioning of institutions like the present-day MIT, the Salk Institute, Cal Tech, Imperial College, and the computer centers in cities from Berlin to Tokyo, in the valleys of California, and on the plains of south India. If indeed Bacon did launch such a vision of modern science and technology through his texts, then Spenser helped to launch Bacon and transform into a new collective mythology the old popular Arthurian myths and legends. In this sense Spenser’s experiments and powerful originality opened his text and Bacon’s to the modern world. His wandering knights and an anachronistic plural hero marked the transition of the heroic from one world culture to another. Bacon was to take this anachronism and plurality of labor a step further and invent, at least textually, the modern idea of progress. For better or worse, the dominant mythology of world culture in the twenty-first century emerged from this synthesis of epics in early modern England.

Notes 1. See the full discussion of this process in W. A. Sessions, Francis Bacon Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), part 2. Also, see the definitions of such georgic labor in my monograph, ‘‘Spenser’s Georgics,’’ English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 202–38. These works provide the background and greater context for my arguments in this essay. For an important analysis of how this Christian, especially Protestant, concept of radically fallen human nature operates as a fundament in Bacon’s dialectical method, see Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), esp. 129 passim and 206 passim. 2. Sessions, Francis Bacon Revisited, chap. 4 for a fuller discussion of the six parts, a deliberate parody of the Genesis story of the creation. 3. R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 61. 4. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400– 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Duffy’s sources are crucial here in establishing his case of the shock of the cultural breach, and his bibliography more than indicates the context of his argument. See esp. Christopher Haigh, The

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English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). These studies have marked a revolutionary turn in English historiography, in many ways reversing the Whiggish analysis of the Elton school. The 1990s debate about Shakespeare’s recusancy and Arthur Marotti’s recent studies on Catholic underground activity confirm this sense of devastation. It should be noted that these studies have opened entirely new perspectives, not least in recent studies like those of Stephen Greenblatt on the concept of purgatory. 5. See the full text of this poem lamenting the destruction of medieval England’s (and northern Europe’s) most famous shrine to the Virgin Mary—a Bodleian Library Manuscript Rawl. Poet. 291 fol 16 identified since the early nineteenth century as a recusant text—in The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse, ed. Emrys Jones, 550–51 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and in Duffy, 377– 78. Shakespeare’s borrowing—proof of his coterie reading of the manuscript of the poem—and his parodic contextualization are obvious in their acknowledgment of the central fact of cultural desolation. 6. For a broader context for this argument, esp. the place of the early Protestant Reformers, see W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. the section ‘‘Surrey’s Blank Verse: Britain,’’ 281–84, in chap. 10, ‘‘The Origins of Blank Verse.’’ See also the chapter by the same author in the New Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), ed. Janel Mueller and David Loewenstein, ‘‘The Early Tudor Court and Literature.’’ 7. Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–) 3: 221–24, esp. lines 45–55 of 224. This letter appears in Erasmus’s Novum instrumentum, actually dated at Froben in February 1516. Similar ideas appear in the Paraclesis and elsewhere. 8. For a full bibliography of this transition and for a broad comprehensive of modern Bacon scholarship, see W. A. Sessions, ‘‘Recent Studies in Francis Bacon’’ in English Literary Renaissance 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 351–71. For an interpretation of Bacon’s influence on the English Revolution itself and the period, see Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), esp. chap. 3. 9. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), esp. pages 149 passim and 282 passim. Lewis merely touches on the popularity of the editions of Malory and the other Arthurian legends throughout the century and up until the Civil War. 10. Among many studies of this shift in the concept of time and subjectivity, see Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), and John Bossy, Christianity and the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 11. There are a number of new studies on the wreck London had become, but for the simplest analysis of what Mary I and her government had to contend with, see David Loades, Mary Tudor (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), and Thomas Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 7. 12. For an extended discussion of this most vital component of early modern European society, see Sessions, Henry Howard, esp. chap. 13. 13. C. S. Lewis, English Literature, 307. 14. An Apology of the Church of England by John Jewel, ed. J. E. Booty (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, published for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1974). For the intellectual and theological context of this primitivism, see Fr. Booty’s excel-

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lent introduction. The ideal primitive church had been a famous Ochamite prophecy, as it was throughout the entire Church Universal in the late Middle Ages and in the time of Savonarola’s experiments in Florence, contemporaneous with Erasmus and the young Luther. For an example of how Bacon adapted his mother’s conceptual language into his own strategies, especially in using certain texts from classical Greece as primitivist devices, see W. A. Sessions, ‘‘Francis Bacon and the Classics: the Discovery of Discovery,’’ in Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts: ‘‘The Art of Discovery Grows with Discovery,’’ ed. W. A. Sessions, 237–53 (New York: AMS Press, 1990). 15. Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of ‘‘The Faerie Queene’’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), esp. 61–79, although the entire book sets a context for this definition of hero. There are some problems in her Old Historicist method and she has one serious misreading, but she makes a genuine attempt to understand Spenser’s choice. The choice of Arthur also haunts the Spenser Variorum writers, and in the critical mode of the old historicism and sources studies, other works investigated Spenser’s choice of the medieval Arthur. The best summary of all this—with his own insights into the choice—is James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘‘The Faerie Queene’’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. in the First Part, ‘‘The One and the Many,’’ the sections ‘‘The Institution of the Hero’’ and ‘‘Arthurian Torso,’’ 22–58. 16. Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 173. 17. See the discussion of the evolution of such a georgic ideal in Sessions, ‘‘Spenser’s Georgics.’’ 18. Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) is the classic contemporary study of Bacon’s prose style. Beginning with Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), the discussion of Bacon’s theory and practice of discourse has received a number of excellent studies, especially noting Bacon’s dialectical structures, not least Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), esp. chap. 2 ‘‘Georgics of the Mind: The Experience of Bacon’s Essays,’’ who argues that the dialectic of indeterminacy necessary for reading Bacon’s essays or expanded aphorisms is itself the meaning of the text. For a more dialectical study of the aphorism in Bacon, see Alvin Snider, Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, Butler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 19. Wayne Erickson, Mapping ‘‘The Faerie Queene’’: Quest Structure and the World of the Poem (New York: Garland, 1996), 29. 20. Sir Philip Sidney, ‘‘Defense of Poesie,’’ in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan Gilbert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962). 21. Kenneth Alan Hovey, ‘‘Bacon’s Parabolic Drama: Iconoclastic Philosophy and Elizabethan Politics,’’ in Sessions, Legacy, 215. 22. Frederic Jameson, ‘‘Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,’’ Diacritics 7 (1977): 2–21. 23. Hovey, ‘‘Bacon’s Parabolic Drama,’’ Legacy, 215–32. 24. The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (1858; repr., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friederich Frommann Verlag, 1963), 1:39, hereafter identified in the text. 25. Rossi, 132.

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26. Hovey, 215. 27. See the discussion in Sessions, Francis Bacon Revisited, 155–56. 28. There is considerable literature on this difference of Bacon’s concept of science. See Sessions, Bibliography, esp. 354–59, 362–64. 29. Clark Hulse, ‘‘Spenser, Bacon, and the Myth of Power,’’ in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, 320 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

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Humanism in Hard Times: The Second Earl of Leicester (1595–1677) and His Commonplace Books, 1630–60 Germaine Warkentin

IN MAY 1619, JAMES HAY, VISCOUNT DONCASTER, LEFT ENGLAND ON AN embassy to Germany, dispatched by James I in his attempt to mediate between the Emperor Matthias and Protestant rebels in Bohemia after the defenestration of Prague. John Donne accompanied him as chaplain, and among the attendant gentlemen was Hay’s young brother-in-law Robert Sidney (1595–1677), who had recently become Viscount Lisle when his father, also Robert, was named first Earl of Leicester of the second creation in 1618.1 Leicester’s heir was twenty-three years old, and had already begun a soldier’s career; in 1614 his father, then governor of Flushing, had given him the command of a company of foot. Like his brother and sisters, he had been educated at home (a matter over which his parents took great care), and in 1607, aged eleven, matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, as had his father and his uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, the poet.2 There he would have received an education ‘‘quintessentially humanistic in nature, though far more irenic and ecumenical than that envisaged by its Italian progenitors.’’3 By his early twenties, Lisle was already a book collector; the titles he purchased between 1618 and 1626, recorded in the general accounts kept by his servant Philip Maret, show that his interests were learned as well as military.4 In mid-June Hay’s entourage arrived in Heidelberg, and among Lisle’s accounts we find the entry, ‘‘June 29 to the Library keeper at Heidelberg 00-02-00.’’ It is probable that the young book-lover paid a visit to the renowned Palatine Library, and for some reason, perhaps tips to the servants, money changed hands.5 The Palatine Library of the early seventeenth century was the most important scholarly library of northern Europe. The University of Heidelberg, renowned as the ‘‘Geneva of the north,’’ was by 1619 tending toward a Christian humanism closer to that of Erasmus and 229

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Melanchthon than to Calvin, argues Notker Hammerstein. ‘‘Court and university were moulded by the late humanistic irenical attitude of many professors and councillors, in effect pursuing a form of religion for the scholarly elite.’’6 In 1619 the overseer of the Palatine Library was Janus Gruterus, a Continental intellectual from circles well known to the generation of Lisle’s father and uncle. Jan van Dorsten has traced the complex familial relationships among Gruterus, Daniel Rogers, and Janus Dousa (the latter two well known to Philip and Robert Sidney).7 Included in this genealogy is Marcus Geraerts or Gheeraerts, who painted Robert’s wife Barbara and her children, including the infant Robert, about 1596. Connected with the same family were Franciscus Junius the biblical translator, Abraham Ortelius the mapmaker, and Emanuel van Meteren the historian; the library at Penshurst would eventually include works by all three. Gruterus was a classical scholar (collector of the important Inscriptiones antiquae, 1602, in which he was assisted by Scaliger), the editor of many Latin authors including Tacitus and Livy, and a Latin poet, but he is best known today as an indefatigable anthologist, particularly of Renaissance Latin poetry.8 Though Lisle was interested in the drama, he would prove to be insensible to poetry. The catalogue of the library he was assembling possessed at least two works by Gruterus, published under the pseudonym of Joannes Gualterius. No reader of the future earl’s commonplace books will be surprised that these were the Chronicon Chronicorum Politicum, quo Imperatores Reges, etc. recensentur and the Chronicon Chronicorum EcclesiasticoPoliticum (both Frankfu¨rt, 1614).9 Another member of the same circle, and one well known to both Philip Sidney and Lisle’s father Robert, was Paulus Melissus (Paul Schede), who had written a cordial farewell poem to Philip Sidney as he left Germany after his embassy to the emperor in 1577. Melissus too had been a keeper of the library in Heidelberg, and it was Gruterus who succeeded him in 1602. Significant intellectual links also drew these Leiden friends of the Sidneys—Janus Dousa, Daniel Rogers, Melissus, and above all the distinguished philologist and moral philosopher Justus Lipsius— into contact with learned men elsewhere, figures such as Jacques Auguste De Thou, George Buchanan, Johannes Sturm, William Camden, and Isaac Casaubon.10 Two features important for this essay characterize the intellectual world of these widely scattered scholars. The first is the generally neostoic character of their thought, which (to generalize broadly) united humanist philological methods with an investigation of the problem of rights grounded in the writings of that formidable critic of tyranny, the Roman histo-

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rian Tacitus.11 ‘‘From 1580 to 1640,’’ writes Peter Miller, ‘‘this Christianized, aristocratic, eclectic, stoical and skeptical philosophy of living was the fashionable intellectual language for educated Europeans from Seville to Danzig and from Jutland to Lower Austria.’’12 The problem of political action posed by such views is suggested in the writing of the Sidneys’ friend Justus Lipsius, who in dialogues such as De constantia (1584) stressed the need for balance among the passions and a supreme detachment in the conflicts of public life. As the seventeenth century progressed an irenic tendency developed in these circles, a movement away from strict Calvinism toward a more comprehensive vision of the unity of Christianity which could be found, for example, in the works of David Pareus, who was teaching theology at Heidelberg at the time of Lisle’s visit, and in the thought of Hugo Grotius, whom Lisle would encounter in Paris in the 1630s.13 Along with this neostoic detachment, with its ambiguous view of monarchies and weary desire for Christian peace, was a preoccupation among late humanists such as Gruterus with encyclopedic methods and projects. They envisioned the collecting and annotating of texts as an essential philological task that the new sources of information proliferating during the early seventeenth century would at last make possible. The work of these late humanists, though erected on the rhetorical and philological foundations laid down by Petrarch, Valla, and Poliziano, placed a high value on order and decorum, both political and textual. ‘‘Their typical achievements,’’ writes William Bouwsma, ‘‘were reference works for scholars. . . . At the same time the apparatus accompanying works of scholarship became increasingly elaborate. . . . Philological study particularly flourished in the Netherlands, where scholars published huge anthologies of obscure ancient and medieval texts.’’14 This enthusiasm for the assembling of collections was exemplified in hundreds of late humanist publications, and would be one of the aspects of the erudition of the times most forcibly rejected by the founders of the new natural and political sciences: Bacon, Mersenne, Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke. In their eyes the late humanists endured, and deserved to endure, the ‘‘death by sclerosis’’ deplored by Anthony Grafton in his compensatingly vigorous defense of the continuing vitality of late humanist rhetoric and scholarship.15 It was this late humanist culture—philological, stoical, ireneic, and above all encyclopedic—of which Gruterus was a part, and as we shall see it was also that of Lisle, who would inherit his father’s title, his papers, and his books in 1626. When the future earl visited Heidelberg in 1619, the sad fate of Janus Gruterus was unenvisioned;

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three years later the imperial forces of Count Tilly would capture Heidelberg, disperse Gruterus’ personal collection, and hand over the Palatine Library as spoils of war to Maximilian of Bavaria, whence 2,500 manuscripts and 8,000 printed books eventually made their way to the Vatican.16 Richard Tuck comments on the fittingly Lipsian resignation of Gruterus’s later years, spent cultivating his garden in a country house near the abandoned university.17 Something of the same resignation would be required of the second Earl of Leicester several decades later. The civil conflicts of the 1640s and the political tensions of the 1650s in England posed major challenges for the head of a family that had a well-established reputation for antiabsolutist views but whose immediate practical need was to preserve the family’s aristocratic status and material estate. Leicester’s own position has never been really clear. As early as 1639, Archbishop Laud was writing to Wentworth that he was ‘‘a most dangerous practising Puritan, none like [him] in the kingdom,’’ yet in the 1650s, John Maudit, the intruded vicar of Penshurst, would attack the earl from the pulpit at his own gate for his popish ways.18 During these years it was the neostoic and encyclopedic phase of late humanism that Leicester would rely on to sustain his intellectual life, not only in his reading but in the way he recorded what he read. He was not a compiler of commonplaces on the scale of his contemporary Sir William Drake, whose fifty-four volumes of notes, writes Kevin Sharpe, constitute ‘‘the greatest archival resource we have to chart how an early modern English gentleman read, and how reading shaped his mental universe.’’19 However, Leicester left a solid body of evidence about his own mental universe: the catalogue of the extensive library which he was already assembling by 1619, and the half-dozen heavy folio notebooks and files he compiled as he read between about 1630 and 1660. Although set down in the hand of a Sidney, these collections are not particularly distinguished in their contents; nevertheless they provide an exceptional window through which to view the structure of knowledge as it was imagined by a man of Leicester’s status and generation. Through it we can also glimpse the possible reasons for a political inaction on the part of the second earl which has puzzled commentators from Clarendon to Conrad Russell.



As Maret’s accounts show, courtier or not, Viscount Lisle at twenty-three was already a discriminating collector of learned works. In the months before his European journey, he had, among others, purchased two books by Girolamo Cardano, De rerum varietate libri

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xvii and De utilitate ex aduersis capienda libri IIII, ‘‘Sandarus’’ (probably Nicholas Sanders, De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani), ‘‘Archimedes Gk & Latin,’’ ‘‘ffonseca’s logicke’’ (Pedro Fonseca, Institutionum dialecticarum libri octo), the Dominican Sisto da Siena’s Bibliotheca sancta, and Emanuel van Meteren’s Historia Belgica (all in his later library catalogue).20 His father, Robert Sidney, the first earl, had possessed a worthy small library, as is demonstrated by the titles cited in the four extensive commonplace books he compiled.21 As several remarks in his papers testify, the second earl honored and clearly learned from his father’s practice; however, he was selfconsciously aware of the difference between the reading of a cultured aristocrat and the techniques of serious scholarship. In a passage written some time around 1635 he observed, They that have been acquainted with me, and my Education, and me, know that I am not, nor was bred to be a Schollar, So as I have always wanted Language, Especially Greek, and never knew I wanted that, and many other parts of learning, until it was too late, and I was too Old to learne them. Cato they say learned Greek at 80 years old, but many things might be thought well done in him (who was so much Esteemed by the world and deserved it) which would be thought, and indeed be faults in me, though I have not yet attained unto . . . half that age.22

The lack of Greek is perhaps the reason why he usually read his Plutarch in French, but it did not prevent him from collecting many books in Greek, and there is evidence that he made later efforts to repair the omission. Lisle became Earl of Leicester in 1626, inheriting his father’s library and with it a heavy burden of debt from which he had to free the estate. In 1632, he was sent to Denmark on his first embassy, and in 1635, he went to Paris, spending six fruitless years as ambassador extraordinary, charged with persuading Louis XIII to aid Charles I’s brother-in-law Frederick in regaining the Palatinate. His time in France was marked, if we are to judge from the books on French topics entered in the later library catalogue, by heavy book buying. However, his embassy yielded no results beyond an acquaintanceship with the distinguished legal theorist Hugo Grotius, a fellow ambassador, and in 1641 he returned to England, passing from the fraught politics of the Thirty Years’ War to the perplexing conflict between king and people that had developed during his absence. For three years, Leicester attempted to serve his royal master; as he wrote to his other brother-in-law the Earl of Northumberland in 1642, ‘‘your lordship knowes I am a servant, and I could not run

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away if I would.’’23 On his return the King had appointed him lord lieutenant of Ireland (his grandfather Sir Henry’s old office, and later in the 1640s his son Philip’s). But influenced perhaps by Laud’s opposition as well as what appear to be emerging stubborn uncertainties on Leicester’s part, Charles eventually withdrew the appointment. In June 1644, the second earl retired to his books at Penshurst and the edification of the newly built Leicester House in London.24 Leicester’s difficulty, in large part, was that he saw himself as equally obligated to the King and to Parliament, where a more politic nobleman would have recognized the practical necessity of choosing between them. He did not make his position much easier by retiring to Kent, where political opinion would oscillate between the King and Parliament over a critical two decades.25 At Penshurst Leicester endured the successive alignments of his neighbors in nearly complete political silence; his extant correspondence is chiefly concerned with family, estate, and national affairs, and though he kept a journal between 1646 and 1661, of which more later, its main focus is chiefly on events in Parliament.26 Although sworn of the Privy Council at the Restoration in 1660, he never led a public life again. In a much-quoted verdict, Clarendon would later describe the second earl as ‘‘a man of great parts, very conversant in books, and much addicted to the mathematics . . . [but] in truth rather a speculative than a practical man and expected a greater certitude in the consultation of business than the business of this world is capable of: which temper proved very inconvenient to him through the course of his life.’’ Leicester, he wrote, ‘‘was a man of honour and fidelity to the King, and his greatest misfortunes proceeded from the staggering and irresolution in his nature.’’27 However, there is a noticeable contrast between Leicester’s capable diplomatic performances and his inaction in this period. The biographer of John, Viscount Scudamore, the English ambassador in Paris when Leicester was Ambassador Extraordinary, observes that ‘‘the earl was much the better politician.’’28 But Felix Hull has commented on Leicester’s tense financial relationship with his wife, chronicled by the earl in a memorandum of about 1650, and his problems may have been personal as well as political.29 For example, in 1642, faced as lord lieutenant of Kent with the need to grant commissions to his deputies under the Militia Ordinance, he at first procrastinated and then resigned his appointment.30 A rigid man by nature, with a good measure of the hot Sidney temper, Leicester may have simply found himself in a situation neither rigor nor temper could resolve. In August 1642, he wrote to his

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sister-in-law Lucy, Countess of Carlisle, widow of the James Hay in whose entourage he had traveled to Germany: I am environed by such contradictions, as I can neither get from them, nor reconcyle them. The Parliament bids me go presently; the King commands me to stay till he dispatch me. The supplyes of the one, and the authority of the other, are equally necessary. I know not how to obtain them both, and am more likely to have neither; so now they are at such extremes, as to please the one is scarce possible, unless the other be opposed. I cannot expect the Parliament should supply me, because it is not confident of me; and as little reason is there to thinke that the king will authorise me, for he is as little confident. The one says, Why should we give money and armes, which may be employed against us? and the other says, Why should I give power and authority, which may be turned against me? . . . . How soon I shall get myself out of this labyrinth I cannot tell your ladyship.31

It was precisely such contradictions which Leicester would spend the next two decades investigating, his method—and perhaps his therapy—the system of inquiry afforded by the encyclopedic mind-set of late humanism.



Leicester’s early years as soldier, courtier, and ambassador exhibited at least the outward form of that life of dutiful negotium which humanists of the preceding century looked for in a public man. A neo-Latin poem addressed to him in the late 1630s praises him in these terms: Ingenio priscos generis tu vincis honores, Et quos maiores laudat imago tuos. Ingens Paladium cingit sapientia pectus, Cui eloquium interpres, regula, iustitia, Sustinet immensum regni sapientia pondus, Insita quæ regnat pectore clara tu[a] Iustitiaeque vias defendis legibus æquis Cui defers studium nocte dieque tuum.32

In 1623 ‘‘Lord Lisley’s studye,’’ with its ‘‘six faier peecis of Tapestrye hanginge’’ with ‘‘Imajarye worke’’ (pictorial scenes with figures) already resembled the studies of the Continental eruditi described by Dora Thornton.33 In a letter of 1580 his late father had been teased by elder brother Philip, ‘‘I would by the way your worship would learne a better hand, yow write worse than I, and I write evill enough.’’34 Leicester in contrast wrote a decent cursive italic, not en-

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tirely illegible even in his later years. When he withdrew to his books at Penshurst, he was apparently well prepared for the otium which ought to have been his reward. That this may have been his ambition, or that someone in his circle thought of him in such terms, is suggested by his portrayal as the learned, wise and noble ‘‘Synesius’’ in the Arcadian romance Theophania, written by an unknown author about 1645.35 Throughout the political events of the 1640s and 1650s, Leicester collected books assiduously (unlike some other learned aristocrats, he does not seem to have been interested in artifacts), apparently edified a proper library room, and about 1652 set his servant Gilbert Spencer to writing out a fair catalogue of his books.36 By 1665 they would number nearly 4,500, constituting one of the more substantial aristocratic libraries of the period in England.37 Leicester thus represents an example of the late humanist ideal: a well-educated nobleman (as well as Latin and some Greek, he read French, Italian, and Spanish), one with international intellectual contacts, a library rich in classical authors, a well-furnished study, a refined hand, and time at his disposal to reflect on the public events in which his family had played a role since the 1550s. The Kent to which he withdrew in the 1640s was a prosperous county with an independent-minded elite densely interconnected by ties of marriage and inheritance. Had he sought it, he could have found distinguished intellectual companionship among fellow book collectors and annotators: if not the absolutist Sir Robert Filmer, then perhaps the conservative moderate Sir Roger Twysden, or other learned men of families like the Derings, Oxindens, Lovelaces, Tuftons, and Haleses. Whatever their political views, these men read widely in the English and Continental political and theological writers of the time and in the Latin authors who constituted the foundation of any reputation for wisdom and learning. Leicester’s most important personal relationships, however, were with men of the court like his wife’s brother Algernon, Earl of Northumberland, not only Charles I’s lord admiral, but a well-informed and expert art collector.38 Although Henry Hammond, the Royalist vicar of Penshurst personally chosen by Leicester in 1633 for his preaching ability, is known to have corresponded with Sir Edward Dering, Leicester himself seems to have had little to do with his fellow Kentish intellectuals.39 Unlike his genial father, who had striven hard at court for the grandee status that was his legacy to the next generation, Robert, the second earl, had little gift for amicitia, Ciceronian or otherwise. There is a contrast, furthermore, between Leicester’s reading practices and those of figures such as Filmer, Twysden, and Dering.

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All three read widely but purposively, concerned to relate what they read to their responsibilities as heads of families, landowners, and members of Parliament. As Peter Laslett long ago observed, their assiduous study of theology, law, and local custom would produce the first great school of English local history.40 In Twysden’s case this led to (among other works) his edition of the Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem (1652), in Filmer’s to his treatise Patriarcha (ca. 1631–42), and in Dering’s to an antiquarian’s absorption in the collecting of early English manuscripts. Their Buckinghamshire contemporary Sir William Drake took the need for practical reading to an extreme; at one point he cautioned himself, ‘‘Be sure not to study much books of learning for they divert business, take up the memory too much, and keep one from more useful things.’’41 This was far from the case with the Kentish gentry, a number of whom were deeply learned, but it is a wry indication of the immediate uses to which a good library could be put in times of civic uncertainty. Leicester too made reading notes in profusion, covering many of the same books known to Drake and the Kentish gentry. Besides the mortgaged library, he had inherited his father’s four, large, partly filled commonplace books, and over the next four decades he would assemble at least five more of his own, in addition to producing many unbound sheets of annotations or adversaria.42 However, it was precisely the meditative perusal of learned writings scorned by Drake that was central—perhaps even psychologically necessary—to Leicester’s later life. In 1683, his son Algernon would tell the judge trying him for treason, ‘‘I believe there is a brother of mine here has forty quires of paper written by my father, and never one sheet of them was published; but he writ his own mind to see what he could think of it another time, and blot it out again, may be.’’43 What he was describing, as Leicester’s notebooks confirm, are the late humanist practices of copying, collation, and evaluation of sources as he daily witnessed his father engage in them. ‘‘The practice of keeping notebooks and commonplace books in general was one of the most widespread activities of the educated classes in contemporary England,’’ observes Peter Beal; ‘‘they constituted the primary intellectual tool for organizing knowledge and thought among the intelligentsia.’’44 Leicester’s father had been instructed in the art of commonplacing on humanist principles by his elder brother Philip. In a letter of 1580, the poet observed, The last poynt which tendes to teach profite is of a Discourser, which name I give to who soever speakes non simpliciter de facto, sed de qualitatibus et circumstantiis facti; and that is it which makes me and many others

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rather note much with our penn then with our minde, because wee leave all thes discourses to the confused trust of our memory because they being not tyed to the tenor of a question . . . that I wish herein, is this, that when yow reade any such thing, yow straite bring it to his heade, not only of what art, but by your logicall subdivisions, to the next member and parcell of the art. And so as in a table be it wittie word of which Tacitus is full, sentences, of which Livy, or similitudes whereof Plutarch, straite to lay it upp in the right place of his storehouse . . . such a little table yow may easelie make.

The early copy of this letter still among the family papers was endorsed by Leicester himself, ‘‘My uncle’s letter to my father abroad in his travail’’; he must have known its advice well.45 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, their source Gabriel Harvey’s annotated copy of Livy in the Princeton University library, have argued that Sidney’s letter reflects a view of commonplacing determined by the reading of Livy that he and Harvey had undertaken together in 1576–77.46 Harvey engaged in four such ‘‘readings,’’ and their analysis of the four illustrates the tact with which we have to situate any given commonplacer’s activity within his reading practice. As Grafton and Jardine describe it, about 1570–71 Harvey debated Livy with Colonel Thomas Smith Jr., their purpose to consider the political implications of impending military campaigns. Five years later, read Livy with Sir Philip Sidney. It is evident that both of these ambitious men had courtly political practice in mind. Reading about 1584 with Thomas Preston, master of Trinity Hall, the focus was on the need to ‘‘provide political theory to match contemporary political requirements’’ (52–53). Finally, there is Harvey’s own solitary reading of Livy with St. Augustine at hand, undertaken around 1590. Of all the readings, it is this one—‘‘genuinely Augustinian in tone and content’’ (54)—which Grafton and Jardine found most difficult to reconcile with the pragmatism of the others. Both Livy and Augustine would play instructive roles in the reading of Philip’s nephew four decades later. Robert Shephard, who is closely familiar with the commonplace books of the elder Robert Sidney, speculates that they were compiled chiefly in an attempt to educate his heir for public life.47 The first earl’s reading followed the lines to be expected in a family with historic antiabsolutist convictions and strong Dutch, and therefore ‘‘republican,’’ connections. His heavily annotated copy of Tacitus’s Annals, for example, is in the British Library,48 and it is evident that he was sharply aware of the public role of a well-informed and active aristocracy; not surprisingly, he had a skeptical view of the royal pre-

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rogative. In their turn the second earl’s notebooks, as Jonathan Scott observes, ‘‘are full of Grotius’s . . . political ideas; interspersed with notes on his other favourite authors . . . in particular Livy, also Cicero, Suetonius, Coke, Littleton, Selden, Buchanan, Hooker and Suarez,’’ and he comments on ‘‘their flavour of Aristotle, Bodin, and Tacitus.’’49 However, Leicester’s employment of such books, as well as the many others to which he also referred, marks a significant difference between the intellectual culture of an ambitious Jacobean courtier and that of a frustrated mid-century grandee, and his intensive note-taking strikingly illuminates that difference. In his hands his father’s heavy folios would multiply into a full-scale humanist enterprise, but one much more inward-looking, speculative, and less oriented toward the immediate issues of politics. In the second earl, in fact, we discover an interesting paradox: the political culture of anti-absolutism is inflected through the operations of an obsessively orderly, precedent-conscious mind.50



The evidence for Leicester’s reading lies among his papers in the Centre for Kentish Studies and the British Library. In the former, there are four folio volumes of notes in Leicester’s hand, plus a sewn booklet: U1475 Z1/4,5,8,9 and Z/9. Their dates can be roughly established by occasional references to current English and continental newsletters, gazettes, and diurnals, though today they have archival numbers in reverse order of their estimated time of production, Z1/4 being in general the latest. The British Library yields secondary evidence that at least one other book existed, excerpts from which were copied by Thomas Birch in the mid-eighteenth century. In addition, the Centre for Kentish Studies holds numerous loose sheets and booklets of various dates, collectively described as U1475 Z47.51 The earliest dateable note is 1630 (Z47/1), but there is one reference to a Mercure Franc¸ois of 1615 in Z47/19, and since (in general) newsbook citations appear to be from fairly current issues, that entry may have been made in Leicester’s very young manhood. The four bound volumes are topically organized, though on differing plans; the set of loose sheets grouped as Z47 provides material evidence of work in progress, especially Leicester’s intensive biblical studies of the 1630s, and the excerpts copied by Thomas Birch suggest that its original may have been more personal and reflective than the papers that remained at Penshurst, a possible reason for Birch’s interest in it. The earl’s bound notebooks fully exemplify the blurring of boundaries between commonplace book and encyclopedia that Ann Moss

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detects in seventeenth-century printed commonplace books.52 The format and mise-en-page of each of these volumes differs; Z1/5 is organized under alphabetized Latin words (Aetas, Aethiop, Lex et Legislator, Liber, Libido, Taciturnitas, Templum, and so on), while Z1/9 is a hybrid of reading notes and entries under such topical headings as ‘‘Authors, Learned Men,’’ ‘‘Nobility wth Titles, precedences, etc.,’’ ‘‘People, rights, Libertyes, pretended.’’ Several references to the need to make entries in one book ‘‘follow on’’ entries in another suggest that single volumes were comprehended in some larger bibliographic scheme no longer possible to reconstruct because essential material has been lost.53 As the overlapping dateable references show, Leicester kept several volumes in progress at the same time; the latest such citation, from 1662, actually appears in Z1/9, which was being compiled in the years after his return from Paris. Note-taking ceases in the early 1660s, when it is apparent from complaints in the earl’s letters that his eyesight is weakening and his hands are becoming arthritic. The physical evidence suggests that Leicester’s volumes were bound up, and in some cases the headings entered, before he began to copy extracts into them.54 In compiling them he may have made on-the-spot entries in the kind of ‘‘table book’’ Sir Philip Sidney had recommended, but no physical evidence of these now remains.55 However, there are many excerpts and comments written on small slips of paper; some of these still remained between the leaves a few years ago, although they have since been brought together and given archival numbers. All of this material, except for some late excerpts copied for him by a steward from European newsletters, is in his own hand; he worked, it seems, in solitude. To manage his large volumes and many small slips, Leicester developed extensive crossreferences, a habit of organization that also characterizes his library catalogue. As a result of this continuous process of compilation all of the notebooks, whatever their arrangement, are drawn into the same set of preoccupations, to an extraordinary extent constituting a complete and self-sufficient intellectual world. One aspect of that world, however, is closed to us. This is the interest in mathematics commented on by Clarendon and which made Leicester a friend of Thomas Hariot, whom he would have met in the circle of the ninth Earl of Northumberland whose daughter he married in 1616. There are several references in Leicester’s notebooks to his regard for Hariot, and the feeling must have been shared since the great mathematician, who died in 1621, made the young viscount one of the executors of his will. In a note of rare affection, Leicester would later write of ‘‘Mr. Harriote that same

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Mathematician, and admirable Scholler, my particular frend and preceptor’’ (Z1/4, 478). Hariot left him some copies of his mathematical papers and charged him with realizing the value of his books to defray his debts.56 Though mathematical works are a noticeable feature of the library catalogue, there is no indication that any of them might have once belonged to Hariot. More to the purpose here, if Leicester kept any mathematical notebooks of his own, they have entirely disappeared, and with them an important dimension of his life. Despite his excellent collection of the canonical Latin texts, this exploiter of late humanist methods was not much interested in Latin literature for its own sake. He almost never cited the poets, except for a few allusions to Juvenal and Ovid. There are many references to a substantial range of antique historians, biographers, and anecdotalists—Tacitus, Livy, Plutarch, Josephus, Aulus Gellius, in particular—but what astonishes in his notebooks is their contemporaneity. Except in U1475 Z1/5, the ‘‘dictionary’’ of Latin words and concepts for which he entered citations in the early 1650s, modern references far outnumber those from the classics. English citations are frequent—to Bede, Matthew Paris, William of Malmesbury, Hooker, Camden, Coke, and current English controversialists such as William Prynne—but the intellectual world in which Leicester moves with greatest ease is that of the historians, chronographers, and court gossips of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century continental Latin culture. Leicester often cited Tacitus and Livy as well as other classical historians, but he was just as likely to resort for information about the antique past to books such as Pierre Ayrault’s Rerum ab omni antiquitate iudicatorum pandectae (1588); his copy is known to have been the edition of 1615.57 Ayrault must have been his constant companion, for throughout his decades of note-taking he refers continually to ‘‘Aerodii Pandect.’’58 Pierre Ayrault (1536–1601), a pupil of the great Jacques Cujas, was one of the major civil advocates of his time in France, and president of Angers during the disorders of the League. His heavy folio is not the collection of laws its name would suggest. Rather, it comprises a vast historical commentary on issues in the civil law, following somewhat the same categories as Justinian’s Institutes, but relying almost exclusively on classical authors. (Some sense of Ayrault’s approach can be gained from his initial definition of the term ‘‘law,’’ which he drew from the Rhetorica ad Herrenium and Cicero’s Topica). The subsequent pages are rich in citations and anecdotes from Greek and Roman historians and lawgiv-

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ers, all thoroughly indexed, and Leicester has clearly used them to quarry Ayrault for historical information of every sort. In Z1/9, where most of the dateable entries are from 1638–45, Leicester’s references are wide-ranging, but almost entirely to contemporary or recently published Latin and French historians and memoirists, or drawn from his considerable collection of such chronographers as Calvisius (the Chronologia, ex autoritate potissimum sacrae scripturae, et historicorum fide dignissimorum of Seth Kallwitz, 27r26) and Johann Carion, Chronicon Carionis in the version of Melanchthon and Peucer (no fewer than seven copies of various editions, 29r03–08, including a duplicate). Thus we find excerpts from and references to, among others, Giovanni Catena’s Vita del gloriosissimo Papa Pio Quinto (31r01); Jean de Serres, Inventaire general del’Histoire de France (174v15; a favorite also with his father); Nicolas Vignier the Elder’s Bibliothe`que historiale (21r16); Laurent Bouchel’s Decretorum Ecclesiae Gallicanae ex conciliis eiusdem oecumenicis . . . libri VIII (23r06); and, in particular, a book that must have absorbed him for many weeks, the letters of that astute observer of the papal court Arnaud, Cardinal d’Ossat (Lettres de l’illustrissime . . . cardinal d’Ossat . . . au roy Henri le Grand et a` M. de Villeroy, depuis l’anne´e 1594 jusques a` l’anne´e 1604; 97v09, in a folio edition as well as the quarto of 1624). In Z1/4 (dateable entries in the 1650s) Leicester cites at least once each such authors as Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Livy, and Pomponius Mela. But by far the largest number of his references and excerpts come from works already mentioned, and from books such as Luis de Ma´rmol Caravajal, Descripcion general de Africa (29r31); Alessandro Ziliolo, Delle istorie memorabili de suoi tempi (78r05); Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa, Compendio Historial di las Chronicas . . . de Todos los reynos de Espan˜a (62r26, another favorite of his father’s), and again d’Ossat and Pierre Ayrault. Tacitus and Livy appear with some regularity throughout these commonplace books, and the earl refers at one point to his ‘‘collections from Livy,’’ now apparently lost (Z1/9, slips g and h). However, these Latin authors, so central to the theorists of classical republicanism, do not seem to be cited because Leicester either agreed or disagreed with their ideas. Rather, like the other works he perused so intently, they are used as source books for the collation and comparison of the ideas of different authors and for the evaluation of their authority. The Reports and Institutes of Chief Justice Coke are exploited in the same way, as are the works of Leicester’s sometime friend, Hugo Grotius. Leicester clearly admired Grotius, though their relationship cannot have been a close one, as they seem never to have exchanged letters after the earl returned to England.59 He

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had many of the great jurist’s works in his library and cites them often. However, a long entry from De iure belli ac pacis on servitude and liberty (Z1/4, 401) makes it plain that Leicester sees Grotius less as an author making an argument than as a source of learning to be situated in a complex of related ideas, in this particular case biblical. Later in the same volume (519) De iure belli ac pacis is cited again, this time casually under the heading ‘‘death.’’ A typical instance of Leicester’s procedure appears in Z1/8 (dateable entries 1646–56), on pages 151–87. Under the heading ‘‘Law, Parlements, Edict, Proclamation, Act of Councell, Custome,’’ where one might expect strong opinions from a Sidney, he initially copies out, in a densely written central column extending over four pages, a long excerpt on consanguinity from Luis de Molina’s De Iustitia (117v10). Down the left side of page 152 this acquires an extended gloss drawn from Davila’s Delle guerre civili in Francia concerning the royal blood and succession in France, buttressed by a historical reference from Calvisius. On the right side he pauses to gloss the word maioribus in Molina’s text: Maioribus dominus est honorum vinculatorum Molina Tract: 2. Disput. 3. That is, wch cannot be alienated wth only ye consent of ye Prince in law v: p. 162 [with further brief citations from Molina][. . .]. This seems to be another Molina, cited by Ludovicus Molina [. . .] where he mentions ye book De Primogenitura wch I have also.

The entries from Molina are followed by thirty-six more pages on the same topic, initially from Andre´ Du Chesne, Histoire ge´ne´alogique de la Maison de Montmorency et de Laval (75r22), but glossed in the margin by Camden’s Britannia (27r27) and citing among others William Prynne, who on page 156 receives the pungent annotation, ‘‘Mr. Prynne, whose authority I do not valew, but only make use of his citations to see if they be right, when I have time to looke upon ye authors.’’ Passages from Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis appear in both the main text and the margins and, other works referred to include Speed’s The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine (178v07?), Higden’s Polychronicon, (148r01), Holinshed (79v14), Grafton’s Chronicle (66r23), Nicolaus Reusnerus’s Itinerarium totius orbis (163v19), and works by Carlo Sigonio and J. A. de Thou. Leicester returns to ‘‘maioribus’’ again on page 168, making careful reference to his earlier gloss, and from time to time comments on what he is copying out: ‘‘he might have named John of Gant’’ he observes tartly at one point (160), and later on, in the margin of page 162, ‘‘Grotius cites and refutes Barthol. for the same opinion.’’ This massive sec-

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tion (which I have not described exhaustively) concludes with a reference to Coke and an anecdote about Archimedes. A telling instance of Leicester’s capacity for thinking in the mode of a commonplacer is the journal he began in December 1646 and kept until May 1661. In part personal (it contains a moving account of the death of his wife, though it marks without much comment the marriages and deaths of various children), it is chiefly devoted to affairs in Parliament. Here Leicester turns chronographer himself, recording events as they happened, and often in the words of men he knew well, with his own sparse comments confined to the margins. In its latter pages, Leicester’s journal becomes a compilation pure and simple, drawing on various newsbooks and diurnals to report events from which the earl was now wholly distanced. Two loose bifola in Z1/9 suggest that he may have attempted at some point to draft a treatise on civil society, but the argument is undiscernable amidst the welter of citations.60



The record of Leicester’s commonplacing takes us into the experience of what commonplacing must have been like—why it gave pleasure, seemed a resource, was what a thoughtful person needed to do to master a problem. We can see this in the fact that he quarries his excerpts almost entirely from volumes in his own library, and they are often very long, as for example in the exceptional body of selections from the letters of Cardinal D’Ossat. These passages, stretching across three decades (in Z1/4, /8, 9, and Z9) must have taken him many weeks, perhaps months, to copy out. Evidently the very activity of copying was important to him, since he can hardly have needed a record of such extensive excerpts from a text of which he apparently possessed two copies. At one point he observes while reading Leo Africanus, ‘‘This, in chronologye and due order of history should have been sayd before, but the author not considering methode, takes this time to shew the originall of the Mamelukes, by beginning wth Saladin who first invented that discipline’’ (Z9, 254). Yet as entry after entry illustrates, he does not use his library as the basis for either a chronological or discursive approach to the record of human knowledge. Rather, it is the ongoing activity of organization and annotation that matters to him, the constant process of assimilation during which one authority is compared with another (often with some skepticism) and where words and concepts are subjected to etymological, if not genuinely philological analysis. Categories are linked to each other, and one volume to another, in a system which cannot be fully penetrated because essential parts of

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it—the volume Birch excerpted, the mathematical notes, the ‘‘collections from Livy’’—are now lost. Leicester’s commonplacing is neither rhetorical, and thus (to use Ann Moss’s categories) in the Ciceronian tradition with its emphasis on style, nor dialectical and thus in the philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on the need to draw inferences.61 In its intense exploitation of historical, chronological, legal, and biblical sources it represents an earnest attempt to establish, in the sheer activity of collation and comparison, what had happened in the past, or what can happen in the future. This is precisely why, in its modernity and historicity, his excerpting is focused on current history as this former ambassador understood it. At the same time, Leicester’s reading does not precisely conform to the action-oriented process of reading as Grafton and Jardine explicated it in their study of Gabriel Harvey’s annotated copy of Livy, or at least to the first three versions of that process: military (though Leicester had been a soldier), courtly (though he had been a courtier), or political (though he had been an ambassador). Rather, Leicester sees history, both antique and modern, from a consistently moral vantage point, and his commentaries and marginal glosses are deployed to test and judge the worth and authority of his sources in that light. Although seemingly skeptical in character, this is just as likely to be a method he drew from the rhetorical works of Philip Melanchthon. In Melanchthon, as Ann Moss shows, both the stylistic and dialectical methods of structuring knowledge give way to one which is probative, designed to set human knowledge in its ethical setting, and direct the unnumbered commonplace collectors of Renaissance Europe to the constant testing of their ideas within a moral framework. ‘‘Melanchthon’s commitment to a truth beyond language underlies the prominence he gives to ratiocinative procedure, his grounding of rhetoric in the places of argument it shares with dialectic, and his insistence that the commonplaces signify how the world is structured rather than store gathered flowers for creating artificial gardens of linguistic plenitude.’’62 It was Melanchthon who had edited (in effect, rewritten to make it his own) Johann Carion’s Chronicle, one of Leicester’s favorite works of history, a work he cited often, and of which, as I noted above, he possessed no less than seven copies. Among Leicester’s resources for a moral reading of history was a fine collection of Bibles in different languages. One of his notes (Z47/1, b) shows him diligently comparing the Spanish and English translations of the sacred text, and his library catalogue lists no fewer than sixteen different editions of the Bible, in six languages besides Hebrew and Greek. He cites scripture constantly, and to many differ-

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ent purposes: historical, etymological, and theological, often but by no means exclusively in the version of Tremellius and Junius.63 In the 1630s, Leicester had engaged in an intensive period of biblical studies (Z/47, g), using as his companion Henry Ainsworth’s Annotations upon the five bookes of Moses, and the booke of Psalmes (1622; catalogue 5r22). One of the few extant printed books with marginalia in his hand is his personal Bible, which is still at Penshurst. This is a copy of the King James version which—and in the same questioning spirit—he has annotated so intensively in every available blank space that it has nearly fallen apart.64 It is in his devotion to biblical study that we begin to sense the rationale for Leicester’s attempt to systematize the record of contemporary history as he understood it within the pages of his densely written folios—and, perhaps, his seeming lack of concern, manifested in the variant organizations of his books, for ever bringing his system to perfection. Among the books he cited most often is St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei, a work he refers to constantly as well as to the accompanying commentary by Juan Luis Vives. Like Gabriel Harvey before him, he exploits both Augustine and Vives as sources of historical information, a practice which, given its encyclopedic character, The City of God certainly encourages.65 But if Leicester drew on Ayrault for historical information on antique custom, and on the chronographers (Calvisius being perhaps the most frequently cited) to situate events in human time, it was to the last of the great Latin authors that he turned for an understanding of the divine plan for human history. The rich historical detail of Augustine’s narrative would have kept before him his uncle’s old recommendation to concentrate in reading on ‘‘who soever speakes non simpliciter de facto, sed de qualitatibus et circumstantiis facti.’’ Augustine treats the city of God ‘‘both as it exists in this world of time, a stranger among the ungodly, living by faith, and as it stands in the security of its everlasting seat.’’66 His insistence on the separation between the city of man and the City of God would also have established for Leicester, a fundamentally eschatological vision of the order of history, one which justified both his absorption in the intrigues of the papal court, and his devout study of God’s word. At the same time, it situates the studies of this angry, reclusive man directly in the tradition of philosophical and moral humanism. ‘‘For all pronouncements of Christian truth, for all theological declarations and arguments,’’ writes Charles Trinkaus, there had to be a constant buttressing by Biblical citation in order to prove the conformity of the statement with orthodoxy . . . the squaring

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of the meaning with the Scriptures with what was currently held to be the eternal verity. Since verity encountered variety at least in its external form, it was necessary to engage in constant interpretation and exegesis of the Holy Writ to prove the correspondence of its truth with less sanctified statements thereof in subsequent hands.67

Yet, as Trinkaus notes, ‘‘paradoxically the humanists offered through their writings a new affirmation of the possibility and value of human action. They presented a vision of man controlling and shaping his own life and future course of his history and they stressed a new conception of human nature modelled on their own image of the Deity’’ (2:767). For the second earl, such action could only take the form of exegesis itself.



In his will (September 28, 1665), Lord Leicester made provision (inadequate, as it turned out) for the future of his collections; he left the said bookes papers and other thinges . . . to be used by my said son Viscount Lisle during his life. And after his decease I will and give the same to my grandchild Robert Sidney his eldest sonne for his use during his life and after to remaine from one heire Male to another. . . . And I desire and require . . . that every of them in his tyme do carefully look to and preserve the same for the good and benefitt of those that shall succeed them as I have done in my time and larger increased them.68

By now his library must for him have resembled the great erudites’ collections he would have encountered in Heidelberg in 1619 and in Paris in 1635–41. The inclusion of his papers in the legacy as well as his printed books projects the significance of his commonplace books into the future, and signals his hope, never to be fulfilled, that later Sidneys would benefit from his ‘‘encyclopedia’’ in the same way that his father, whom he revered, had preserved his knowledge for his own son. In the face of Leicester’s withdrawal from the world of action it would be easy to claim either that he had failed the culture of late humanism, or that it had failed him, but the realities of his situation were fearsomely complex, as his desperate sense that he was ‘‘environed by contradictions’’ would suggest. Consider these complexities: as Earl of Leicester, he is a proud aristocrat who, like his father before him, is troubled by extreme claims for the royal prerogative. But raised in an honor culture, and possessing a profoundly hierarchical and orderly temperament, he nevertheless understands him-

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self to be a servant of the King. His intellectual culture is that of the erudite anthologists of his family’s skeptical, neostoic circle; and so deeply vested in it is he that he establishes in the Penshurst living a famously learned vicar who happens to be a Royalist. Yet as his English contemporaries increasingly were doing, he believes strongly in the king’s need for the consent of Parliament in his actions, and his sons are active republicans. A Clarendon might have found a way to turn these contradictions to his own purpose. Leicester, instead, compares the forces afflicting him one with another, and sees no way out. In the world of a prospective lord lieutenant, collation and comparison will not suffice, and a year after his letter to the Countess of Carlisle he leaves behind the labyrinth (demonic version, perhaps, of the ideal of encyclopedic knowledge) and retires to his library, where the comparison of authorities can be carried on until the City of God is attained. A different path was taken by most of his contemporaries, for whom the resources of humanist learning were beginning to seem a historic phase rather than an essential method; the world of late Renaissance humanism was being transformed by the new intellectual framework being erected by figures like Hobbes. The breadth of his reading testifies to the fact that Leicester would have been unsurprised at the vision of the City of Man in Hobbes’ Leviathan, a book which he made sure to add to his library (97v16). But the difference between the concept of a moral rhetoric in constant action which his commonplacing exemplified and the logical, discursive textuality of the new generation is yet one more symptom of a critical turning point in the history of European learning. Locke, in The Conduct of the Understanding, would pour contempt on the concept of broad-ranging scholarship in which Leicester and his contemporaries had been educated (though he wrote influential instructions for commonplacing himself ).69 The scientific age of practical education with its attendant specialization is at hand—Sir William Drake, in his own way, is in the vanguard—and the humanistic one with its moral vision and encyclopedic learning seems to be passing away. Leicester’s despair at the task of living in such times is evident in a stoical entry Thomas Birch copied out of what appears to have been the earl’s most personal notebook. Under the heading ‘‘On Life,’’ Leicester wrote—it is not apparent when, or from what source—‘‘If there be another Life after this, let us do that which is good. If there be none, it is no matter what we do, for this life hath nothing worth the caring for’’ (BL Add. 4464, f. 33r). Did Leicester avail himself of Robert Burton’s remedy for such distress ‘‘to ease my mind by writing’’? Two years after his trip to Heidelberg Philip Maret recorded

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that he had ‘‘pd for democritus Junior 00-06-00.’’70 Whatever the case, it is the anthologizing, citation-ridden, probative textual culture of readers like Leicester that provided the seedbed for a new school of history, the ‘‘nuova scienza’’ of the next century, one which would be deeply indebted to humanism and its resources. Freed from the seventeenth-century obsession with decorum, just such a renovation of humanism would begin to evolve with Giambattista Vico, born in Naples in 1668, around the time when Leicester and others of his generation were finally laying down their weary pens.

Notes I am grateful to Joseph L. Black, Michel Brisebois, Clare Browne, Roger Kuin, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Hilary Maddicott, Michael Milway, Annabel Patterson, Robert Shephard, Patricia Vicari, and Daniel Woolf for kind advice on various points during the writing of this essay. 1. For this embassy, see Letters and Other Documents Illustrating the Relations Between England and Germany at the Commencement of the Thirty Years’ War, ed. S. R. Gardiner, The Camden Society, first series, 90 (London: Camden Society, 1865). 2. For the elder Sidneys’ concern with the education of their children, see Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle & Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place (London: HMSO, 1925–66, hereafter HMC), 2, 227, 269, 424, 434, and 437; for the younger Robert’s matriculation at Oxford, see HMC, 3, 464n. 3. Mordechai Feingold, ‘‘The Humanities,’’ in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, 213 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 4. Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies (hereafter CKS), De L’Isle Mss., U1475 A41/1–14, covering the period from June 1618 to August 1626. 5. CKS U1475 A41/1, f. 10v. 6. Notker Hammerstein, ‘‘The University of Heidelberg in the Early Modern period: aspects of its history as a contribution to its sexcentenary,’’ History of Universities 6 (1986–87), 105–33 (116). 7. J. A. Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers and the Leiden Humanists (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 21. 8. For Gruterus’ life and work see J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 2: 359–62. 9. Leicester’s library catalogue, ca. 1652–65, nos. 68r25 and 68r26. For the catalogue, see CKS U1475 Z45/2; with William R. Bowen and Joseph L. Black, I am currently editing it for publication. References to Leicester’s catalogue in the following pages are to the modern editorial numeration, thus: 68r25 signifies folio 68 recto, 25th entry on the page. For information on the library and its history, see Germaine Warkentin, ‘‘The World and the Book at Penshurst: the Second Earl of Leicester (1595–1677) and his Library,’’ The Library, sixth series, 20:4 (December, 1998): 325–46. 10. On the English dimensions of this intellectual world, see Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton 1586–1631. History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Ox-

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ford University Press, 1979), esp. chap. 3 on Cotton and the historical scholarship of Western Europe. 11. For a general survey of the political implications of neostoic and skeptical thought, see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: Political Virtue and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584–1650 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) discusses Lipsian neo-stoicism in England; her ‘‘Prologue’’ is useful for its explication of current terminological debates in a vexed field. 12. Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 13. 13. See Howard Hotson, ‘‘Irenicism and Dogmatics in the Confessional Age: Pareus and Comenius in Heidelberg, 1614,’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46, no. 3 (July, 1995): 432–53. For Grotius on Christian unity, see Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651, 185–88. 14. William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance 1550–1640 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 180–81. 15. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 11. 16. On the fate of the Palatine Library, see Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, 2: 361. 17. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 131. 18. The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D.D. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1860), 7: 568. For Maudit, see Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640–60 (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1966), 226. See also Maudit’s own pamphlets: Antiprobale, or A defence of the minister of Pensherst (London: T.R. for the author, 1660; Wing M1327), and The practises of the Earl of Leycester against the minister of Pensherst (London: T.R. for the author, 1660; Wing M1330), as well as his own slightly longer account of this debacle, Oxford: Bod. Ms. Rawl. A58, ff. 83–87. 19. Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: the Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 73. 20. CKS U1475 A41/1, ff. 2, 3, 3v. In the later library catalogue these are: Cardano 27v43 and 44; Sanders 170v03; Archimedes 11r28 or 30?; Fonseca 58v12, Sisto 176v10, and Meteren 115v13. Lisle bought several books on his trip to Germany; the only one specifically named is recorded on June 30: ‘‘for a book de Sensibus 00-09-00’’; this might be Aristotle, but is more likely either Hieronymus Provenzalis, De Sensibus Hieronymi Provenzalis . . . tractatus (Rome, 1597; 153r09) or Julius Casserius, Pentaestheseion, hoc est de quinque sensibus liber (Venice, 1609; 29v09). 21. CKS U1475 Z1/1, Z1/2, Z1/3, Z1/10. Robert Shephard is currently at work on a detailed analysis of the references the elder Sidney made to the books in his possession (personal communication, August 2, 1999). 22. BL Add. 4464, f.1. For Birch’s copy of a lost commonplace book of Leicester, see below. 23. Leicester to Northumberland, September 9, 1642. See Sydney Papers, ed. R. W. Blencowe (London: John Murray, 1825), 265. 24. For Leicester’s account of these events, and the date of his return to Penshurst, see HMC 6: 554–59. 25. Alan Everitt traces these swings of opinion in The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, passim. 26. HMC 6, appendix 3, ‘‘Journal of the Earl of Leicester December 31, 1646– September 8, 1661,’’ 559–624; for Leicester’s resistance to attending sittings of Par-

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liament, see 362. In 1650 he subscribed to the Engagement, essentially to maintain his rights before the courts. 27. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ed. W. D. Macray (Oxford, 1888), 2: 531. 28. Ian Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: The Career of John, First Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), 181. 29. For Leicester’s state of mind in this period, see Felix Hull, ‘‘Sidney of Penshurst—Robert, 2nd Earl of Leicester,’’ Archaeologia Cantiana 111 (1993): 43–56. 30. For his refusal to sign commissions, see Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 107–08. 31. Sydney Papers, ed. R. W. Blencowe, xxii. 32. Roger Heffernan, Illvstrissimo nobilissimoqve domino D. Roberto Sydnaeo Lecestriæ comiti, vice-comiti de l’Isle, baroni de Penhvrst, nec-non serenissimi magnæ Brittanniæ regis ad Lvdovicvm XIII. Legato (broadsheet; n.p., 1638?), ll. 7–14. The only known copy is in the British Library, Luttrell 1: 176. 33. CKS U1500 E120, f. 20v (inventory of Penshurst in 1623). I owe the explanation of ‘‘Imajarye’’ or ‘‘imagery’’ to Clare Browne of the Victoria and Albert Museum. For the mise-en-sce`ne of the learned man, see Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 34. Letter 42, cited above. Philip in fact wrote a beautifully legible italic. 35. Internal historical references suggest Theophania was written about 1645, although it was not published until 1655 (T. Newcomb for Thomas Heath [Wing, 2nd. ed., S371]). For its problematic authorship and dating see Theophania: Or, Several Modern Histories Represented by Way of Romance, and Politickly Discoursed Upon, ed. Rene´e Pigeon (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1999). Pigeon remarks that ‘‘The representation of . . . Leicester as Synesius, ‘a most perfect cavalier,’ is among the most interesting in Theophania because of the marked discrepancy between the fictional character and his historical counterpart’’ (75). For Synesius’s learning, see Theophania (1999), 108–09. 36. For these and other details about Leicester’s library, see Warkentin, ‘‘The World and the Book at Penshurst.’’ 37. Because a number of the entries are cross-references, there are 5,869 actual entries representing about 4,500 titles (still in process of verification); counting sets, we estimate the library contained about 5,000 actual volumes. This appears a very substantial collection for its period when we compare it with that of Leicester’s learned father-in-law, the ninth Earl of Northumberland (about 2,000 titles in 1632), or that of his book-loving Kentish contemporary the younger Sir Edward Dering (about 1,500 ca. 1656–62). 38. For the connoisseurship of Leicester’s brother-in-law, see Jeremy Wood, ‘‘Van Dyck and the Earl of Northumberland: Taste and Collecting in Stuart England,’’ in Van Dyck 350, ed. Susan J. Barnes and Arthur K. Wheelock (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art / University Press of New England, 1994), 281–324. I owe this reference to Hilary Maddicott. 39. Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 62. 40. On the intellectual vigor of the Kentish gentry and aristocracy, see Peter Laslett, ‘‘The Gentry of Kent in 1640,’’ Cambridge Historical Journal 9, no. 2 (1947–49): 148–64. 41. Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 125. 42. For a diverting history of marginal annotation and adversaria see H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

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43. ‘‘ ‘The Trial of Colonel Algernon Sidney at the King’s Bench for High Treason’: 35 Charles II. A.D. 1683,’’ in Cobbett’s State Trials (London 1809–26), IX, col. 878. This was no casual remark; private papers—their format, hands, and location—played a central role in the evidence at Sidney’s trial. 44. Peter Beal, ‘‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,’’ in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), 131–47 (pp. 131 and 134). 45. CKS U1475 C7/8, Philip Sidney to Robert Sidney, October 18, 1580. In The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), vol. 3, letter 42, 131–32. The letter is a contemporary copy, but the endorsement is in Leicester’s hand. He seems to have kept a ‘‘table book’’; in a note to himself of 1640, Leicester writes, ‘‘This I presently writt in my Table bookes the same day, but I transcribed it in this paper the 5th of January, 1640.’’ See Sydney Papers, ed. R. W. Blencowe, 263. 46. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘‘ ‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,’’ Past and Present 129 (November, 1990): 30–78 (pp. 37 and 77). 47. Personal communication, Robert Shephard, August 7, 2001; I am much indebted to his analysis of the senior Sidney’s reading. 48. The elder Robert Sidney’s copy of Tacitus is the edition of Lipsius published by Christopher Plantin, Antwerp 1585 (BL c.142.e.13, 186r06 in the Penshurst library catalogue). For the anti-absolutism of the Sidneys, see Blair Worden, ‘‘Classical Republicanism and the English Revolution,’’ in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London: Duckworth, 1981), 182–200; and his ‘‘The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney,’’ Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 1–40; Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988); and his Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis 1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Scott Nelson, The Discourses of Algernon Sidney (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993); J. G. A. Pocock reviews the entire discussion in ‘‘England’s Cato: the Virtues and Fortunes of Algernon Sidney,’’ The Historical Journal 37 (1994): 915–35. 49. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 54–55. 50. See for example the marginal comment on a passage copied from the letters of Cardinal D’Ossat (U1475 Z9, pg. 6): ‘‘But that formality is necessary, for els how shall it be known what quality is given to the messanger by his Master that sends him, unless by accident another Ambr be upon ye place as Sillery was here.’’ 51. Except for ‘‘Birch’’ all of the notebooks and papers discussed here belong to CKS class U1475, and I will refer to them without the prefatory U1475. In chronological order according to dateable entries they are as follows: Z47, loose items, possibly 1615, certainly 1630–48. Birch (scribal; excerpts only, BL Add. 4464), ca. 1634–41. Z1/9, bound volume, 1638–45 with entries from 1652, 1662. Z9, sewn gathering intended as part of Z1/9, 1646–47. Z1/8, bound volume, 1646–56 with an entry from 1660. Z1/5, bound volume, 1648–57. Z1/4, bound volume, 1650–56. I omit here two smaller notebooks classified by early archivists as ‘‘commonplace books’’ but merely comprising extensive quotations (Z1/6) from Juan de Mariana,

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De ponderibus et mensuris liber (109v20) and a treatise on money attributed to Sir William Beecher (Z1/7). Neither constitutes a ‘‘mathematical notebook’’ as described above. 52. Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. chap. 8 and 9. Like everyone else who tries to write about late-humanist commonplacing, I am deeply indebted to Moss’s book in the discussion that follows. 53. The notebook excerpted by Birch and now unretrievable is an example; other lost material would include the ‘‘collections from Livy’’ and the mathematical notebooks mentioned below. 54. The headings all appear to have been entered in Leicester’s own hand except for those in the ‘‘dictionary,’’ Z1/5, where it is possible another hand entered the headings and the earl altered them to suit himself from time to time. 55. None of the documents in the De L’Isle papers corresponds precisely to the kind of table book he speaks of in his comment of 1640 (see note 45, above) but there is ample evidence among the papers of almost obsessive casual note-taking. 56. For Hariot’s will see Henry Stevens, in Thomas Hariot the Mathematician, the Philosopher, and the Scholar (1900; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), 193–203. 57. I am much indebted to Joseph L. Black for identifying the specific edition of Ayrault. 58. There are (at a minimum) six references to Ayrault in Z1/4, at least fifty in Z1/5, half a dozen (some on loose slips) in Z1/8 and the same in Z1/9. This count is by no means complete. 59. There are no letters between the two either in Grotius’s voluminous published correspondence or in the De L’Isle papers, although during Leicester’s sojourn in Paris Grotius referred to the earl many times in his letters to others. 60. Ann Moss cautions shrewdly against the modern assumption that a work composed of citations could not achieve a discursive purpose; see her ‘‘The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the Commonplace Book,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 421–36. 61. For the distinction, see Moss, Printed Commonplace Books, chap. 1–3, passim. 62. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books, 124. See also 124–33, 136. 63. The Bibles are 19v24–29 and 21r01–11. The languages are French (4), Latin (4), English (1), Italian (2), German (1), Spanish (1), Hebrew and Greek (1), Hebrew OT (1) and Greek NT (1). 64. The Bible is an edition of 1613 with the Psalms of 1614, possibly STC 2227– 28, 2230–31, or 2233. The other books with annotations are: 1) Edward Ayscu, A History contayning the Warres, Treaties, Marriages and other occurents betweene England and Scotland (London: G. Eld, 1607. STC 1014. Chicago: Newberry Library, case oDA 765 .98 1607). 2) Augustine Vincent, A Discourse of errours in the first edition of the Catalogue of nobility, published by Ralph Brooke, 1619 (London: W. Jaggard, 1622. STC 24756. Oxford: Bodleian Library, Gough Gen.top.214. Not in library catalogue). The last-named is particularly interesting, having been heavily annotated by both the first and second earls. 65. Grafton and Jardine, ‘‘Studied for Action,’’ 45, 53. 66. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1984), 5. 67. Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 2:564. 68. PRO Prob. 11/355, fols. 215r-v , 337–43 (probate December 19, 1677). 69. Feingold, ‘‘The Humanities,’’ 221. For Locke and the commonplace tradition, see Beal, ‘‘Notions in Garrison,’’ 140–42. 70. U1475 A41/2 f. 2v, purchased March 16, 1621.

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Making World War with Literature John Neubauer

IN A KEY SCENE OF ERNEST PSICHARI’S NOW ALL BUT FORGOTTEN NOVEL, L’Appel des armes (1913), Captain Timothe´e Nange`s strolls around Paris with Colonel Servat. Passing Les Invalides they join the crowd to pay their respect to Napoleon. When they leave the tomb, Servat recites verses from Victor Hugo’s poem ‘‘Waterloo,’’ starting with ‘‘Restless man’’ (‘‘L’homme inquiet’’).1 As if listening to him, the narrator remarks: Who will find this ridiculous? This is inevitable! It occurs spontaneously! To recall these admirable verses that are now part of us is no cultural fact, no literary knowledge. This is instinct. It comes from more distant, more profound regions than intelligence. Our philosophers would say that our subconscious enters into play.2

Servat’s own concluding commentary shifts the subject from poetry to history: the danger is to forget history. This culture vanishes like so many others. But knowing the earlier fortunes of our race teaches us to live in the present and to raise ourselves above the contingencies of social action.3

The two commentaries complement each other: following a powerful nineteenth-century tradition, both Servat and the narrator believe that history must not be forgotten and poetry, more than historical discourse, is the best way to keep it alive. Poetry shapes national identity by providing foundational myths and historical fiction about the nation’s origin and heroic life. Servat cites a great national poet (Hugo) on a great national hero (Napoleon) to remind the reader that French history had more glorious memories than the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71.

I The idea that literature is a storekeeper of national memory has historical connections to Napoleon, albeit in a negative sense: it 254

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emerged in the German-speaking countries under his threatening shadow. The paradigmatic formulation of this view is to be found in the sixteen public lectures that Friedrich Schlegel held between February 27 and April 30, 1812 on Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (History of the Older and Newer Literature) to a brilliant audience in Vienna. Friedrich, one of the fathers of literary history, started out as a cosmopolitan revolutionary but was by now serving Metternich, to whom indeed he dedicated the 1815 publication of the lectures. He valued poetry and literature now for their national contributions. The main purpose of his lectures was to represent the influence of literature ‘‘on real life, on the fate of nations, and on the march of time.’’4 Noting that German and other European literatures regained their national spirit at the end of the eighteenth century, Friedrich characterized literature, for the first time it seems, as a keeper of national memory: For the whole further development, nay for the whole spiritual life of a nation it is supremely important . . . that a volk has great and ancient national memories, . . . their preservation and celebration is the highest task of poetry. Such national memories—the most wonderful heritage a volk can have—are an irreplaceable advantage. And if a nation rises in self-estimation and feels, as it were, ennobled, because it possesses a great past, memories of ancient times, in a word: poetry, then it will be raised to a higher level in our eyes and our judgment as well.5

And in a foreword to the journal Deutsches Museum, which aspired to become a treasurehouse of the national past, Schlegel wrote the same year: ‘‘Every literature has to and must be national; this is its destination, and this alone can endow it with its true and full value.’’6 This national view of literature appealed to politicians and educators; it justified in their eyes both literature and the institutionalization of philology and literary studies. In the course of the nineteenth century, all European countries established university chairs for their national literature, and all of them introduced it into the curriculum of the secondary schools. Philologists, folklorists, poets, novelists, and dramatists turned to the national past to construct (and frequently to forge) from it foundational myths and great national epics; they canonized national poets that came to serve as icons of the nation’s identity; they furthered the building of national theaters and national operas that not only stimulated the writing of national tragedies but also served as public spaces for the celebration of the nation. Last but not least, the philologists wrote national liter-

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ary histories that integrated the founding myths, the revival of medieval literature, the story of the language revival, and the canonization of national poets into comprehensive grand narratives. Croce’s comment that the protagonist of De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–71) was Italian literature, even Italy, and that individual writers were presented only as phases in the general development would hold, mutatis mutandis, for most others as well.7 De Sanctis had in fact been dreaming from very early on about writing a history of Italian literature that would also be a history of Italy (De Sanctis 2: 421). National literary histories became uplifting accounts of the nation’s spiritual fortunes. ‘‘I cannot claim that I can reconstruct the soul of the whole nation,’’ wrote the Polish literary historian Piotr Chmielowski, adding, ‘‘but I shall attempt to offer some hints about the changes it underwent, as reflected in the literature of the last nine centuries.’’8 Others saw their task in similar terms: they constituted the nation as a logical subject or a collective hero, and they suppressed or excluded elements threatening the integrity of the story. As Ernest Renan stated in his famous lecture, ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ (1882), collective amnesia is as important to a national consciousness as shared remembrances.9 In the French nation that absolutism had forged, people had to forget the great southern massacres of the thirteenth century and the night of St. Bartholomew: the cultivation of the national language and literature went hand in hand with the suppression of minority cultures, languages, and literatures. In the following, I present two case studies on a specific, and rather late manifestation of this national idea of literature: the way in which literature and philology participated in the preparation of World War I, by keeping the national memory alive and whipping up patriotic enthusiasm. Interweavings of the war and memory, so impressively initiated in Paul Fussell’s now classic study The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), and recently reenacted in Pat Barker’s novel trilogy Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road (1991–95), tend to be retrospective and analeptic. They tend to foreground the traumas and disillusionments we find in the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Franz Werfel, Georg Trakl; and in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (1916), Jean Giraudoux’s Simon le pathe´tique (1918), Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik (1920–23). But a large body of prewar literary culture mobilized memories proleptically, in an anticipatory way: exhorting readers to prepare for and enthusiastically carry out the war. My two texts were written by poets of the sword, both of whom were killed in battles: Ernest Psichari

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(1883–1914) fell in the first days of World War I, Theodor Ko¨rner (1791–1813) in the war against Napoleon, though, as I shall show, philology kept his memory alive.

II Ernest Psichari was Renan’s grandson. L’Appel des armes adopts both Schlegel’s notion that literature is national memory and Renan’s that national memory represses as much as it preserves.10 But the lost voice that Psichari wanted to recuperate belonged to the military, not to the downtrodden; in his eyes, the Third Republic repressed the martial spirit: ‘‘The army has its own internal moral, law, and mystique. And these are neither the morale nor the mystique of the nation.’’11 Indeed, Psichari considered the army an article of faith, war as divine, and the French soldiers that died in the Sahara as religious martyrs.12 L’Appel des armes is a type of Bildungsroman, for it recounts the education of an adolescent, Maurice Vincent. Nange`s, his mentor, awakens his slumbering patriotism and his military mystique, and this awakening is presented repeatedly as an allegory of a national revival. The Third Republic is depicted as a product of the national defeat in 1870–71; it is a defeatist, pacifistic, liberal, immoral, corrupt, and dispirited system based on economics and money. To be sure, Maurice’s biological father is a morally upright representative of the Third Republic. But this liberal, antimilitarist, and anticolonialist schoolteacher, who probably carries traits of Psichari’s own philologist father, is portrayed negatively. Only the church and the army resist the decline of ancient morals that material progress brings about. Nange`s succeeds in ‘‘converting’’ Maurice by telling him stories about military life in the Sahara and by introducing him to a military discipline that subjugates the self to a ‘‘higher cause.’’ His success recalls that of Napoleon and demonstrates that a national renewal is possible: But behold how the case of our little Frenchman becomes a sort of symbol, takes the value of a historical fact. Behold how this little Frenchman becomes France itself. The war was reviled. Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] just taught us to love human beings, the Revolution just taught us that people are free and conquest is unfair. People found themselves within a perfect idyll. And a little lieutenant of the artillery sufficed to stamp a great army out of the ground [ . . . ]. Astonishing paradoxes that complement and explain each other. The case of Vincent explains us that Bona-

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parte found the instrument he needed, and, inversely, the imperial epic teaches us why and how Maurice Vincent is always possible in France.13

Adopting the martial spirit means submission to discipline for its own sake while rejecting women, love, comfort, and at times even reason. Sexual self-denial is paramount. Maurice is never at ease with his fiance´e, especially once he is initiated into the male society of the military (51). Indeed, on the rare occasions that Nange`s and Maurice are intimately with a woman they seem to do nothing else but deliver interior monologues on the necessity of cutting themselves free (58f; 184–85; 216). Women are ‘‘animal joli’’ (256), ‘‘beˆte blesse´e,’’ or ‘‘belle animalite´’’ (262) that one may pity but also guard against, lest one gets captured and locked away: ‘‘Happy are the young men of our days who lead the frugal, simple, and chaste life of the warriors.’’14 The speaker of such frequent sententious remarks usually remain unclear for they are presented in free indirect discourse: they may be said by Maurice or Timothe´e, but also by the narrator. Sometimes the narrator explicitly states that he is merely articulating a view that the characters instinctly feel but cannot express. In contrast to the modernist novels, which use free indirect discourse to discriminate between different points of view, L’Appel des armes leaves the speaker indistinct because the individual merely represents general trends and views. As Hargreaves rightly remarks: ‘‘Without exception, all the main characters share essentially the same outlook, which in turn is identical with the narrator’s. The result is a remarkably flat narrative, almost completely lacking in dramatic tension.’’15 The army rejects the existing social and political reality but offers as a compensation homoerotic male comradery and a quasi-mystical attachment to an idea of the nation. The ultimate purpose of the military machinery so created is combat and its concomitant: violence. Although the soldiers in Psichari’s novel are not trained to commit atrocities, they are taught the art of killing. The foot soldier that Nange`s most admires used to be an activist in union movement; when asked what he would do if he were to be commanded to shoot at strikers, he now replies: ‘‘I would try to kill as many striking workers as the number of soldiers I used to wish to kill’’ (65). The revival of the military mystique involves both remembering concrete historical events and fashioning legends and myths around them. Of the two national military legends, Jeanne d’Arc and Napoleon, Psichari appeals only to the second: for him, the tomb at Les Invalides is a visible reminder that the reawakening of the slumbering martial spirit may be possible even in the spoiled, lazy, pleasure

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seeking, and materialistic Third Republic. But women dislike Napoleon and his memory (114); perhaps because, as the narrator says, Napoleon preferred his grenadiers to all women (99). It hardly comes as a surprise then that, in the misogynic male world of Maurice and Timothe´e, Jeanne d’Arc reappears in a male incarnation, namely as the figure Timole´on d’Arc that Psichari adopted from Alfred de Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835).16 The adoption is as curious as the reference to Hugo, and one may well ask why the conservative Psichari used subtexts from progressive romantic writers rather than from the classics of the seventeenth century, which were the admired exemplars for royalists and conservatives. Whatever the reason, Psichari’s use of Vigny is as reductive as his use of Hugo, for Servitude et grandeur militaires, a string of three narrative episodes accompanied by reflections, is highly critical of the military and of war—and not only because the army was in decline when Vigny served as an officer in the postNapoleonic decades. Timole´on appears in the second episode of the book, which describes how the gunpowder deposit at Vincennes exploded on August 17, 1819. But in the story of the explosion, which Vigny actually witnessed, and in the fictional story that Vigny builds around it, Timole´on is merely a secondary character, and not a very attractive one. In Psichari’s novel, Timole´on appears to Nange`s as a vision in the Sahara. The encounter interlinks the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury officers as well as the past and the present decline of the military. As Timole´on remarks: ‘‘You, like captain de Vigny and like myself, have experienced the great sadness of the army. Like us, unfortunately, you have experienced more of the servitude than of the greatness.’’17 Yet, there is a difference: Timole´on, who was stationed with Vigny in the desolate garrison of Vincennes after the collapse of Napoleon’s army (306), is envious of Timothe´e’s opportunity to participate in the ‘‘exquisite and voluptuous charm’’ (‘‘ce charm atroce et voluptueux’’) of the colonial adventure in the Sahara (304). According to him, hatred drives Nange`s’ generation toward a promising future. ‘‘You have tasted for forty years the frightful poison of defeat. Whatever you do, there will remain at the bottom of your heart an impotent rage, a bitter sadness, an unquenched thirst.’’18 But, he adds, ‘‘since you are spurned on this way, you will be greater than we were . . . We thought only of that great shadow [of Napoleon] that dominated us, while you, you are waiting for somebody.’’19 Timole´on obviously expects another great and dictatorial military leader a` la Napoleon. When the pen calls for the sword, writing is marginalized. Indeed,

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Psichari is skeptical about art, and he perceives aesthetic qualities in the military instead; it is military discipline that must be seen as an art for art’s sake (199). Hence, Nange`s quotes with pleasure a remark that Vigny was supposed to have said in praise of a soldier: ‘‘He exercizes the art of war not out of ambition but as an artist.’’20 When he quotes Pascal (19, 22, 102, 200), Chateaubriand (102), or Flaubert (106) he is concerned with religion, not art itself. Even Hugo and Vigny are marginal: Hugo’s poetry itself remains silent, and Vigny is referred to only as a soldier, not as a writer. Indeed, as Timole´on acknowledges, Vigny’s text nowhere speaks of grandeur in the military. Grandeur makes its appearance only in isolated individuals who loyally serve a disembodied ideal. The historical Vigny turned away both from the military and from society at large in order to lead a withdrawn life in what Sainte-Beuve called his ‘‘ivory tower.’’ Psichari’s fictional Timole´on says he followed Vigny into a tower that was more beautiful than an ivory tower, namely the (military) donjon of Vincennes (306). But the allegorical ‘‘ivory tower’’ of Psichari’s novel is the Sahara, and the story inevitably ends ironically, with a return to sordid reality: Maurice is wounded in the first insubstantial skirmish against desert bandits and is forced to serve the rest of his life as a clerk in some dusty room of the defense ministry. The disappointed Nange`s, dying of boredom, prepares for another adventure in the colonies. Psichari was perhaps lucky to die in one of the first combats of World War I, together with Charles Pe´guy, Alain-Fournier, and other prominent French writers. L’Appel des armes was no isolated case in France, but part of a conservative and aggressive literary wave that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and crested in the prewar years. The title itself echoes Maurice Barre`s’s L’Appel au soldat (1900). Next to Barre`s, members of this literary conservatism included the monarchist and anti-Dreyfussard Charles Maurras; Le´on Daudet, who co-edited with him the ultra-right-wing Action Franc¸aise; Henri Massis, who later eulogized Psichari in three books; Charles Pe´guy and many others. For all their differences, these men were all creating male myths of adventure, militarism, and war. Whether they were responding to a broad change of sentiment in youth or whether, reversely, they were fomenting this very spirit, is difficult to say. The survey that Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde conducted among the pupils of the elite secondary schools and universities indicates that they were both responding and fomenting. Their famous conclusions in Les Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui, published in 1913 under the pseudonym Agathon, spoke in the subtitle of ‘‘Disposition toward Action,’’ ‘‘Patri-

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otic Faith,’’ and ‘‘Catholic Renaissance.’’21 According to the authors, the new youth rejected the apathy, skepticism, aestheticism, pacifism, and egotism of the decades after the French defeat of 1870–71; they overcame doubt, disdained introspection, and prepared to regain the lost territories of Alsace and Lorraine. The journal L’Opinion, which first published this survey, also published Psichari’s L’Appel des armes as an exemplification of the spirit that the survey revealed. The myth, created by the cultural memory in the novel, became a fact in the survey and a rhetorical device in fomenting militarism. On its outer edges, this wave of militarism shaded into a great variety of other currents that were in no sense militaristic, but which nevertheless had some affinity with it. After placing L’Appel des armes in L’Opinion, Massis, the secretary of that journal recommended to the editors Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, but the editors rejected it because they considered it too delicate and unengaged. They were no doubt correct in their evaluation. And yet, this neoromantic novel and the great article of Alain-Fournier’s friend Jacques Rivie`re, ‘‘Le roman d’aventure,’’ were also rebelling against the literature and the spirit of late nineteenth-century France when in search of adventure and excitement.22 Like Psichari, Alain-Fournier was among the first casualties of the war. Broad currents of European literature and art prepared rather than resisted or rejected the coming war. The currents assumed different colors from country to country, from movement to movement, and from writer to writer, but they negated traditional distinctions between left and right, conservative and liberal, reactionary and avant-garde. However different they may have been, all of them propagated a virile, adventure-seeking, and martial spirit, and all of them attacked traditional humanism and aestheticism. In this respect, Psichari’s conservative novel overlapped with Marinetti’s famous futurist manifesto of 1909, which declared that war was ‘‘hygenic’’ and a roaring car more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.23 To be sure, Marinetti affirmed militarism and rejected aestheticism because he anticipated a new, technological world, whereas Psichari rejected technology as a product of capitalism and materialism that destroyed a national military myth. But the end effects were similar.

III Theodor Ko¨rner is as thoroughly forgotten today as Psichari. From a purely aesthetic point of view, this is surely justified, but in a

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cultural and political history of literature his case becomes in many respects paradigmatic. To recall it, we have to retrace our steps to Friedrich Schlegel’s mentioned 1812 Vienna lectures, for young Ko¨rner became a frequent guest at the Schlegels after his arrival at Vienna on August 26, 1811. As a good north German he was somewhat irritated by the fervent papism of Schlegel’s lectures, but he reacted enthusiastically to the idea that literature must once more become part of the national life and the national past.24 After quickly making a name for himself in Vienna with poems and two comedies that were performed in the Burgtheater in January 1812, Ko¨rner proceeded with great speed to write what was to become his opus magnum, the drama Zriny. He researched the historical material in the spring and wrote it down within three weeks in June. After some delay by the censors, it was performed in the Burgtheater on December 30, 1812. Ko¨rner volunteered for the army in March 1813 and was killed on August 26 of the same year. Zriny, which Ko¨rner subtitled a Trauerspiel, is based on a historical event known and cherished by all Hungarians: Miklo´s Zrinyi’s heroic defense of the tiny fortress Szigetva´r (in the southwestern part of present Hungary) against the overwhelming Turkish army of Suleman II (1566). When defense no longer seemed possible, Zrinyi and his remaining men charged out of the ruins into their deaths. Suleman II had died a natural death at the siege a few days earlier. The historical stuff is a fascinating complex of stories, profoundly implicated in regional politics. The Zrinyis, originally from Dalmatia and called De Brebirio, assumed their name in 1347, when King Lajos gave them the fortress of Zrin in Croatia.25 To this day, the family has a Croatian as well as Hungarian identity, and Nikola Sˇubic´ Zrinski, as the Croats call the hero of Szigetva´r, is as much a Croatian national hero as Miklo´s Zrinyi is a Hungarian one. To be sure, the Hungarian claim on him is bolstered by the hero’s great-grandson, also called Miklo´s and also an important politician and military leader, who wrote an epic poem, in Hungarian, about the siege: The Peril of Szigetva´r (1645–46).26 It is generally recognized as the highpoint of seventeenth-century Hungarian literature. But Miklo´s’s brother, Petar, executed by the Habsburgs on charges of treason, somewhat evened the account by making a free translation of the epos into Croatian. Ko¨rner may have known about the epos,27 but since no German translation of it existed in 1812 he had to turn to other historical and literary sources for his drama.28 What matters for our purposes is that Ko¨rner appropriated the patriotic story of this ‘‘Hungarian Leonidas’’ (letter to his family, March 5, 1812) for purposes of his

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own patriotism, by staging the dying Suleman II and the resistance against him as an allegorical exhortation to fight the waning power of Napoleon. The political message was surely a major factor in the huge success of a play that was, by general admission, dramatically and aesthetically flawed. Two theaters immediately offered Ko¨rner a post as resident dramatist—but he preferred the sword to the pen, and followed his dramatic character in his death.29 This combination of patriotic life and poetry made Ko¨rner a favorite of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The bibliography of German books for 1790–1910 lists more than fifty collected or complete editions of his works (in Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Stuttgart, and even New York), most of which went through several printings, some reaching even above ten. Some forty individual editions of Zriny are listed for the same period, many of them for use in schools and amateur theaters, some adapted for male-only casts in Catholic schools.30 In the bibliography for the following period, I found for 1910–14 six new complete editions and four new ones of Zriny; only one new edition of the play is listed for the war years, but we may assume that earlier editions were kept in print due to the topicality of its martial spirit.31 Prof. Dr. Schmitz-Mancy, for instance, warmly recommended the play in 1916 for high schools because of its political relevance: The drama, which was created under the terrible pressure of the time, is . . . the Song of Songs on liberating the fatherland, with a thrilling glorification of patriotic love, selfless devotion to duty, and fearless bravery . . . Ko¨rner did not just sing of Zriny’s heroism, he lived it as well—he and thousands and thousands of men and even women! . . . when poetry and truth flow into each other, as they do with Ko¨rner, one explains the other with eternal youth . . . spirit and character, as they appear to us in ‘‘Zriny,’’ will, in times that decide on the existence and non-existence of the fatherland, help us to overcome its enemies in a power onrush, as in the present World War.32

Zriny continued to be popular in the Weimar Republic, for seven new complete editions of Ko¨rner’s works and ten new editions of the play were published between 1918 and 1933. In contrast, only four new editions of Zriny appeared under the national socialist regime, and none since 1945. The only collected edition after the war was published in the GDR! Scholarly and popularizing publications on him and on Zriny have practically come to a standstill. That it was German nationalism that sustained the immense popularity of Zriny in the nineteenth and early twentieth century is obvious enough. But the success is rather puzzling, for unlike Kleist’s

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Hermannsschlacht and other patriotic works, Ko¨rner’s play was not about indigeneous, German patriotism, and it did not treat an event from the national past. Its Napoleonic allegory, ‘‘imported’’ from the East, sought to rouse German/Austrian audiences with the patriotism of a Hungarian/Croatian hero. To make matters worse, the patriotism of the historical Zrinyi was not exclusively directed against the Turks but also against the Habsburgs, whose legitimacy to the Hungarian throne was contested. Emperor Maximilian assembled a great army against the Turks but let Zrinyi die, for he was only concerned with the protection of Vienna. The anti-Habsburg element became more pronounced in the lives and writings of Zrinyi’s two great grandsons, and by 1812, when the Turks were gone and Hungary became dominated by the Austrians, much of the Hungarian national awakening turned against the Habsburgs. Allegorical readings of Zrinyi’s story could become exhortations to fight the Habsburgs; indeed, some Hungarian opponents of the Habsburgs sympathized with Napoleon. These complications may explain why, in spite of its intense patriotism, Zriny cleared censorship only after extended scrutiny.33 Though the original manuscript did not survive, traces of the censorial intervention abound, and they are quite evident in the general replacement of ‘‘Hungary’’ and its cognates by terms like ‘‘fatherland’’ and emperor. Indeed, Ko¨rner’s Zrinyi repeatedly stresses his loyalty to the emperor, and in act 2, scene 6, which may have been inserted at the request of the censor, he explicitly reprimands those who complain that the imperial army did not come to his rescue: ‘‘do not speak sacrilegiously about our good Emperor . . . Life looks different from the throne . . . The individual goes down in the general. / It is the Emperor’s hereditary right: / He can demand a sacrifice from thousands, / If the good of millions is at stake.’’34

IV Ko¨rner’s play put a Janus-faced Hungarian patriotism to the service of Metternich by covering up one of its two faces. It fuelled patriotism in Germany with transmogrified Hungarian nationalism. But, to complete a bizarre story, if German schools and theaters (mis)appropriated a Hungarian patriotism, Ko¨rner’s German nationalism was in turn appropriated by the Croats, who actually just reclaimed a hero they always had regarded as their own. It is not surprising that the Croatian composer Ivan Zajc and his librettist Hugo Badalic´ should have thought of the hero of Szigetva´r when

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searching for a topic suitable for a national opera. By the 1870s, most countries experiencing a national awakening already had national operas: in Italy it was Verdi’s Nabucco (1842), in Hungary it was Ferenc Erkel’s Hunyadi La´szlo´ (1844) and Ba´nk Ba´n (1861), in Poland it was Stanislaw Moniuszko’s Halka (1848), in Bohemia it was Bedrich Smetana’s Bartered Bride (1869). National operas reached into the nation’s historic past and native musical tradition; their performance occasioned national self-celebrations. Zrinyi/Zrinski was an ideal national hero for Zajc and Badalic´, but the Croatian version of the epos was apparently too sprawling and undramatic for the stage. Instead, the composer and the librettist decided to ‘‘re-nationalize’’ Zriny for Croatian purposes. Ko¨rner (or his censors) made their task easier by neutralizing Hungarian patriotism and partially converting it into loyalty to the Habsburgs. The opera Nikola Sˇubic´ Zrinski, first performed on November 4, 1876, makes good use of this: time and again it simply substitutes Croatia or one of its cognates for indefinite terms like Vaterland. To be sure, this was not quite without danger in the early years of the dual monarchy, which held the Croats in a subordinate position both with respect to the Hungarians and the Austrians. Croatian nationalism played complicated and shifting roles throughout history; in the nineteenth century it was directed, with varying intensity and direction, both against the Habsburgs and the Hungarians. Once more, a national awakening had to confront foreign censorship, once more the existence of censorship left its traces in the text. Not, to be sure, in the Croatian version but in its German retranslation: where the indigenous Croat text explicitly speaks of Croat heroism, the German will use, time and again, Ko¨rner-like vague expressions like Vaterland.35 It would be idle to speculate what exact role the opera’s Croat nationalism played during the First and Second World Wars, during the existence of Yugoslavia, and in Croatia’s recent struggle against the Serbs. That the opera was recently (and probably for the first time) performed in Hungary, gives one the hope, however, that making war in literature and on the stage need not always lead to new wars.

Notes 1. The reference to Hugo is obscure and may well be a mystification. Neither the 3-vol. Ple´iade edition of the Oeuvres poe´tiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1964–74) nor the 1,700 pages of the Oeuvres poe´tiques comple`tes edited by Francis Bouvet (Paris:

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Pauvert, 1961) contains a poem by Hugo with that title. Book 1 in part 2 of Les Mise´rables (pp. 339–97 in the Ple´iade edition of 1951) is a magnificent account of the battle of Waterloo, but contains no verses and the phrase ‘‘L’homme inquiet’’ does not seem to occur in it. To complicate matters further, Hugo was no admirer of Napoleon and the military. 2. ‘‘Servat ne put s’empeˆcher de re´citer a` mi-voix ces vers de Hugo, Waterloo, depuis: ‘‘L’homme inquiet . . .’’ Qui trouverait cela ridicule? C’est tellement fatal! C¸a va tellement de soi! Ce n’est plus un fait de culture, de connaissance litte´raire que d’e´voquer cet admirable lyrisme qui fait maintenant comme partie de nousmeˆmes. C’est de l’instinct. Cela vient de plus loin que de l’intelligence, de beaucoup plus profond. Nos philosophes diraient que c’est le subconscient qui entre la` en jeu.’’ See Ernest Psichari, L’Appel des Armes (1913), 4th ed. (Paris: Oudin, 1918), 222f. 3. ‘‘le danger, c’est d’oublier l’histoire. C’est une culture qui se perd, comme tant d’autres. Et c’est pourtant la connaissance des destine´es ante´rieures de nos races qui nous apprend a` vivre dans le pre´sent et a` nous e´lever au-dessus des contingences de l’action sociale’’ (Psichari, 223). 4. ‘‘die Literatur in ihrem Einflusse auf das wirkliche Leben, auf das Schicksal der Nationen und den Gang der Zeiten darzustellen,’’ in Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, edited by Ernst Behler et al. (Paderborn, Germany: Scho¨hning, 1961), 6: 9. 5. ‘‘Wichtig vor allen Dingen fu¨r die ganze fernere Entwickelung, ja fu¨r das ganze geistige Dasein einer Nation erscheint es auf diesem historischen, die Vo¨lker nach ihrem Wert vergleichenden Standpunkte, daß eine Volk große alte NationalErinnerungen hat, welche sich meistens noch in die dunkeln Zeiten seines ersten Ursprungs verlieren, und welche zu erhalten und zu verherrlichen das vorzu¨glichste Gescha¨ft der Dichtkunst ist. Solche National-Erinnerungen, das herrlichste Erbteil, das ein Volk haben kann, sind ein Vorzug, der durch nichts anders ersetzt werden kann; und wenn ein Volk dadurch, daß es eine große Vergangenheit, daß es solche Erinnerungen aus uralter Vorzeit, daß es mit einem Wort eine Poesie hat, sich selbst in seinem eigenen Gefu¨hle erhoben und gleichsam geadelt findet, so wird es eben dadurch auch in unserem Auge und Urteil auf eine ho¨here Stufe gestellt’’ (Schlegel, 15f ). 6. ‘‘Jede Literatur muß und soll national seyn; dieß ist ihre Bestimmung und kann ihr allein erst ihren wahren und vollen Werth verleihen.’’ See Deutsches Museum (1812. repr. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 1: 2. 7. Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana. 2 vols. [1870–71] (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1925), II, 433. 8. Piotr Chmielowski, Historya Literatury Polskiej [History of Polish Literature], vols. 1–6 (Warsaw: Biblioteka Dzieł Wyborowych, 1899–1900), 1: 23. 9. Ernest Renan, ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ (1882), in Oeuvres Comple`tes, ed. Henriette Psichari, 10 vols., 887–906 (p. 892) (Paris: Callmann-Le´vy, 1947–61), I (1947). 10. On the relation between ideas of Renan and Ernest Psichari see Simone Fraisse, ‘‘D’Ernest Renan a` Ernest Psichari,’’ Revue d’histoire litte´raire de la France (1994), 114–23. Many critics, including Barre`s and Massis, saw Ernest Psichari’s conversion to Catholicism in 1914 as a symbolic redemption of his iconoclastic grandfather. Fraisse indicates a more complex set of analogies and contrast between the two Ernests. On Psichari, see further: Daniel-Rops, Psichari, rev. ed. (Paris: Plon 1947); Wallace Fowlie, Ernest Psichari (New York: Longmans Green &

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Co. 1939); A.-M. Goichon, Ernest Psichari d’apre`s documents ine´dits, 2nd ed. (Paris: Conard, 1946); Alec G. Hargreaves, The Colonial Experience in French Fiction: A Study of Pierre Loti, Ernest Psichari and Pierre Mille (London: Macmillan, 1981); Henri Massis, La Vie d’Ernest Psichari (1916), Evocations (1931), and Notre ami Psichari (1936); Henriette Psichari, Ernest Psichari, mon fre`re (Paris: Plon, 1933). 11. ‘‘L’arme´e comporte en elle-meˆme sa morale, sa loi et sa mystique. Et ce n’est ni la morale ni la mystique de la nation’’ (197). 12. ‘‘L’arme´e est un article de foi’’ (22); ‘‘La guerre est divine’’ (314); ‘‘le sang des martyrs de l’Afrique e´tait utile’’ (295). 13. ‘‘Mais voici que le cas de notre petit Franc¸ais devient une sorte de symbole, prend la valeur d’un fait historique. Voici que ce petit Franc¸ais devient la France elle-meˆme. On maudissait la guerre. Jean-Jacques venait de nous apprendre l’amour des hommes, la Re´volution venait de nous apprendre que les peuples sont libres et que la conqueˆte est inique. On e´tait en plein dans l’idylle. Et il a suffi d’un petit lieutenant d’artellerie pour que sortıˆt de terre la grande arme´e . . . Paradoxes e´tonnants qui s’expliquent l’un l’autre et se comple`tent. Le cas Vincent nous explique que Bonaparte ait trouve´ l’instrument qu’il lui fallait, et, en retour, l’e´pope´e impe´riale nous apprend pourquoi et comment Maurice Vincent est toujours possible en France’’ (207–08). 14. ‘‘Hereux les jeunes hommes qui, de nos jours, one mene´ la vie frugale, simple et chaste des guerriers!’’ (297). 15. Op. cit., 109f. 16. Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 354–411. 17. ‘‘Comme le capitaine de Vigny, et comme moi, vous avez e´prouve´ la grand tristesse de l’arme´e. Commme nous, he´las! vous en avez e´prouve´ les servitudes plus que les grandeurs’’ (303). 18. ‘‘Depuis quarante ans que vous avez gouˆte´ l’affreux poison de la de´faite, quoi que vous fassiez, il reste au fond de vous-meˆmes la rage impuissante, l’ame`re tristesse, une soif inassouvie’’ (305). 19. ‘‘tant que vous aurez cet aiguillon, vous serez plus grands que nous n’e´tions . . . nous ne pensions qu’a` cette grande ombre qui nous dominait. Au lieu que vous, vous attendez quelqun’’ (306). 20. ‘‘Il exerce, non en ambitieux, mais en artiste, l’art de la guerre’’ (298). 21. Agathon [Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde], Les Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui: Le Gouˆt de l’action la foi patriotique—Une Renaissance catholique le re´alisme politique, 6th ed. (Paris: Plon, 1913). 22. Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise 9 (1913), pp. 748–65, 914–31 and 10 (1914), pp. 56–77. 23. Le Figaro, February 20, 1909. Following him, the Russian Cubo-Futurists Burliuk, Majakovskij, and Xlebnikov advocated throwing Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and other canonized writers from the ‘‘Steamship of Modernity.’’ See Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 446. 24. See his letter to his family, dated May 2, 1812, about Schlegel’s closing lecture, in Theodor Ko¨rners Briefwechsel mit den Seinen, ed. A. Weldler-Steinberg (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1910), 186f. 25. See Tibor Klaniczay, Zrinyi Miklo´ s, 2nd ed. (Budapest: Akade´ miai Ko¨ nyvkiado´, 1964), 10f. 26. Published in Vienna in 1651 in a volume entitled Adriai tengernek Syrena´ja (The Siren of the Adriatic Sea).

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27. Friedrich Schlegel, who spent some time in Hungary and learned a smattering of the language, remarked in his tenth lecture that the Hungarians retained an interest in the heroic epos throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (6: 237), but he does not name Zrinyi. It is not unreasonable to assume that he had a role in Ko¨rner’s choice of topic, but we have no hard evidence on this. 28. His father supplied him with the most important historical sources. The most important literary source was probably the three-act play Niklas Zrini oder die Belagerung von Sigeth by the minor Swabian author Friedrich August Clemens Werthes (1748–1817), published in 1790. See Reinhard Kade, ‘‘Zu Ko¨rners Toni und Zrinyi,’’ Die Grenzboten 48 (1889): 171–80, 224–30. 29. Schwert und Leier (Sword and Lyre) was the title of a collection of Ko¨rner’s lyric poems; the contrast was also a topos in the poetry of Miklo´s Zrinyi. 30. Gesamtverzeichnis des deutsprachigen Schrifttums (GV) 1700–1910 (Munich: Saur, 1983), vol. 79, 117–23. An exact tally is all but impossible because many editions have no publication date and the number of printings is only intermittently given. Furthermore, many editions were in series, under different names. 31. Gesamtverzeichnis des deutsprachingen Schrifttums (GV) 1911–1965 (Munich: Verlag Dokumentation, 1978), vol. 71, 147–51. 32. ‘‘Entstanden unter dem furchtbaren Druck der Zeitverha¨ltnisse . . . ist das Drama mit seiner hinreißendenVerherrlichung aufopfernder Vaterlandsliebe, hingebender Plichterfu¨llung und furchtloser Tapferkeit das Hohelied von der Befreiung des Vaterlandes. . . . Ko¨rner dichtete das Heldentum Zrinys nicht nur, er lebte es auch; er und Tausende, ja aber Tausende deutsche Ma¨nner und selbst Frauen! . . . Wo Dichtung und Wahrheit so ineinanderfließen, wie bei Ko¨rner, da verkla¨rt eines das andere mit unverga¨nglicher Jugend, . . . Geist und Gesinnung, wie sie und in Ko¨rners ‘‘Zriny’’ entgegentreten, werden in Zeiten, wo es sich um Sein und Nichtsein des Vaterlandes handelt, helfen, dessen Feinde in gewaltigem Ansturm zu u¨berwinden, wie im jetzigen Weltkriege.’’ See Schmitz-Mancy, Erla¨uterungen zu Ko¨rners ‘‘Zriny’’ (Paderborn, Germany: Scho¨ningh, 1916), 13–14. 33. Ko¨rner reported on June 27, 1812, to his family that he completed the writing. He read parts of it the following day to Friedrich Schlegel. (Ko¨rner to his family, July 11, 1812). But on September 12, he reported that Zriny had not yet passed Metternich; on September 19 he wrote that Zriny is being dragged out until the end of October; on October 23 that he hoped to get an answer from the censor the next day. The permission finally came on October 31. Ko¨rner remarked that he could not complain about all too-extensive deletions (letter of October 31 to his family), but this must be taken with a grain of salt: due to the long waiting he must have feared the worse. 34. Lines 1621, and 1638–41. See Theodor Ko¨rner, Werke (Berlin: Bong, n.d.), 2:114–15. 35. The discrepany is still evident in the booklet that accompanies the Croatian cd I acquired. The booklet was produced in the 1990s, and claims to contain a revised German text, but this text quite consistently tones down the Croat national element in the libretto.

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Recycling the Renaissance in World War II: E. W. & M. M. Robson Review Laurence Olivier’s Henry V Ton Hoenselaars

AFTER MORE THAN A CENTURY OF FILM, SHAKESPEARE ON THE SCREEN HAS become booming business, in the cinema, the classroom, and the academic’s study. Current interest focuses on the interaction between the traditional stage and the modern screen, the appropriation and dissemination of a canonical early modern author by the primary medium of mass popular culture, and the phenomenon of cinematic adaptations as postmodern offshoots.1 This essay discusses what many have recognized as the first major British Shakespeare film, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944). Over the years since its release, Henry V has, of course, received more than its fair share of attention from critics and scholars. However, parts of its early history still remain unexplored, in particular the contemporary, midcentury writings on the British cinema by Emanuel W. and Mary Major Robson. Before discussing the Robsons’ views of Shakespeare and Henry V, however, it seems both relevant and appropriate briefly to dwell also on their other work devoted to film history, if only to recognize the Robsons’ total output as a neglected context of Olivier’s Henry V, a corpus of criticism hinging on an effort to align the cinematic arts of the mid-twentieth century with those of the history and literature of Elizabethan England, whose representatives included Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, John Northbrooke, as well as Shakespeare. Emanuel and Mary Robson were two sociologically oriented British film critics, active during the 1930s and 1940s. Together, they wrote a number of reviews, treatises, and books on the cinema, including The Film Answers Back (1939), In Defense of Moovie [sic] (1941), The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp (1944), Bernard Shaw among the Innocents (1945), and The World is My Cinema (1947). The Robsons’ view of the British cinema represented a curious brand of 269

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liberal humanism mixed with ultraconservative views on marriage and the family as the cornerstones of a civilization that developed along Darwinian lines, and crossbred with a highly inflammable brand of insularity and xenophobia. The Robsons’ first full-length study, The Film Answers Back, which appeared just before the Second World War and which contained a number of insightful comments about the Fascist regime in Germany, was well received, despite its curious thesis that film producers should raise their standards of quality by studying box-office figures.2 Reviewers of The Film Answers Back called the Robsons ‘‘a pair of able chroniclers’’ who had written ‘‘a book no serious film student should overlook,’’ describing it as ‘‘[t]he most interesting and at the same time the most aggravating volume ever written on films.’’3 However, under the pressure of the war, it would appear, the Robsons became ever more extreme in their views, and ever more intolerant vis-a`-vis those of others. Representative is their vituperative review of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943), in which they argued that the film’s representation of Englishmen and Germans tended to be too critical of the former and too lenient with regard to the latter. In fact, the Robsons denounced Colonel Blimp as ‘‘a vivid example of how the living, breathing germs of World War Three [were] being carefully hatched.’’4 Their criticism—which may well have met with the approval of Churchill, who had unsuccessfully tried to suppress the film5 —occasioned a huge controversy, which seriously undermined any creditable reputation the Robsons might have cherished in the annals of film history. In a 1978 paper devoted to Powell and Pressburger as the makers of Colonel Blimp, John Russell Taylor still considered it ‘‘weird’’ that ‘‘the extreme right wing, jingoistic Robsons were accusing the high Tory Powell and the committedly anti-Nazi Pressburger of being insufficiently out of sympathy with that famous reactionary zealot Adolf Hitler and his pack of unspeakable Huns.’’ Taylor was prepared to acknowledge that the Robsons had been on to something without realizing what it was, but he nevertheless spoke of the couple as ‘‘happily now long forgotten.’’6 Due to the oblivion that the Robsons appear to have called on themselves, one fascinating feature about their work has not received the attention it deserves. This is the way in which they drew on the English Renaissance, its history, and its literature, as a variegated model for the British film industry in the turbulent 1930s and 1940s. Anxious to secure world peace, they developed a theory about the way in which the British cinema might make a major contribution:

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the talkie film and the wireless are mightier than the bombing plane and the big howitzer. The historical process is already showing, even though things in Europe may look black for the moment, that the new weapons of international understanding will eventually put the weapons of destruction out of commission. (The Film Answers Back, 99)

Just as the Elizabethan period saw the impetuous advance of the printing press, the Robsons argued, so the interbellum saw the advance of radio and the talkie film as the instruments of a new social order. To achieve its militant mission, the cinema had to be prepared to recognize the multiple analogies between contemporary and early modern history, and decide to shape, or, rather, reshape and improve itself accordingly. The 1930s film industry in Britain, as the Robsons interpreted it, was in a state of decadence, as a result of imitating and borrowing from the predominantly unwholesome international film scene. The democratically oriented U.S. film industry had long functioned as a model, but even the Hollywood of the 1930s was beginning to show signs of degeneration. As a consequence, the British film industry was in need of a serious boost. In response to the situation they recognized, the Robsons defined as one of their credos that the British cinema should present unambiguous praise of virtue and the punishment of vice. English cinema, they believed, was too permissive in its presentation of authoritarianism, and might, in this way, also promote it. The old class system in English cinema produced film that was nondemocratic and expressed contempt of human dignity. Instead, they wished to see the ‘‘Hitler type humbled in the dust’’ in the way Charlie Chaplin mocked the despot even before the release of The Great Dictator (The Film Answers Back, 168). It was also against this background that the Robsons termed Laurence Olivier’s role in The Divorce of Lady X unchivalrous, referring to the part that Olivier played as an ‘‘unassailable Fuehrer’’ (182), while asking themselves how long it would be before such antisocial behavior led to ‘‘the next logical step, the snatching of other people’s property and jobs on the cock-and-bull excuses of ‘Jews’ ’’ (184). In this manner, the Robsons really criticized ‘‘a very light, highly polished comedy of errors, never intended to be taken seriously’’; and their verdict, Olivier’s biographer John Cottrell argues, was ‘‘an indication of the stuffiness of the age.’’7 The Robsons argued for a degree of social commitment at odds with the subjectivist, art for art’s sake ideal, which betrayed ‘‘a desire among a section of the intelligentsia to rest on their oars, to enjoy the fruits of humanism bequeathed to them by the Renaissance and

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the French Revolution without reference to the future movement of society’’ (The Film Answers Back, 187). To the Robsons, the cinema should realize its humanizing potential vis-a`-vis the masses, and to support their argument, they cited Huntley Carter’s The New Spirit in the Cinema (1930). In Carter’s account of his peregrinations through a war-torn Europe, he mentions an occasion on which he was briefly imprisoned, but managed to get his rough prison guards to arrange a joint visit to the cinema, after which ‘‘[s]omething had humanized them, had made them no longer guards but guides’’ (106). Film’s social commitment advocated by the Robsons was not an unproblematic issue. Recognizing film as the new medium of the people, one needed not only to recognize their needs, but also to instruct mass audiences. In other words, the Robsons’ view of film created the need for a substantial educational strategy, so as to prevent situations that occurred in the early days of film: commendable attempts were made . . . to interest the public in fifteenminute versions of the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Dante. Even Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was persuaded to appear in one of them. But these pictures cut very little ice with the public. Showmen, no matter how well intentioned, had yet to learn that nothing has ever grown from the top downwards . . . it was only amongst the people that the film was to find its roots.8

The consequent pedagogical imperative of this vision, coupled with the notion that the early modern period might serve as a model for the developing British film industry, accounts for the Robsons’ rewriting of Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry as a poetics for the new cinema entitled In Defense of Moovie [sic]. The ideal of educating the masses also explains the idiosyncratic style of this neglected offshoot. ‘‘In Defense of Moovie’’ by Sir Philip Sidney (1581–1941). Transcribed from ‘‘In Defense of Poesie’’ appeared in Edinburgh in December 1940. Curiously, one searches in vain for any reference to the Robsons’ rewriting of Sidney’s Defense in the major Sidney bibliographies. Although In Defense of Moovie has always been traceable under ‘‘Sidney’’ in the British Library index, the pamphlet is not included in either Samuel and Dorothy Tannenbaum’s Concise Bibliography of 1941 (covering the period from Sidney’s death through 1940), or Mary Washington’s annotated bibliography of Sidney criticism from 1941 through 1970.9 Given the fact that In Defense of Moovie appeared in Edinburgh in December 1940, it is likely that the Tannenbaums did not see a copy of the book before their own bibliography ap-

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peared in print less than a year later. The reason for the pamphlet’s absence from the bibliography by Washington may be that she ‘‘did not attempt to check the period prior to 1941’’ (Washington 1972, 1). Whichever the case may be, it is certain that due to the hiatus in both major bibliographies, Renaissance scholars and film studies specialists have been deprived of an eccentric chapter in the English reception history of Sir Philip Sidney. The Robsons’ rationale behind their choice of Sidney was the conviction that the Defense of Poetry was ‘‘a literary work of such brilliance and psychological acumen that with only slight alterations its teachings [were] as serviceable [during World War II] as when it was completed about the year 1581.’’10 What had been a cultural guide for the Elizabethans struggling against Philip the Second, the Robsons argued, could also serve as a humanist model for a nation at war against Hitler. The Robsons’ target audience were the ‘‘ordinary folk,’’ the ‘‘common people,’’ who ought not, as was the case in Germany, be separated from the national expressions of poetry and drama (In Defense of Moovie 7). The Robsons argued a case for ‘‘human reason’’ joined to ‘‘the life, the liberty, and the happiness of the people’’ (8). They sought ‘‘the Anglo-Saxon path of social sanity, humanity, and democracy,’’ not that of scholasticism which had given rise to Nazidom. Sidney’s dying words were interpreted as a universal plea for humanity, as ‘‘a story that has confirmed mankind in their faith in humanity . . . in every part of the world’’ (9–10). To the Robsons, Sidney represented ‘‘the profound humanism which was the predominant current in Elizabethan England’’ (10). They wholeheartedly subscribed to Fulke Greville’s claim, prefiguring Jacob Burckhardt’s nineteenth-century definition of expansionist Renaissance humanism, that Sidney ‘‘was a true model of worth, a man fit for reform, conquest, colonisation’’ (10). In an act of Fluellenism, the Robsons continued to list the parallels between the early modern situation and the contemporary plight in Europe. Just as Sidney fought against his godfather, Philip II, England now played a leading part in combatting Hitler. Under Philip as well as Hitler, constitutional rights and freedom were totally suppressed. Just as Philip II relied on the Inquisition, Hitler depended on the Gestapo. Just as Philip II had murdered Don Carlos, Hitler was responsible for the deaths of his followers. Just as Hitler had his Gauleiters, so Philip II had had the Duke of Alba as well as the Guise and Medici families. In the introduction to their rewriting of the Defence of Poetry, it was the Robsons’ aim to recall ‘‘the essentially social and Christian im-

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pulse which influenced the greatest men of the sixteenth century, to build that tremendous cultural pyramid that culminated in the work of Shakespeare, and the publication of the authorised version of the Bible in 1611’’ (19). The Robsons praised the poets and playwrights who mastered the Greek, Latin, French, and Italian tongues, not as a form of self-satisfaction, but as ‘‘a privilege and a social obligation.’’ At the center of their neo-humanist ideals was the conviction that men like Sidney, More, and Shakespeare, through their study, attempted to realize a world ‘‘where human values might reign supreme and men may live in fellowship and mutual productive endeavour’’ (21). To present a eulogy on Renaissance humanism, however, was only part of the Robsons’ objective. Their utopian neo-humanism was really a stalking horse to further their mission vis-a`-vis the British cinema, which, as they had already argued in The Film Answers Back, was overly elitist in subject matter and language, and still inferior to its infinitely more democratic Hollywood counterpart. The Robsons felt that it could only be improved by catering to broad audiences whose tastes, likes, and dislikes could be identified by studying their box office behavior. This approach to film making would delight and teach audiences, lead to a healthier society, improve the British cinema, and make it a powerful weapon in the war on Hitler. Clearly, the humanist potential of the cinema, as they envisaged it, was not devoid of another agenda, which again drew on the early modern period as its model, seen through the nineteenth-century eyes of Burckhardt and John Addington Symonds. In a typical instance of ‘‘conscripting the earlier humanists to the commercial, scientific and imperial expansionism of the later nineteenth century,’’ the Robsons hoped that with Sidney’s poetics properly interpreted and put in practice, they might further the broader cultural cause of Britain abroad.11 Preferring to see the early humanists’ selfordained task ‘‘not as the discovery of the future but as the recovery of the past,’’ the Robsons expressed the belief that ‘‘[t]he best of Britain’s culture, as in Elizabeth I’s day, should be made to illumine the world.’’12 For all the seriousness with which the Robsons advanced their theories about the future of the British cinema, it is difficult on occasion to suppress a chuckle at the rather naive rewriting of Sidney’s Defence for the masses considered in need of education, although they nevertheless effected a subtle reformulation of Sidney’s dictum that poetry should teach and delight and thus move to virtuous action, to read that the pictures should move (as in movies) in order to teach and delight. A few examples of the Robsons’ rewriting of

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Sidney should suffice. In the Defence of Poetry, Sidney speaks of the merits of Aesop’s fables as follows: the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs, the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher, whereof Aesop’s tales give good proof, whose pretty allegories, stealing under the formal tales of beasts, makes many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue from these dumb speakers.13

In the version by the Robsons this becomes: But the Moovie is the food for the tenderest stomachs—the Moovie is indeed the right popular Philosopher, whereof Walt Disney’s tales give proud proof, whose charming allegories, stealing under the formal exploits of animals, make many begin to hear the sounds of virtue from these players. (In Defense of Moovie, 42)

A similar transfer takes place in Sidney’s argument about the lessons of the Stoa to be learned from dramatic literature. Sidney brings in Sophocles: Anger, the Stoics said, was a short madness: let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing or whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger than finding in the schoolmen his genus and difference. (Defense of Poetry, 86)

The Robsons, again, draw on Walt Disney: Anger, the Stoics have told us, is a short-lived madness. Let but Disney bring us Donald Duck upon the Moovie Screen, threatening his enemies in a violent fury of anger, and then you can tell me if you have not a better insight into anger upon seeing this outburst of violence than you could ever have by consulting the learned scholars for a definition of what anger is. (In Defense of Moovie, 42–43)

The ‘‘friendship in Nisus and Euryalus’’ to which Sidney refers (Defence of Poetry, 86), is replaced by the friendship ideal represented in the plot of Victor Fleming’s Test Pilot, a film which postdates the Hollywood star system, and which has Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Lionel Barrymore, ‘‘disinterestedly pulling together in the interests of the production as a whole.’’14 A phrase in Sidney like ‘‘glad will they be to hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas’’ (Defence of Poetry, 92) is modernized to read: ‘‘glad they will

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be to see and hear the tales of the Exeter, Ajax, and Achilles, and the valiant boarding of the Altmark’’ (In Defense of Moovie, 49). Where Sidney mentions Amadis de Gaule as the type of poetry that might incite to ‘‘the exercise of courtesy’’ (Defence of Poetry, 92), the Robsons choose Captains Courageous as their example (In Defense of Moovie, 50), the film with Spencer Tracy playing a Portuguese sailor who ‘‘stands out for his dignity, his humanity, his sane regard for the eternal human values’’ (The Film Answers Back, 316). Sidney may wonder, ‘‘Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?’’ (Defence of Poetry, 92); the Robsons read, ‘‘Who that saw Gary Cooper in Mr Deeds Goes to Town did not wish it were his fortune to do good in such excellent performance?’’ (In Defense of Moovie, 50). The ultimate question is not why ‘‘England, the mother of excellent minds, should be grown so hard a stepmother to poets’’ (Defence of Poetry, 110), but ‘‘to the Moovie Industry’’ (In Defense of Moovie, 71). It is not the genre that is to blame for the state of the British cinema; it is ‘‘the fault of Moovie Apes and not of Moovie Makers’’ (85). It is only a small step from the Robsons’ use of the Renaissance as a period providing ample analogies with the turbulent present to their veneration for Shakespeare, even if, as I shall illustrate below, Shakespeare and the cinema, to them, were not compatible. Together with the authorized version of the Bible, Shakespeare for them stood at the top of the ‘‘tremendous cultural pyramid’’ of the early modern period. Shakespeare represented ‘‘the vigour, the nobility, the depth of human understanding’’ which were the outcome of the ‘‘stimulating social atmosphere of England during the reign of Elizabeth . . . when exciting new Eldorados were opening out before the gaze of men’’ (The Film Answers Back, 141). Under Elizabeth, Shakespeare ‘‘wrote his name across the eternal realms of literature’’ (146). Shakespeare represented the pinnacle of Elizabethan drama, and, as the Robsons saw it, this was a genre which had gone through a process of development much like the cinema in the twentieth century. Drawing for support on Sir Sidney Lee, the Robsons developed the theory that Shakespeare had entered a theater scene dominated by inferior authors and playwrights. Unlike them, he had turned to catering for a playgoing public. In this way, he had managed to delight and teach his audiences, thus ‘‘raising the standards of civilisation and social behaviour among his fellow-citizens’’ (23). Just as the earliest dramatic performances were held on crude stages in inn yards, so the cinema had started at music halls and fairgrounds. Just as Shakespeare had raised the dramatic genre to unprecedented heights by setting out to delight and teach his audi-

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ences and to cater to their tastes, so the cinema could raise its standards if it took its cue from Sidney’s Defence of Poetry and address not the elite but the masses. Part of their praise of Shakespeare is that whereas he worked with an eye toward the populace, English films of the interbellum were marked by ‘‘the upper classes in England, living in a more rarefied atmosphere,’’ and since the English film was a closer expression of their particular world, it could not, in its existing form, achieve the world circulation of the American product, or make an appeal to the majority of the British people.15 In short, the advantage of Shakespeare, the Robsons argue, was that he limited himself to a ‘‘healthy’’ representation of life. By way of an example, they quote Cardinal Wolsey from Henry VIII, throwing ‘‘a shaft of light on human moral understanding when, in his deep-felt remorse he calls out: O, Cromwell, I charge thee, cast away ambition. Had I but served my God as I have served my king, He would not, in mine age, have left me naked to mine enemies.’’ (The World is My Cinema, 168)

Particularly interesting in this context is the Robsons’ praise of Shakespeare for enlisting history in the service of the theater and perfecting the genre of the history play. When Shakespeare first came to the theater, they argue, there were only chronicle plays, ‘‘mere pageants or processions of ill-connected episodes, chiefly of English history, in which drums and trumpets and the clatter of swords and cannon largely did duty for dramatic speech and action’’ (In Defense of Moovie, 23). Shakespeare, however, developed new standards, and proved ‘‘how genius might evoke order out of disorder and supplant violence by power’’ (23). Shakespeare’s democratic achievement with the history play differed rather strongly from elitist Alexander Korda’s Private Life of Henry VIII, Herbert Wilcox’s Victoria the Great, or Korda’s more recent Fire Over England (1937), which ‘‘told very much more about Queen Elizabeth than about England.’’16 Against the background of such elaborate praise of Shakespeare and the English history play, it is curious indeed to find that the Robsons saw no real use for the playwright in the movie medium. Their discussion of Olivier’s Henry V leaves one in little doubt. Olivier’s film version of Henry V, first released in 1944, is now firmly situated in the canon of film literature. This has not always been the case. As Harry Geduld usefully reminds us in the introduction to his anthology of early criticism devoted to the Olivier project,

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‘‘the film did not find unanimous acceptance.’’17 Initially, there was disagreement about the ‘‘textual deletions’’ which oversimplified the character of the king. Also, the way in which the Globe scenes had been made to frame the Agincourt campaign was considered ‘‘a confusion of convention’’ (67). Manny Farber found the film ‘‘stagy,’’ recalling ‘‘grade-school operetta’’ (67). Philip Hartung considered the opening scene ‘‘a great bore’’ as he did the scenes ‘‘showing Shakespeare’s so-called clowns in action’’ (68). Finally, the film’s political stance has been described as ‘‘quite ambiguous’’ (69). Olivier himself argued that this was essentially a film about ‘‘Anglo-British relations’’ (Geduld 1973, 17). The French, however, were not convinced. At the time of the film’s release, for example, a party of Free French sailors stationed in Britain are said to have left the auditorium, and the French authorities were seriously concerned by its stereotypical representation of the French national character.18 Yet, none of the rather less polite expressions of criticism vis-a`-vis Olivier’s now canonical film epic equals the assault on the film from the Robsons. Both in their Bernard Shaw among the Innocents (1945), and in their chapter on Henry V included in The World is My Cinema, they took the film to task on a number of grounds, some familiar, others less so. The Robsons dismissed the film almost categorically. The only favorable words they spent on it were the following: There is only one commercial justification for making an historical film, a ‘‘costume’’ picture as it is called, and that is its topicality, its bearing upon our own social and individual problems and their solution. The elements of love and marriage and parenthood and protection of one’s kith and kin, are eternal and therefore topical yesterday, today and tomorrow. There are occasional flashes of topicality in the Technicolor Henry V. (Bernard Shaw among the Innocents, 28)

The Robsons were angered by the fact that ‘‘even the work of our greatest national poet and playwright cannot be handled by our anti-social, anti-religious, paradox mongering film makers without smearing religion with a tar brush’’ (The World is My Cinema, 77). With indirect reference to the flattering accounts of the preparation of the film script (like C. Clayton Hutton’s), the Robsons asked the question: by what process of reading or reasoning could those expensive transcribers have gathered from Shakespeare’s text that the Bishop of Ely should be a scruffy-looking tramp, dressed like Grock the Clown, and that he, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, should, between them, deliver their

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lines, clowning and fidgeting and grimacing, and dropping things all over the place, as if they were acting for a children’s pantomime?19

Not only did the Robsons criticize the way in which Olivier represented the clergy; they also launched a fierce attack against the film’s use of comic relief. Dreading the prospect of two and a half hours of ‘‘Henry, Henry, Henry,’’ Olivier had argued that ‘‘the film cried out for light relief,’’ and this is what he introduced rather profusely.20 The critics did not fail to notice this, like Bosley Crowther who believed that ‘‘Olivier ha[d] leaned perhaps too heavily toward the comic characters’’ (Geduld 1973, 68). Foster Hirsch described the scenes with the comic characters, when they did not comment on the war, as ‘‘remarkably flat.’’ ‘‘These low-comedy contretemps,’’ he wrote, ‘‘are an interference.’’21 The polite and circumspect style of these critics is a far cry from the Robsons’ response. They called the team behind Henry V a bunch of ‘‘clod-hopping film makers’’ for following Henry’s ‘‘Once more unto the breach’’ speech with the ‘‘comic mockery’’ of it by Bardolph and Pistol (The World is My Cinema, 78). The Robsons were certainly aware of its faithfulness to the Shakespeare text, but they believed that it testified to ‘‘senselessness to think that because it reads thus and thus in the book, it has to be made exactly thus and thus slavishly for a film’’ (78). This was not an instance of the film reviewers applying Sidney’s advice against mingling kings and clowns; rather, it was the Robsons’ conviction that Shakespeare wrote the Bardolph-Pistol interlude following the Harfleur sequence as comic relief, during an interval introduced as ‘‘a physical let up’’ for Elizabethan audiences standing in the yard (79). The need for such relief, they alleged with Darwinian fervor, was totally out of date, unnecessary in the modern cinema with its sedentary audience. As a consequence, the glorious heroism of Henry and St. George on film could only be deflated by the comedy if it was kept in. From the outset, there has been a tendency among critics of Olivier’s Henry V to argue that the cinematic representation of king and country is more patriotic than Shakespeare’s more ambivalent play text would seem to allow. Gorman Beauchamp, described as ‘‘an extremely hostile critic,’’ even spoke of the result as ‘‘pasty patriotic ragout.’’22 It is a mark of the Robsons’ unusually selfprotective and insular outlook, that—as with Powell and Pressburger’s Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—they did not consider the film patriotic enough. The Robsons further believed that Henry V, like most British films of the time, relied too much on verbal communication. Whereas Bosley Crowther praised the film for having ‘‘mounted the play with

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faithful service to the spirit and the word’’ (Geduld, 76), the Robsons identified ‘‘an absolute, pathetic, almost pathological leaning upon words, words, words; upon the verbal imagery of Shakespeare in Henry V’’ (The World is My Cinema, 24). Although Olivier had taken the trouble to play ‘‘the first few scenes on the Globe stage in a highly, absolutely deliberate, theatrical style [to] get the film audience used to the language, and let them laugh its excesses out of their systems before the story really begins,’’ the Robsons’ verdict on Henry V still was that ‘‘you cannot regard [the film] as more than a photographed sound track or word track.’’23 In this respect, the Robsons’ opinion—which Anthony Holden would classify as ‘‘highminded’’24 —was nearest to that of Roger Manvell who, in an essay of 1947, the same year that saw the publication of The World is My Cinema, expressed the conviction that ‘‘this film could not make full use of the resources of the cinema since it was bound to the verbal wheel of Shakespeare’s text written for the rhetorical theatre. The camera had to record rather than take charge.’’25 The Robsons’ response is understandable, certainly given the type of film under review, whose structure, as Richard Griffith wrote in 1967, ‘‘was designed constantly to remind the spectator of the fact that it was a play and not a film’’ (Geduld, 77). Or, as Ernest Lindgren put it: Olivier’s Henry V was a very fine filmed version of the play, but the magnificence of Shakespeare’s verse alone, although spoken by our greatest actors, is not enough to make a great film in the true sense of the word . . . what is required is poetry of the film, instead of poetry in the film.26

Even a more recent critic like John Collick seems to share some of the discomfort that the Robsons expressed, when he states that the film’s production team were really ‘‘championing two different causes’’: On the one hand the intricate visuals of the film need little of the text to complement their implicit reiteration of the spectacular tradition and the mythology of British wartime culture. On the other hand Olivier and the producers of the movie, definitely perceive the text as the idealised source of meaning and so the speeches are delivered with the precise and measured enunciation of a BBC radio broadcast.27

These critics may seem to be repeating the Robsons’ argument in more careful terms. A closer look, however, reveals that for the Robsons their observation about the discrepancy of the spoken word and the visual image, the stage play and the movie, did not go far

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enough. To them, the British literary heritage was not a proper film source: There is a big difference between literary imagination destined for the printed page, and filmic imaginativeness, which forms the substance of the foremost American productions. . . . We in this country follow not the tradition of the cinema, but the tradition of books and literature which belongs properly to books and literature, but not to film. . . . It is that old, sometimes halting, thousand-year-old literary outlook which drags upon the feet of the British film industry like the fetters upon a victim of a chain gang. It is that disability to free itself from the printed page, that inability to learn the art of film making afresh which is holding up our progress as a film producing country at every turn.28

The very quality of Shakespeare’s verse was the main reason for its disqualification as matter fit for a screen play: the beauty of Shakespeare lies in his imaginative verbal exposition, or, as his contemporaries would describe it, ‘‘figuring forth.’’ His language was the Technicolor of the sixteenth century and the attempt to Technicolorise Shakespeare is, indeed, gilding the lily—a process both redundant and anachronistic. (77)

To make the point even more clearly, the Robsons, never at a loss for literary models to argue that ‘‘[t]he film impinges upon the prealphabetical faculties of man,’’ shamelessly adapted Aquinas’s Summa Theologica to read, ‘‘Words are to a film but things apart, They are a novel’s whole existence.’’29 The Robsons’ criticism of Henry V was not based on the assumption that the film makers had failed to do justice to Shakespeare; it was simply Shakespeare who could not match the requirements of the movie medium. The makers of Henry V had ‘‘forgotten that what suited an Elizabethan audience is not necessarily meat for us in our day and generation’’ (The World is My Cinema, 75–76). If Eric Bentley considered that Olivier’s filmed Shakespeare was ‘‘part of the horribly desecratory trend towards popularization-cum-prostitution of the Bard,’’ the Robsons felt that the national playwright was antiquated and hence had no business in the cinema whatsoever.30 The point the Robsons were trying to make was that the British cinema should not rely on existing, literary texts as the natural basis for screenplays: After Henry V has gone the round of cinemas, what then? What follows? Our film makers are back exactly where they were before, still under the

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obligation of learning the essence of film scripting. (The World is My Cinema, 79)

Apparently, they were not aware of the various stages through which the Shakespeare play had gone to become the ultimate scenario for the film, a script from which Olivier and his team departed even further in the process of making the film.31 Their argument, however, mainly focused on the perceived irreconcilability of the spoken word and the cinematic, moving image: Shakespeare has been a source of inspiration to authors and playwrights for nearly four centuries, but authors and playwrights, however skilful, are handicapped to the extent that they have to present a picture of the world in words. The artist worker in words describes the world. The film maker literally places ‘‘the world before your eyes.’’ (79)

Olivier, with reference to the film version of Henry V, stated that ‘‘if you have Shakespeare’s lines, you don’t need tricks to maintain interest’’ (Cottrell 1975, 196). The Robsons, as advocates of the new medium of film, however, saw the craft of the writer, like Shakespeare, as one fraught with ‘‘limitations’’ (The World is My Cinema, 80). Basing themselves on the prologue to Henry V, which had grown out of ‘‘the very discomforts and inadequacies of the Elizabethan theatre auditorium’’ (80), they proceeded to illustrate those limitations also in Olivier’s Henry V. Here, they argued, ‘‘you get the form of Shakespeare’s imagery in words followed by an underlined pictorial emphasis of what those words describe. Which is as if a schoolmaster were to put C O W on the blackboard and then paint a picture of the animal above it so that you should make no mistake as to what those letters stand for’’ (80). With the invention of the movie, the Robsons rather ominously felt that there was no longer any need to ask the audience to ‘‘suppose’’ because ‘‘the cine´-camera brings the world in front of you upon the screen without need of supposing’’ (80). The Robsons used Olivier’s film to vent a number of their main preoccupations, views which, even if they were shared by others to a degree, were never expressed in more repudiating terms. If literature required the ‘‘figuring forth’’ by means of words, the Robsons argued, film could do so by means of images. In the opinion of the ever explicitly Darwinian Robsons, therefore, speech, dialogue, and verbal imagery were ‘‘earlier forms of idea communication in the line of evolution’’ and ‘‘must form only a part, a restricted and subordinate part, to the visual and moving and active’’ (81). In this way,

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Shakespeare was effectively reduced to a stopgap, since the Robsons took it as certain that Shakespeare and film do not go easily together . . . speech, dialogue and verbal imagery, whether Shakespeare’s or any other playwright’s, may only be used sparingly in the film medium. They may only be employed to fill in the gaps which a particular film is unable to span any other way. (81)

Ever since the film’s release, much of the debate over Laurence Olivier’s Henry V has turned around the charge that too much of Shakespeare’s original text had been cut. This is not the debate that the Robsons were involved in. They felt that far too little of the text had been cut. It is a sad measure of the fanaticism mobilized for the Robsons’ assault on Olivier’s Henry V, that they failed to appreciate the most striking visual addition to the original Shakespearean play, the battle of Agincourt.32 Gradually, in the course of their advocacy of the British cinema, the Robsons began to renege also on other aspects of the Renaissance which they had applauded as a model at the beginning of the war. If in 1939 and 1940 the Robsons had relied on the militant and admirable early modern humanism to advance their own ideas, in 1947 they preferred to see the Renaissance as a reversion from Christianity to paganism: The Italian Humanists, despite their own notions of the nobility of their cause, went back from Christianity (true Christianity), to the self-pleasure, self-interest in place of the collective interest. The soul . . . had gone out of religion and communal life. (The World is My Cinema, 35–36)

The authors here discerned an analogous development in the first half century of film history. After ‘‘weld[ing] together a polyglot population of many races and languages into one nation,’’ there was now a ‘‘backward, negative tendency’’ (36). Here, Olivier’s Henry V was seen as a significant example. In his notoriously expensive Henry V, exemplifying a ‘‘trend of lavish extravagance,’’ they argued, the emphasis was ‘‘on things, not people; not with emotions, feelings, aspirations and human, kindly passions.’’33 To the Robsons, the decor, background, and costumes in Olivier’s Henry V actually recalled Italian Renaissance painting. This Italian influence, they argued, was so unmistakable that ‘‘the breath and soul and spirit of England tick only faintly, only intermittently’’ (The World is My Cinema, 36). What the Robsons wanted instead was ‘‘Anglo-Saxonism, both in the matter and in the manner of presentation,’’ since this

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would be the only way to achieve and secure the status of British film as a ‘‘world product,’’ thus realizing the objective contained in the title of The World is My Cinema. Any informed viewer of Olivier’s Henry V—aware that the sets were designed on the medieval model of the Limburg brothers34 —is in a position to see how the Robsons’ increasingly severe demands on the new medium to establish British cinematic hegemony in the world, blinded them to the realities in front of them. Moreover, whereas at the outbreak of the war they had praised the English Renaissance humanism as the fashion of an age that imported and appropriated ideas from the European continent, they now, in fact, advocated a departure from these foreign and historical models: The successful film is the one that absorbs, modifies and dominates the older cultures. The successful film is the one which is not dominated by the older forms of painting, word-poetry and drama. This is the crucial lesson we must learn. (The World is My Cinema, 87)

Arguably the most macabre feature of their postwar argument about the evolution of the British cinema was their call for sharper surveillance of its moral quality. Here, the Robsons preferred the United States as their model, in the form of the code advanced by William Harrison Hays who proclaimed that Hollywood provide only ‘‘pure entertainment,’’ films that ‘‘were wholesome and avoided social and political issues.’’35 By the so-called Hays code it was understood, among many other things, that no film should ridicule any religion or use any ministers of religion as comic characters or villains, whereas respect was called for in the handling of religious ceremonies.36 By these criteria, of course, Shakespeare’s Henry V was no unproblematic text. The Robsons were quick to point this out with reference to the representation of the clergy in the film, and it was not without a certain glee that they quoted the Daily Express of June 29, 1945, which made mention of the way in which Hays had felt it necessary to bowdlerize Shakespeare’s own language in the Olivier film: NAUGHTY WORDS IN A GOOD WORLD SO HAYS BANS HENRY V More and more British films are being banned in American because of naughty words. Latest victim of the ‘‘bad words’’ campaign is Shakespeare. Henry V has been banned by the Hays office because the words ‘‘damn’’ and ‘‘bastard’’ are uttered and there are references to the Deity. A cable received from America by Henry V’s producers calls for a

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reshooting of the offensive scenes to meet the rulings of the Hays production code. Laurence Olivier, the director and star now playing abroad to the B. L. A., will record the lines again on his return, but this will delay the American presentation of this £450,000 film by at least a month.37

Interestingly, for all their attempts in the late 1940s to establish the evolutionary difference between the early modern period and the twentieth century, in order to support their argument in favor of the Hays code, the Robsons drew on the Renaissance model of censorship. If the British cinema was to achieve full maturity, they reasoned, it ought to copy the way in which the London stage after a number of formative years reached its apex with Shakespeare. In the same way the London theater before Shakespeare had profited from the invective employed by the ‘‘professional reformers and fanatics,’’ the British film industry should institute a body like the Hays office to prevent the disintegration of society. As an illustration of the reformers who worked as ‘‘an abrasive that helped to clean up the theatre stage before it could evolve to a worthier position in our social life,’’ the Robsons quoted long passages from John Northbrooke’s 1577 Treatise against Idleness, Idle Pastimes, and Playes, arguing that ‘‘[t]he Elizabethan ‘professional reformers and fanatics’ realised what we in our day tend to forget, that mortal danger threatens that society which encourages loose conduct and anti-social behaviour either through rhetoric or acted in performance’’ (The World is My Cinema, 54). It is difficult to find a starker instance of the Robsons’ bizarre eclecticism than in the fact that they simultaneously advocated Sidney’s Defence of Poetry as a model—which, during the war, had also led them to found The Sidneyan Society to further their goals—as well as Northbrooke’s intolerant Treatise taking ‘‘the plays of his time to task in a manner that might fittingly apply to some of [the British] home-made films’’ in 1947 (54). One of the aims of this essay has been to rescue from oblivion two film critics whose work has not received the attention it deserves. On the one hand, one understands how and why the Robsons were eventually relegated to obscurity. Their notions of Britain, British culture, as well as the surveillance of that culture have become hopelessly dated, and have made way for views of the nation and of culture that decenter Britain as the hub of the old empire, that refuse to equate Britain and England and hence further political devolution, and that recognize criticism or subversion as integral component drives of any culture’s dynamics without sensing the need to

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reject it as ‘‘Britain-baiting’’ (Bernard Shaw among the Innocents, 13). One understands only too well why contemporaries and near contemporaries (like John Russell Taylor) preferred to relegate the Robsons and their immoderate conservative stance on the family and the nation to forgetfulness, and have in fact been rather successful. On the other hand, however, it is precisely our current appreciation of cultural diversity, as well as the newly recognized virtue of historicizing the cultural manifestations we study, that should lead us to explore, ever more seriously, the interacting pressures that operated between, in our case, Olivier’s Henry V and the society that both produced and perceived it. Clearly, one would err on the side of generalization if one continued to view Olivier’s Henry V merely as a ‘‘fairytale, whose brightly coloured glamour and spectacle was highly appropriate for the aesthetic appetite of the time,’’ or believe that the comic representation of the clergy was ‘‘[e]qually well suited to the susceptibilities of a war-time audience’’ (Davies 1988, 27). In view of the Robsons’ crusade, Henry V was not the unified expression of a nation at war. Any such view of the film, it seems, would tend to accept as fact the assertion of national unity projected by the Shakespearean plot, rather than sharpen the focus on genuine diversity of opinion on a number of scores—generic, political, social, as well as historical. If, in one sense, the Robsons enable us to see Olivier’s Henry V as a more fiercely contested film—both nationally and internationally—than has long been assumed, they also help identify a World War II image of Shakespeare that is at odds with the propaganda purposes to which Henry V was put by Olivier or G. Wilson Knight, or with the bardolatrous and Churchillian readings by Dover Wilson (who was delivering his Clark lectures on Falstaff and Hal at Cambridge while the film was being made), E. M. W. Tillyard, or J. H. Walter. It is true that the Robsons uncritically accepted Shakespeare as a national paragon, but in their view the medium of the future, the movie, was not made for him, nor he for it. In the writings of the Robsons, Shakespeare and Sidney began as humanist models of a type of neohumanist, antidecadent aesthetics. Over the years their status as models changed considerably. The playwright Shakespeare, who had started at the summit of the early modern ‘‘cultural pyramid,’’ became no more than an anachronism in the British cinema. Similarly, the Elizabethan humanism of Sidney—whose plea to delight and teach and ‘‘move men to take that goodnes in hande, which without delight they would flye as from a stranger’’ featured prominently at the beginning of The Film Answers Back (11), and whose name graced The Sidneyan Society that the

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Robsons founded in order to propagate their ideas—was coupled to the intolerant, Puritan rule of Northbrooke and his antitheatrical prejudice. Gradually, the Robsons’ unorthodox views and playful appropriation of England’s humanist heritage hardened into what is perhaps best described as a prescriptive poetics, no longer a defense of the movie as a new genre, but an attack on existing practice, ‘‘committed,’’ as Graham Holderness has put it, ‘‘to the independence of film as an art, and hostile to any dependence of film on the literary media.’’38 With it, they developed a degree of monomania that ironically drove them to advocate a return to the kind of Puritan censorship that Sir Philip Sidney had meant to counter with his Defence of Poetry.

Notes I am grateful to William Uricchio (MIT and Utrecht University), for his encouragement at an early stage of this project. During the research for this paper, I have also enjoyed the support of the staff of the Amsterdam Film Institute, Jose´ Ramo´n Diaz-Fernandez (University of Malaga), Russell Jackson (University of Birmingham, UK), and Paul Franssen (Utrecht University). 1. The field is vast and rapidly expanding. A most valuable introduction to Shakespeare and film is The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); a useful anthology of earlier criticism is Shakespeare on Film, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1998). 2. E. W. and M. M. Robson, The Film Answers Back: An Historical Appreciation of the Cinema (London: John Lane, 1939). 3. For excerpts from contemporary reviews see the final page of ‘‘In Defense of Moovie’’ by Sir Philip Sidney (1581–1941). Transcribed from ‘‘In Defense of Poesie’’ by E. W. and M. M. Robson (Edinburgh: H. & J. Pillans & Wilson, 1940). 4. E. W. Robson and M. M. Robson, The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp: The True Story of the Film (London: The Sidneyan Society, 1944), 4. 5. For an extensive re-appraisal of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp see Neil Rattigan, This is England: British Film and the People’s War, 1939–1945 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 213–32. 6. John Russell Taylor, ‘‘Michael Powell: Myths and Supermen,’’ Sight and Sound, (1978). Internet version at ⬍www.brainstorm.co.uk/steve/Powell/Reviews/ Micky/Supermen.html⬎. 7. John Cottrell, Laurence Olivier (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 129. For other reviews of The Divorce of Lady X see Olivier: The Films and Faces of Laurence Olivier, ed. Margaret Morley (Farncombe, UK: LSP Books, 1978), 75. 8. The Film Answers Back, 47. In this connection, the Robsons also speak of an ambitious Italian version of Homer’s Odyssey. When it was toured all over America, audiences in the Middle West wanted to know whether Mr. Homer was traveling with the company to make a personal appearance (65). 9. Samuel A. and Dorothy R. Tannenbaum, Elizabethan Bibliographies IX (1941);

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and Mary A. Washington, Sir Philip Sidney: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1941–1970 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972). 10. ‘‘In Defense of Moovie,’’ 5. 11. Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997), 72. 12. See Davies, 72; and In Defense of Moovie, 24. 13. A Defence of Poetry in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, 87, ll. 24–29 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 14. In Defense of Moovie, 43; and The Film Answers Back, 303. 15. The Film Answers Back, 142. See also: ‘‘In England there is a division between the upper and the lower strata of society . . . by comparison with the rigidity and frigidity that separates the upper layers of society from the lower in this country, the Americans are living in blissful brotherhood’’ (142). 16. The Film Answers Back, 150. The Armada sequence from Fire Over England was re-inserted in The Lion Has Wings (dir. Alexander Korda, 1939), to stress the parallels between the Elizabethan struggle against Spain and Britain’s campaign against Germany. It was soon to become the model for later propaganda. See James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (London: I. B. Taurus Publishers, 1998), 58–65. 17. Harry M. Geduld, Filmguide to ‘‘Henry V’’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 67. See also the section on Henry V in Anthony Davies, ‘‘The Shakespeare Films of Laurence Olivier,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, 163–82. 18. D. K. C. Todd, Shakespeare’s Agincourt (Durham, UK: The New Century Press, 1985), 7. ‘‘The Battle of Agincourt was the finest part of a good film; which was not, however, considered to be good by some members of the audience when I saw it. I remember the occasion. I was doing my national service in Newcastle upon Tyne at the end of the war. A party of Free French sailors sat a couple of rows in front of me—there must have been eight or ten of them. They were the ones who walked out (whether before or after Agincourt I can’t recall).’’ See also John W. Young, ‘‘Henry V, the Quai D’Orsay, and the Well-Being of the Franco-British Alliance, 1947,’’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 7, no. 3 (1987): 319–21. 19. C. Clayton Hutton, The Making of ‘‘Henry V’’ (London: n.p., n.d.). 20. Laurence Olivier, On Acting (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 187. 21. Foster Hirsch, Laurence Olivier (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 72. 22. Ace G. Pilkington, Screening Shakespeare from ‘‘Richard II’’ to ‘‘Henry V’’ (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 110–11. 23. Olivier, On Acting, 187; and The World is My Cinema, 77. When Bosley Crowther refers to ‘‘some critics [who] have quibblingly complained that the film is no more than an adroitly photographed reproduction of the play,’’ he may well be referring to the Robsons. See his ‘‘Henry V,’’ in Focus on Shakespearean Films, ed. Charles W. Eckert, 57–62 (p. 59) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). 24. Anthony Holden, Olivier (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 180. 25. Quoted in Geduld, Henry V, 76. 26. Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 92. Quoted in Geduld, 78–79. 27. John Collick, Shakespeare, Cinema and Society (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989), 50. 28. E. W. and M. M. Robson, Bernard Shaw among the Innocents (London: The Sidneyan Society, 1945), 23. 29. The World is My Cinema, 6 and 79, respectively. 30. On Eric Bentley, see Anthony Holden, Olivier (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 220.

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31. For a discussion of the genesis of the film script, see Ace G. Pilkington, Screening Shakespeare from ‘‘Richard II’’ to ‘‘Henry V,’’ 100–29. 32. Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 34. 33. The World is My Cinema, 83 and 36, respectively. It is not impossible that this anti-Italian stance contains a veiled rejection of Filippo Del Giudice, the Italian immigrant who produced Henry V. Olivier acknowledged Giudice’s vital contribution to Henry V when he gave him the Oscar he had received in March 1947, saying ‘‘Without you, dear fellow, Henry V would never have been made’’ (quoted in Cottrell 200). 34. Donald Spoto, Laurence Olivier: A Biography (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), 142. Spoto contradicts Olivier’s claim that he himself rather than Roger Furse was responsible for the film’s design. 35. See Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987), 13–14. See also the Robsons on the Hays code in The World is My Cinema, 44–55. 36. The Robsons provide a breakdown of the various headings under which the Hays office grouped the rules governing the representation of reality in film. They include ‘‘Crimes against the Law,’’ ‘‘Sex,’’ ‘‘Vulgarity,’’ ‘‘Obscenity,’’ ‘‘Dances,’’ ‘‘Profanity,’’ ‘‘Costume,’’ ‘‘Religion,’’ ‘‘National Feelings,’’ ‘‘Titles,’’ and ‘‘Repellant Subjects’’ (The World is My Cinema 57–58). 37. Quoted in The World is My Cinema, 46. See also Cottrell, 199; and Holden, 180. 38. Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 187.

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Of Music and Silence: The Harmonies of Thomas Whythorne and Rose Tremain Helen Wilcox

MUSIC WAS REGARDED IN THE HUMANIST ERA AS ONE OF THE SEVEN liberal sciences, eloquent in skills, emotions, and ideals, and fulfilling an important function as a symbol of both heavenly harmony and earthly endeavor. As Sir Thomas Browne claimed in 1643, ‘‘there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; . . . [music] is an Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world.’’1 For Browne and his contemporaries, music was authorized by Apollo and Orpheus as well as by the biblical David, signifying divine order and human achievement. The art of music inscribed, as though by means of ‘‘hieroglyphics,’’ the creator in the creation; George Herbert, for example, was reminded emblematically of the cross and Christ’s ‘‘stretched sinews’’ when playing on the wood and strings of his lute.2 The best in human nature was thought to be reflected in our capacity to compose and enjoy music; as Browne put it, ‘‘whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony’’ (149). Music was thus seen simultaneously as the expression and the confirmation of the marvel that is the human being. As is typical of Renaissance humanism, the physical and the metaphysical reinforced one another. The melodies that Browne heard in the everyday world awakened echoes of the unheard music of creation. ‘‘Even that vulgar and Taverne Musicke,’’ he confessed, ‘‘strikes in mee a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer’’ (149). The image of Thomas Browne listening meditatively to ballads in a seventeenth-century East Anglian alehouse may not be the most commonly held picture of Renaissance humanism; nevertheless it seems to me an aptly material embodiment of the ideals of music in the early modern world. Leaving Browne drinking his ale in philosophical contemplation of those ‘‘vulgar’’ tunes, this essay will proceed to a case study of 290

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music, both heard and unheard, in two parallel and yet sharply contrasting texts. The first, from the heyday of humanism in England, is the autobiographical Book of Songs and Sonetts by the writer and composer, ‘‘Thomas Whythorne, Gent.,’’ written around 1576. The second is Rose Tremain’s historical novel, Music and Silence (1999), tracing the fortunes of the fictional English lutenist, Peter Claire, at the court of the seventeenth-century Danish king, Christian IV. What do these two works have to say about music as an ideal and as a practical way of life? What kinds of relationship do they sketch between music on the one hand and self-expression, character, love, society, and religion on the other? In what ways is music seen to be related to languages and other means of expression—or to what extent is it shown to be closer to silences, both positive and negative? These and other related issues will be explored in a juxtaposition of these two fascinating works. My purpose is not to suggest the influence of one text upon the other, but rather to assess both the Renaissance humanist perspective and the extent of its continuing presence in our modern culture. The two works each have at their center the role of music and music-making in the early modern context, but in their differences of date, genre, and readership they reflect diverse aspects of this harmonious art across four centuries of humanism.

I Thomas Whythorne’s Book of Songs and Sonetts was discovered in 1955 among a collection of legal and other papers in Herefordshire, and was subsequently presented to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.3 It consists of an autobiographical prose ‘‘discoorse,’’ as the title-page claims, covering ‘‘the chylds lyfe, togyther with A yoong mans lyfe, and entring into the old mans lyfe,’’4 interspersed with Whythorne’s own poems, which function as commentaries upon his experiences. The manuscript also contains a long diversion in defense of music,5 sandwiched between a record of Whythorne’s own achievements as a published composer and an account of his years as master of music at Lambeth Palace. The Book ends with the texts of seventy of his own poems intended to be set to music. All of this is really quite remarkable. The text is a secular autobiography whose explicit aim is ‘‘to lay open the most part of all my private affairs, and secrets accomplished from my childhood’’ until the time of writing (3), a rare phenomenon in an era when autobiography as a genre did not exist and the impulse to self-expression was more often indirectly

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released.6 Whythorne’s Book supplies the background to the books of madrigals and songs which were formerly all that was known of him.7 Further, the narrative gives a detailed and vivid picture of the work of a music teacher, composer, and poet in the late sixteenth century. It also makes available a collection of English lyric poems from the era of Tottel’s famous Miscellany, thereby extending our knowledge of lyrical poems and their link with musical settings in the late sixteenth century.8 Possibly the most remarkable feature of this unusual work, however, is that it was written in what Whythorne called his ‘‘new Orthografye’’ (1), that is, a form of phonetic spelling by which he wished to ‘‘write words as they be sounded in speech’’ (6). This system was based on John Hart’s Orthographie (1569), although Whythorne adapted it in a way that renders his text relatively accessible9 while also giving some scientific accuracy and, incidentally, supplying fascinating evidence of Elizabethan English pronunciation. Whythorne’s most commonly used devices include two characters from Old English (the thorn for th as in ‘‘this,’’ and the yogh for soft j and g), a dot to indicate long vowel sounds (as over the y in his own name) and the expansion of final syllables when pronounced, as in ‘‘babbull’’ instead of ‘‘babble.’’ Several of his methods may strike the reader as familiar from common modern English misspellings, such as his consistent spelling of a concluding tion with an s as in ‘‘meditasion.’’ His replacement of the voiced s with a z seems to anticipate modern American spelling, while his substitution of k for the hard c sound (leading to words such as ‘‘okkazion’’ and ‘‘kowtenans’’) will remind readers from the Netherlands of similar recent developments in Dutch spelling. Apart from the curiosity value of Whythorne’s ‘‘Orthografye’’—an example of which may be seen in illustration 8—his commitment to such a system underlines his interest in language as sounds as well as semantics. We are dealing here with an early modern writer who not only wrote musical melodies but for whom words themselves were melodic. Indeed, underlying Whythorne’s defense of music is its link with poetry and other expressive uses of language. In his extended exploration of the nature and function of music, he reminds his reader that ‘‘the Muses were ladies and governors of Poetry, music and eloquence’’ (225). Citing classical and contemporary authorities, Whythorne asserts that music is in ‘‘the middle’’ of the list of the seven liberal sciences: ‘‘grammar, logic, Rhetoric, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry and Astronomy.’’10 Music is thus at the very heart of learning, poised between verbal and numerical systems of knowledge; being at the center, music can, Whythorne boasts, ‘‘accord her’’ to every

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8. A sample of Whythorne’s ‘‘orthografye’’ and handwriting fol. 7 of the Bodleian MS Eng. Misc. c. 330. This is provided in Osborn’s edition of The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne.

other form of wisdom (238). This feminized phenomenon of music, which (or who) combines art and science, expression and measurement in ‘‘her’’ own single nature, appears to Whythorne to be the ultimate analogue of the soul itself. Just as the soul is ‘‘dispersed’’ throughout an individual and expressed in the complex workings of the mind and body together, so is music, he suggests, given form ‘‘in singing or playing on musical instruments [together] which is called harmony’’ (235). As Thomas Browne would later also claim, Whythorne asserts that musical harmony reflects the concord of opposites in the creation and the human individual. Further, he asserts that only music can fully represent the threefold nature of the soul, whether these three aspects are regarded as ‘‘Vegitative, Sensitive, and Intellective’’ as suggested by Xenocrates, or in accordance with Aristotle’s division of the soul into ‘‘lively, understandingly, and heavenly’’ aspects (235–36). For Whythorne, the plenitude of human life as defined by the ancients is epitomized in his own vocation. Music combines ‘‘into one concordance’’ (236) the animated life of rhythm, the sensual proportion of melody, and the metaphysical perfection of harmony. In Whythorne’s praise of music, his own practice as a musician is firmly entwined with reference to classical and other authorities. Passages which apparently savor genuinely of the musician’s daily experience turn out to be quotations from pseudo-Aristotelian treatises.11 This disarming mixture of tradition and individual talent is

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typical of Whythorne’s Book, and of early modern autobiographical writing in general, in which shared history and personal anecdote merge and generate a kind of double authority. Whythorne bases all his subsequent claims for the perfection of music on biblical evidence, showing that the art was approved by God and indeed, according to the Book of Revelation, heard in heaven from ‘‘before the world began’’ (222), though he calmly refers to the scriptural authority as ‘‘my opinion’’ (222). As he proceeds to describe the powerful effects of music, he echoes Erasmus in honoring music as ‘‘the reviver and nourisher of the spirits’’ in the same way that ‘‘meat and drink’’ are ‘‘necessary to the sustenance and preservation of the body.’’12 However, when he goes into further detail of the varied impact of music on warriors, lovers, the melancholic, and many other human types, he cites not only written sources but also his own accumulated anecdotes. These include ‘‘how music affecteth infants’’ and how the ‘‘sounding of some musical instrument’’ can be a successful mechanism for soothing crying children (242–43). He even tells the story of the bagpiper who survived the ‘‘peril and danger’’ of being lost in a forest filled with ‘‘wild beasts’’ by playing his pipes to calm the wolves (242). This strikes me as a worthy forerunner of the urban myth, but it serves to illustrate the lively mix of authorities—folk tale and domestic anecdote as well as classical, biblical and contemporary learning—with which Whythorne supports his defense of music. True to his calling as both poet and musician, Whythorne concludes his praise of music with a (rather expansive) summary in verse form, concluding his six pages of poetry with a more concise coda, advertising the benefits of music in a mere six lines: The music tunes of voice or sound Doth help the ears and doth expell All sorrows that the heart doth wound Also the wits it cherish’th well It suppleth sinews of each wight And eek the faint it fills with might. (254)

The poem promotes a harmonious tonic which seems to be the cure of all ills—of heart, mind, body, or spirit—though it is noticeable that Whythorne does not claim that enjoying music will necessarily make one a skilled poet. Nevertheless, this ‘‘sonnet,’’ as he calls it, was set to music as a five-part madrigal and included in his Songs of 1571—and, despite its weaknesses as spoken verse, the poem’s direct language, active metaphors, and interwoven syntax make it particu-

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larly well suited to musical setting for multiple voices. As Whythorne wisely observes with reference to his performance of his own songs, when music was ‘‘joined’’ with the poem there was indeed a gain: ‘‘I might tell my tale with my voice as well as by word and writing’’ (51). A Book of Songs and Sonetts tells Whythorne’s ‘‘tale’’ in considerable detail and provides an unusually private account of the musician’s world and its intrigues of art, love, and power. Although Whythorne claims in his defense of music that musicians have been greatly ‘‘esteemed’’ by monarchs (254), his own career was, unfortunately, not without its difficulties and certainly did not lead him to a position at court. Indeed, his employment was generally closer to that of Hortensio in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew: a performer and music teacher in the homes of the gentry and occasionally the aristocracy,13 but one who was always vulnerable to losing his job, and frequently the prey of the scheming and wayward affections of employers and pupils alike. In his early years, Whythorne was very fortunate to work as amanuensis to the musician and poet John Heywood, from whom he ‘‘learned to play on the virginals, the lute, and to make English verses’’ (13). After his apprenticeship in Heywood’s household, he proceeded to London: I took a chamber in London, and so determined to live of my self by teaching in such sort as I had learned of him. That is to say by teaching of Music, and to play on those instruments . . . that I had learned to play on. The which changing of mine estate, brought me other cares than I was troubled withall before. For whereas I was before but troubled with the fear of tutors and masters, I was afterward brought to have a care of mine own credit, and estimation, with the maintenance thereof as of a master and not as either servant or scholar, and also to keep myself without penury or need. (18)

The uncertainty and anxiety expressed with great honesty in this passage will be familiar to many a musician both then and now, but also indicate the ambition of a young man moving from the status of dependant or scholar to ‘‘master’’ through his own skill. He goes on to describe his transition toward being ‘‘mine own man’’ (18), a phrase which suggests financial independence but also a burgeoning individual identity typical of one who would choose to write his own autobiography. Whythorne’s consciousness of his own identity as a musician living independently is vividly expressed in the detailed account he gives of the decoration of his new residence in London: I caused a table to be made to hang in my chamber whereon was painted (in oil colours) the figure and image of a young woman playing on the

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lute, who I gave to name Terpsicore, which is the name of one of the nine muses, whom the poets do fain to be the goddess of all soft melody . . . Since I knew that this Terpsicore was goddess of that sort of Music which I then professed to be a master and teacher of, I caused to be painted . . . in the same table . . . not only the counterfeit of a virginal but also of the gittern,14 and sittern. and also a book wherein there is both pricksong,15 and tablature for the lute, and also this sonnet following.16

There is something almost endearing about the blatant self-promotion in this commissioned work of art: not only did it feature Whythorne’s own poetry, but it also deliberately included all the instruments that he himself could play and the forms of musical notation that he could write and teach. The name given to the female player is factually inaccurate (Terpsichore was the muse associated with dancing), but the knowing classicism is revealing of his desire for respectability; the painting is a visual equivalent of the verbal citation of Greek and Latin authors in his text. His desire to be identified with the melodic muse and her tradition—or even to supersede her—is further confirmed in the Book when Whythorne confesses that he also had his own ‘‘counterfeit or picture’’ painted inside the lid of a virginal, ‘‘likewise playing upon the lute’’ (20). However, the verse that he caused to be inscribed with his portrait warns darkly of the youthful pleasures which will ‘‘forsake’’ him when ‘‘hoary age appears.’’ As Whythorne is anxious to point out, although he took ‘‘some pleasure in the painter’s art,’’ the verses demonstrate the musician’s early awareness that worldly pleasures are ‘‘but vain and not permanent or abiding’’ (20). I hardly dare speculate on what psychoanalysis would make of Whythorne’s substitution of himself in the place of the female muse in this second picture, but it is certainly clear that he continues to personify music as feminine. He speaks of ‘‘the delightful conceit’’ of ‘‘dame music’’ (20), though while he is apparently in thrall to her throughout his life, he spends much of his text attacking ‘‘the feminine sex, and their loves,’’ as well as their ‘‘allurements, enticements and snares’’ (30). While his idealized muse symbolizes harmony and inspiration, the less metaphoric women whom he encounters cause him unease and are perceived as simultaneously attractive and threatening. As is the case with Shakespeare’s Hortensio, Whythorne finds himself courted by his female pupils, working in households with ‘‘diverse young women’’ (30) and in close physical proximity to them as they finger a lute or gittern. In an almost novelistic episode, Whythorne recounts how one young woman wrote some loving verses to him and

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did put them between the strings of a gittern, the which instrument as a sitting mate, lying mate, and walking mate, I then used to play on very often, yea and almost every hour of the day . . . When I came according to my accustomed wont to take the gittern to play on it, and finding the paper . . . I asked myself the question who it should be that made it and did put it there. (30–31)17

Whythorne’s account makes clear (whether consciously or not) the intimate link between the musician and his instrument, the ‘‘mate’’ with whom he walks, sits, and lies. It also reveals that, while he was certain of his bond with the gittern, he was fundamentally uncertain of his social position as music teacher in a household. In the case of the love poem slipped between the strings, he wonders openly whether the source of the verses is a woman who genuinely loves him or a man in the household who wishes to mock him out of envy or disrespect. (In fact, it turns out to be a combination of them both.) In another of his working environments, he is wooed by the mistress of the house who wants him as ‘‘both her servant and also her schoolmaster’’ (37), an ambivalent social and emotional position which he spends many pages negotiating. He subsequently falls victim—according to his own version of events—to eager widows, lascivious serving maids, love-lorn pupils, and society ladies. But when he once tries to woo for himself, using (of course) his own ‘‘pretty ditties made of love’’ sung ‘‘oftentimes to her on the virginals or lute’’ (77), the suit is rejected and comes to nothing. While Whythorne’s narrative is shot through with affairs of the heart, it also resounds with music throughout. We glimpse the tension as he is ‘‘perfecting and writing out’’ his music for publication but then begins to doubt the wisdom of allowing his own words and harmonies to be ‘‘made a common gaze unto all the world,’’ vulnerable to ‘‘the blasts of all folks’ mouths, and upon the middle-finger pointings of the unskillful’’ (174). In addition to witnessing the vulnerability of the artist faced with public scrutiny and interpretation by others, we also see into the social web of the Elizabethan household both above and below stairs, particularly as the musician was poised somewhere between those two worlds of the masters (or mistresses) and the servants. When that uncertain environment becomes too much of a strain for Whythorne, he explores other ways of earning a living. The fact that the two alternative ways of life in which he dabbles are commerce and travel tells us a lot about this increasingly mercantile period of the late sixteenth century. He finds himself (briefly) at the ‘‘top of Fortune’s wheel’’ when his ‘‘credit and estimation’’ are equally high (138), and keeps the com-

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pany of men such as William Bromfield who has ‘‘ventures’’ in ‘‘Muscovia, in Russia, but also in Tartaria, and Persia . . . Guinnea, in Ethiopia, and also, to Magrobumba, and Noua Spania and also to Terra florida, in America’’ (138). He soon returns to music teaching, however, where he seems to feel more at home even if under the too close scrutiny of his female pupils. His travels have meanwhile supplied him with plenty of musical anecdotes, such as the story of the ‘‘drunken Dutchman’’ who joined a company of singers in a church and at first sang temperately but gradually ‘‘brayed out louder, and then followingly he roared and yelled out so loud, as no beast living being no greater than he could have made greater and louder noise than he’’ (106). Whythorne’s moral is not so much directed against Dutchmen (though he does seem to consider drunkenness their chief characteristic) as toward illustrating how one ‘‘discordant noise’’ can destroy an otherwise ‘‘concordant harmony’’ (106). It is interesting that, when abroad, Whythorne concentrates less on trade than on trying to learn the ‘‘speech and languages’’ of ‘‘people where I came’’ (60). His attention is consistently attracted to media of expression, whether musical or linguistic. When, for example, he has devoted himself to ‘‘the study and obtaining of the Italian tongue’’ (62), he proceeds to share with the reader the fascination of the rhythm, meter, and lyric voice of some verses ‘‘written upon a wall’’ in ‘‘a house on the hither part of Italy’’ (63). One might say that for Whythorne the writing was often on the wall, whether on his Italian travels, in his own verses inscribed into the paintings he commissioned, or metaphorically in his restless movement from one position of employment to another; behind it all was his abiding sense of death awaiting him. He wrote his autobiographical Book of Songs and Sonetts when he was less than fifty years old, and saw his life in three main phases: the child, the young man, and ‘‘entering into the old man’s life’’ (1). When he commissions a new portrait of himself in middle age, Whythorne compares it mercilessly with the earlier portrait inside the virginal, and notes that I was much changed from that I was at that time, as by the long and fullness of my beard, the wrinkles on my face, and the hollowness of mine eyes, and also that as my face was altered so were the delights of my mind changed, I caused to be written in the table where my counterfeit was, these two lines following— As time doth alter every wight So ev’ry age hath his delight. (135)

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Once more Whythorne writes on the wall and continues to contain his life’s experiences, even the consuming power of time, in rhythm and harmony. This process of self-inscription is embodied not only in his music and verse but also in the decision to write the autobiographical memoir itself. The text is an unusually introspective selfcontemplation for its period and it is offered by Whythorne, like the series of portraits, as a record of ‘‘what manner of favour’’ he had (134). In a notably meditative passage, he points out that a text or a set of portraits provides something more permanent than the reflection in a ‘‘looking glass’’ which only remains briefly ‘‘in the memory of the beholder’’ and shows ‘‘but the disposition of the face for the time present, and not as it was in time past’’ (134). His writing, by contrast, can record how he has ‘‘been changed from time to time, by time’’ (4) and builds up a very human face of the poet, performer, composer, music teacher, defender of music, traveler, linguist, orthographer, and would-be lover called Thomas Whythorne.18

II While the focus of Whythorne’s Book of Songs and Sonetts is so obviously his own life story that his modern editor can safely entitle the volume The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, it would be misleading to suggest that Rose Tremain’s 1999 novel Music and Silence centers similarly on the equivalent musician figure, Peter Claire. With its postmodern structure of playful pastiche and multiple narratives, the novel constructs the stories of at least four other main characters: the Danish king Christian IV at whose court Claire is employed as lutenist; the king’s scheming second wife, Kirsten; her lady in waiting, Emilia, who falls in love with Claire; and Claire’s former lover, Francesca, an Irish countess of Italian origin. The novel’s settings range from Ireland and East Anglia to the Danish royal palace of Rosenborg and the icy valleys of the Numedal. One reviewer described Tremain’s novel, which won the Whitbread Prize for the best English novel of 1999, as a ‘‘treasure house of delights, as haunting as it is pleasurable’’ with ‘‘intrigues, searches, betrayals, in vivid scene after scene which loop in and out, back and forth, like overlapping and repeated chords.’’19 This final simile is apt, since music plays a vital role not only in the novel’s plot structure but also as one of the fundamental ideas explored in its pages. As John Bayley pointed out in his review of Music and Silence, the reader who hopes for technical information about lutecraft will be disappointed, but

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music is a ‘‘spirit and a suggestion’’ throughout the ‘‘seductive paragraphs’’ of this novel.20 The events are set in 1629–30, and Tremain’s characters are appropriately steeped in the humanist and neo-Platonic traditions of music shared by Thomas Whythorne. King Christian longs to ‘‘reimpose order upon chaos,’’ not only in his kingdom but also in ‘‘our innermost souls,’’ and music is his means of achieving this; human beings are prone, he says, to lose the ‘‘thread of things’’ and what he ‘‘asks of music’’ is ‘‘to restore the thread to me.’’21 Just as Whythorne saw music as an emblem of the soul, so Christian regards music itself as ‘‘the human soul, speaking without words’’ (6). He requires his musicians to perform in a cold, dark cellar underneath the Vinterstue, the room in which he receives visitors to Rosenborg. As the Music Master explains, by means of a series of air ducts the sounds we make here are transmitted without distortion into the space above and all the King’s visitors marvel when they hear it, not knowing whence the music can possibly come and wondering perhaps whether Rosenborg is haunted by the ghostly music makers of some other age. (16)

This association of music with ‘‘ghostly’’ origins and a mysterious, disembodied sound evoking ‘‘a sense of wonder’’ in the listeners (223) intensifies the connection between music and spiritual or otherworldly forces. The musicians ‘‘seem to create a rich and faultless harmony’’ from the cellar, ‘‘huddled together in their dark domain’’ (28), a description inevitably conjuring up links with death and an Orpheian music sounding from beyond the grave. Those who cannot respond to music in the novel are the least sympathetic characters; Kirsten, Christian’s outrageously selfish consort, for example, is known to ‘‘loathe and detest Musical Performances’’ (179). The echo of Lorenzo’s comment in The Merchant of Venice, that those who have no music in them and are not ‘‘moved with concord of sweet sounds’’ are ‘‘fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,’’22 consciously roots the novel’s musical idealism in the humanist era. Both Music and Silence and Whythorne’s Book provide lively accounts of the experience of making music. Whythorne sums up the way in which he passes his time ‘‘pleasantly, as sometime in singing, sometime in playing on musical instruments, sometime in dancing, and sometime in writing of English verse’’ (44), and later analyzes the way in which he can give fuller expression to his ‘‘Cupidian’’ affections through music (77). Peter Claire, too, perceives the effect of music-making on his own nature. Contemplating the ‘‘intense

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harmony’’ of the royal orchestra which sounds ‘‘as one’’ but is ‘‘in reality composed of all our parts,’’ he becomes ‘‘no longer this habitual resemblance of myself that walks about and eats and sleeps and is idle, but myself entirely’’ (224). In both cases the musician is not just a conduit of beautiful sounds but is transformed by the process of creating them. The impact of music on those who simply listen is also referred to by Tremain’s characters in ways similar to the arguments and anecdotes of Whythorne’s defense of music. His story of the bagpiper and the wolves springs to mind when, in the novel, a ‘‘whole company of men and mules’’ is entranced by Claire’s playing of an ayre on his lute (84). And, having kept the company of chickens in their dark cellar, the royal orchestra then find that they are to play out of doors alongside a flock of sheep. ‘‘Wherever we go, we are plagued by livestock!,’’ the flautist complains, but from the moment that the musicians begin to play, ‘‘the sheep raise their heads and listen, forgetting to graze for long periods of time’’ (118). Christian’s belief that ‘‘certain pieces of music aid digestion’’ (14) also recalls Whythorne’s faith in the power of music to soothe infants and ease melancholic spirits (239). Indeed, the most sympathetic characters in Music and Silence find comfort and inspiration in music and musicians. Peter Claire’s sister is taken by the power of melody to ‘‘somewhere that transcends time and space’’ (300) and his beloved Emilia describes her only hope, ‘‘the impossible,’’ as ‘‘the arrival out of the white landscape of a man carrying a lute’’ (407). As the novel draws to a close and Claire prepares to leave the Danish court, the king reminds him of the transforming power of music by which the lutenist has worked ‘‘a magnificent alteration’’ in the hearts and lives of those for whom he played (421). Tremain’s own rich language regularly draws on music as a source of metaphoric transformation in the novel. The effects of music are closely associated with memory, as when Christian, having heard Peter Claire performing a pavan by Ferrabosco, declares that it ‘‘reminded him of a voyage to Spain, where the evening light was the colour of jade and the women smelled of cloves’’ (308). But it is not just specific memories that are awakened by music; the very nature of music, the novel suggests, is bound up with memory and anticipation: They say that Music, to reach into a Human Soul, depends upon Expectation born of Memory—that certain notes will follow in sequence after certain others—and so we hear the thing we call Melody flowing through Time. And if Memory be faulty—as I do think mine must certainly be— then we shall remain all our lives indifferent to Music. (453)

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At times in the novel, memories become more vivid than the present, and then music becomes a yardstick against which to measure their force: ‘‘he sees that she is almost laughing and this remembered sound of her laughter is as potent as music’’ (321). But music is, however potent, always ‘‘an abstraction’’ (301), and it can therefore lead listeners into contemplation of the future as well as the past. When Claire and the viol player entertain the passengers on the ship bound for the silver mines of the Numedal, ‘‘the captain leans against some rigging and fixes his eyes on the moon and stars, but the geniuses of the mine gaze intently at Peter Claire and Krenze, as if the sounds they make contained some precious metal as yet unknown to them’’ (62). Tremain’s metaphors, whether of music or from music, repeatedly touch on the mystery hinted at in its harmonies. At the heart of the novel is a sense that the ‘‘unknown,’’ the precious secret of perfection intimated by music, is ultimately unattainable, giving added poignancy to music’s ‘‘aching sweetness’’ (245). We hear of compositions ‘‘begun and never finished’’ (424) and of performances that are never quite perfected. Christian comments to his orchestra one night that ‘‘if he is not mistaken, they are approaching some kind of perfection’’ (245), a statement in which the uncertainty (perhaps he is mistaken), the ‘‘approaching’’ rather than achieving, and the qualifying phrase ‘‘some kind of perfection,’’ remind us uncomfortably of their imperfections. The most disturbing example of this yearning in the novel is the experience of Francesca’s Irish husband, Johnnie O’Fingal, who dreams that he has composed a particularly beautiful song, but when he wakes up, he cannot recapture its melodies. In agony, he protests that ‘‘something as significant as that cannot be lost’’ (40), turning the music into an emblem of every paradisal quality for which fallen humans search. He goes mad in that search and dies. As one of his children whispers, ‘‘perhaps Papa’s lost music is of the kind that no one can hear?’’23 The novel’s title rightly suggests that it is as much concerned with silence, or not hearing, as with hearing. When Christian leads his expedition to the ‘‘far-away hillside under a Norwegian sky,’’ he includes musicians in his party because ‘‘he considers that a life without music . . . is a life where the cold indifference of the universe may hold absolute sway. And he is in no mood to hear its uncaring silence’’ (59). The absence of music—one definition of silence—is taken as a sign of the absence of love, both human and divine. Thus the sudden onset of deafness is accompanied by an existential terror, whether the loss of hearing is psychological, as in the case of

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Johnnie O’Fingal’s lost dream music, or physical, as with Peter Claire who is afflicted by desperate pain in his ear and a consequent silence which is ‘‘absolute’’ (422). Tremain’s interest in silence takes many forms: she refers to ‘‘the silence of lost years,’’ the ‘‘slow torture’’ of Peter Claire’s lonely silence in the absence of Emilia, and the still darkness of a windless night ‘‘silent as the tomb’’ (232, 262, 410). Silence signifies the past, loss, absence, death—but also the unspoken and the unheard. When spring comes to the frozen Numedal, where the search for silver has only brought poverty and death, the afflicted people remaining in the valley are not affected by the thawing of the cataract: ‘‘it is as if no one hears the sound of the waterfall’’ (203). The love which Peter Claire feels for his Irish countess, and later for Emilia, is oppressed by the silence of inexpressibility, and, even in his permitted conversations with the king, the lutenist is aware of ‘‘what so often exists in the silences between words,’’ a knowledge which ‘‘both haunts them and makes them marvel at the teasing complexity of all human discourse’’ (395). Music, silence and language, then, are all closely interconnected in Tremain’s novel. In Whythorne’s Book, too, we observed how his fascination for music goes hand in hand with an obsession with discourse of all kinds—poetry, song, foreign tongues, orthography. Music and Silence may not be written in a phonetic code, but it certainly betrays a profound interest in words as art and mystery. Christian delights in calligraphy from an early age, enjoying the ‘‘absolute majesty’’ of ‘‘knowing his hand to be in perfect control of every stroke or loop of the pen’’ as he practices signing his name ‘‘in calligraphy of exceptional sophistication and beauty’’ (45). The English ambassador, visiting the Danish court and conversing in German with Christian’s consort, finds another pleasure in language—not the visual beauty of writing but the suggestive structures of sentences. He appreciates the way that, in German, ‘‘the verb withholds itself from its own completion until the last moment in almost every sentence, thus imparting to all linguistic constructions a hanging thread of mystery’’ (121). This fine characterization of Germanic syntax implies that language communicates but at the same time can tantalize and even withhold communication. Just as music is seen in the novel as the expression of the soul, so words, too, can express ‘‘innermost being’’ (46). However, both music and speech can be overwhelmed by silence; at a crucial moment, Peter and Emilia share experiences ‘‘which neither can put into words’’ (119). Earlier in the novel, Christian comes across a splendid Arabian stallion which has no name because, according to its owner, ‘‘no word in our language presents itself to me as fine enough’’

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(98). As Emilia’s youngest brother realizes, language is also vulnerable; ‘‘names can break,’’ the child advises, so ‘‘you have to hold them carefully’’ (146). In the imaginative world of Tremain’s novel, the expressive systems of words and notes interweave their threads among memories and desires. It is revealing that Peter Claire, when trying to recall and understand a conversation with Emilia, is said to play and replay it in his mind ‘‘as though it might be a piece of music’’ (156). When the king’s childhood friend sees Christian’s ‘‘exquisite’’ calligraphy, he gives it the highest praise by declaring it to be ‘‘like music’’ (79). And yet, for all the praise and power accorded to music in the texture of the narrative, those who make music are shown to be ‘‘pawns’’ (363) in the early modern world of political schemes and personal manipulation, as well as in the novel’s own plot. The lutenist is, like Whythorne, dependent upon the whims of his employers, vulnerable to their love and admiration but ultimately a possession to be exchanged, if need be, for money or other more valuable commodities. As King Christian explains to Claire, the orchestra is deliberately confined to the cellar so that they will be ‘‘forgotten’’ and ‘‘invisible’’—and then those who hear their music will be filled with ‘‘a sense of wonder’’ at the music (223), but never at the musicians. High ideals of almost heavenly music coexist with a much lower regard for the earthly music-makers in this harsh world.

III These two works bring to life in very different ways the same world: the environment of early modern musicians, in which underlying humanist principles of discourse, harmony and potentiality are juxtaposed with the practicalities of their professional and emotional lives. Considering the distance between the two works in period, genre and function, it is indeed striking just how many parallels there are between them. Both texts, as we have seen, give a vivid insight into the writing, teaching, and performing of music in early modern Europe, and offer a spirited defense of music, suggesting that it induces ‘‘appetite of celestial things’’ (Whythorne 1961, 239) and expresses ‘‘a reaching out, in the soul of man . . . towards God’’ (Tremain 1999, 93). In both we see the detail of several courtships pursued simultaneously by the musicians as they attempt to win their ladies through their own combination of poetry and music. Whythorne woos by singing his recently written verses set to his own melodies, and Peter Claire attempts this, too, although he does won-

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der whether he might do better composing music for some of Shakespeare’s lines instead: This is the first time in his life that he has attempted to write a love-song and he suspects that the writing of love-songs is never the easy, effortless task that others such as Shakespeare contrive to make it seem. Indeed, not being Shakespeare appears to him, at this moment, as a not inconsiderable burden all Englishmen are forced to bear. (123)

Tremain’s lightly ironic touch here reminds us of the postmodernist benefit of hindsight also to be enjoyed in recent works such as the film Shakespeare in Love.24 However, the self-conscious features that we might expect to find in a 1990s novel are, surprisingly, to some extent present in Whythorne’s 1570s Book. The failed relationship with one of his widowed mistresses is wittily described as the mitigation of the ‘‘rage of our tragedy’’ in the achievement of ‘‘a comical end’’ (59). As we have seen, Whythorne is not averse to self-contemplation in the looking-glass or the mirror of his own portraits, and he anxiously controls his ‘‘diet and government of the order of my body’’ with the desired result that ‘‘I was judged of many which did not know my years, to be always younger than I was in deed’’ (136). Peter Claire, too, is shown by Tremain considering his image in a mirror, ‘‘trying to see what others see there, to objectify his own features,’’ but ‘‘the light on them is cold and hard’’ and he cannot discern ‘‘the truth about himself ’’ (301). The relationship of The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne and Music and Silence to images and portraiture not only highlights some of the similarities linking the two works but also affords a glimpse of significant differences between them. When Whythorne stares into a looking glass, he sees what he knows to be a false image: ‘‘it showeth the face the contrary way, that is to say, that which seemeth to be the right side of the face is the left side in deed. . . .’’ He is also conscious that the reflection is fleeting, and ‘‘the disposition and grace of his face’’ is forgotten as soon as he moves away from the glass. His concern is with accuracy of representation, knowing that all human beings should carefully ‘‘consider with them selves’’ in order to ‘‘be the more ready to die’’ (134). When Peter Claire is also depicted turning to the mirror for an objective view, his aim is to facilitate a true understanding of himself alone. The context of Whythorne’s self-knowledge is a more generalized Christian morality in which human life is seen as a fleeting appearance on an immortal stage, whereas Peter Claire is infused with the modern sense of selfunderstanding as an end in itself. As Sylvia Plath wrote in the voice of a ‘‘Mirror,’’

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Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is.25

The search for what we really are underlies Rose Tremain’s novel, and the playful illustration on the back cover of Music and Silence would suggest that the search is ultimately futile. A genuine portrait of Kirsten Munk,26 Christian IV’s consort who so disliked music, has been adapted by the addition of a lute which she holds upside-down so that it obscures her entire face. This postmodern collage, while hinting that historical individuality can be imagined but not really known, also troublingly implies that music replaces and perhaps even denies self-expression. There is an element of hide-and-seek in the new picture, allowing the character to remain silent while disguised behind music. By contrast, Whythorne saw his portrait and his compositions working together. In 1571, he had a woodcut made from his portrait (illustration 9) for his 1571 Songes, and in his autobiography he comments that he has added his coat of arms to the frame and assumed the title ‘‘gentleman,’’ as he intends to show myself to be [a gentleman] as well in the outward marks, as in the inward man, of the which inward man the music and the ditties and songs & sonnets therewith joined shall show to be sufficient judge in that respect. (211)

Whythorne’s text breathes supreme confidence in the unity of this Renaissance man, whose ‘‘inward’’ and ‘‘outward’’ natures are in union, and whose portrait and titles, songs and poems all work in harmony. One area in which Whythorne betrays a lack of self-confidence is in his relationships with women, at whose mercy he seems to remain despite (or perhaps because of ?) his misogynist opinions. Oddly enough, this leads to another striking parallel with Rose Tremain’s novel, in the course of which we see almost all the leading male characters being manipulated by women. The sharp difference between the two texts in this respect is one of perspective: whereas Whythorne’s Book is a straightforwardly autobiographical account from a single male point of view, Music and Silence follows several narratives, among which the men’s are largely narrated in the third person while the women’s frequently take the form of journal entries. If there is a trend to be observed here, it is the extension of autobiographical and fictional forms to embrace the woman’s perspective. The writers and philosophers of the early modern period, with hon-

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9. Woodcut of Whythorne made for his Songes, 1571. From the Osborn edition of The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne

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orable exceptions,27 stressed the man in humanism; our contemporary heritage from humanism is a good deal more emancipated. However, the expansion of humanism has tended to force the divine aspects of the human into the background. This can be seen in the attitude of the music lovers in Music and Silence who, although they hold that music is the ‘‘human soul, speaking without words’’ (6), are not at all sure to whom that soul is speaking. Whythorne takes for granted that the context for music is spiritual, and the primary purpose he outlines in his defense of music is ‘‘openly and privately to serve God’’ (230). Peter Claire’s sense of music’s function is much less certain. He knows that it is ‘‘a reaching out . . . towards God’’ (93), but there is no confidence that it will find God, or that there is indeed a God to be found. Later in the novel, the musician reduces the scale of his belief in music, trusting that his playing will simply express his own self—yet even that hope is perhaps a delusion: What does the lute player believe he is expressing? He struggles for precision, but is convinced that through that precision something of his heart can be heard. How deluded is he on this matter? The heart of John Dowland was black. He was judged to be the greatest musician in England, but what filled his soul, by all accounts, was bitterness and loathing. (301)

This passage reminds us of the melancholic modern perception, although expressed in an early modern setting, of the gap between the art and the artist, as well as between that artist and the divine. But what, finally, should we make of the idea of ‘‘silence’’ which so pervades Tremain’s novel? Is there an equivalent silence in Whythorne’s text or the ideas of his contemporaries? The prevailing idealism of the early modern era reveals itself in the notion that even in silence there is a Platonic idea of music, known as the music of the spheres. As Thomas Browne—returned from his tavern—wrote of the created universe in 1643, ‘‘those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.’’28 Physical silence, Browne suggests, is not the absence of sound but an opportunity to hear the celestial music of creation. Whythorne also refers to this idea, recalling that ‘‘our ancient poet’’ Chaucer described the spheres as ‘‘the walls of music’’ (236).29 Whythorne thus suggests that, though he may be preoccupied on a small scale with writing songs and teaching lute-playing techniques, the scope of music as a whole is enormous, sounding and resounding in the entire universe.

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The unheard music filling the creation is the only sense in which silence is understood in Whythorne’s text and in the principles of his contemporaries; it is not an emptiness but a metaphysical fullness. This positive understanding of silence is only rarely glimpsed in Tremain’s work—for example, when the English King, Charles I, retreats from the ‘‘swirling, chaotic world of London’s streets and wharves, a world from which silence and stillness are almost entirely absent,’’ in order to ‘‘marvel’’ in silence at the works of art in his state rooms (360). For the most part, however, as we have seen, silence is experienced as deprivation: the opposite of music, loss of sound, the failure of communication, despair at the absence of God. It is here that we see the limits of our acceptance of the humanist inheritance. While for Whythorne music and silence are not opposites but aspects of the same greater harmony, in Tremain’s novel, silence is what ‘‘fell on Johnnie O’Fingal’’ (384) when he lost the exquisite music of his dream. Silence is a threat or, at the very least, an unknown: a mystery to be explored. As the twentieth-century Welsh poet R. S. Thomas put it, our contemporary understanding of the world—physical, musical, spiritual—consists in our attempts To analyse the quality Of its silences.30

Notes 1. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643), 2:9, The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 149–50. 2. George Herbert, ‘‘Easter’’ (1633), The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), 37. 3. Whythorne’s manuscript is Eng. Misc. c. 330. 4. The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 1. All further quotations are taken from this edition and referred to by page number. 5. A Book of Songs and Sonetts, Bodleian Eng. Misc. c. 330, ff. 64–75. 6. For an exploration of the varied and oblique modes of autobiographical writing in this period, see Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Henk Dragstra et al. (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000). 7. Songes (1571) and Duos, or Songs for two voices (1590). 8. First published in 1557, Richard Tottel’s collection of manuscript verse included the work of Wyatt and Surrey—and was also entitled Songs and Sonnets, like Whythorne’s book (which, oddly enough in view of this title, contains more prose than poetry). 9. For the ease of readers of this article, quotations from Wythorne’s text have been converted into modern English—unless the quotations are intended to illustrate the orthographic system itself.

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10. Autobiography, 237–38. Whythorne took this sequence from ‘‘A brief declaration in Metre, of the seuen liberal Artes,’’ in Thomas Wilson’s The Rule of Reason, conteinynge the Arte of Logique (1553), f. 2v. 11. For example, an account of ‘‘sharp and flat sounds’’ (236) is taken from De Mundo Aristotelis (Basle, 1533), 18. 12. Autobiography, 230. The quotation is from Erasmus’s Apophthegmata (1550), 2:182. As Whythorne’s meticulous editor, James M. Osborn, points out (230 n. 4), Whythorne must have used the Latin edition since this passage is omitted from Nicholas Udall’s English translation. 13. Although Whythorne does not name the ‘‘nobleman’’ who employed him briefly as a music tutor (83), it is evident that it was Lord Ambrose Dudley, later the Earl of Warwick (xxviii–xxix). 14. An early wire-strung guitar. 15. Counterpoint. 16. Autobiography, 20. The lines which featured in the painting were his six-line coda on the effects of music, ‘‘The music tunes of voice or string,’’ quoted above. 17. The first set of three dots in this extract signifies a gap where the verses themselves are quoted, but the second set is in Whythorne’s text itself. 18. It seems that Whythorne married within a year or two of completing his Book of Songs and Sonetts, and there is evidence of the burial of a ‘‘Thomas Whitehorne gentleman’’ on August 2, 1696 (Autobiography, li–lii). 19. Ruth Petrie, cited at www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ts/book-reviews. 20. John Bayley, the New York Review of Books, June 29, 2000, 54. 21. Rose Tremain, Music and Silence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999), 4, 29. All further quotations will be identified by page number. 22. 5.1.83–85; in the novel the lines are partially quoted by Peter Claire and discussed by Christian with reference to his wife (294). 23. Music and Silence, 94. Ironically, the music turns out, in keeping with the postmodern nightmare, to have already been written by Ferrabosco (145). 24. The burden of ‘‘not being Shakespeare’’ was one difficulty from which Whythorne was spared, living as he did one-and-a-half generations before Shakespeare. 25. Sylvia Plath, ‘‘Mirror,’’ ll 10–11, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 174. 26. The painting is by Jacob van Doordt and hangs in the Rosenborg Palace, Copenhagen. 27. See, for instance, the famously educated daughters of Sir Thomas More. The paradoxes of humanism for women in the English context are discussed by Hilda Smith in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox, 9–29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 28. Browne, Religio Medici, 2:9, Major Works, 149. 29. Whythorne actually misquotes Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls; 1.62 refers to spheres as the ‘‘welle of musik.’’ 30. R. S. Thomas, Selected Poems (London: Dent, 1993), 104.

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Dominic Baker-Smith A Bibliography 1963 Review of Leland Miles, John Colet and the Platonic Tradition (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962). In Dialogue 2 (1963): 235–36. ‘‘Cause and Catastrophe in Shakespearean Tragedy.’’ Chelsea Annual 3 (1963): 35–44. 1965 ‘‘More, Buchanan and Florens Wilson.’’ Moreana 7 (1965): 106–8. Review of D. C. Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964). In Blackfriars: A Monthly Review 46 (1964): 371. 1966 Review of Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). In Canadian Journal of History 1 (1966): 82–84. ‘‘Florens Wilson: Two Early Works.’’ The Bibliotheck 4 (1966): 228–29. 1968 ‘‘John Donne and the Mysterium Crucis.’’ English Miscellany (Rome) 19 (1968): 65–82. Review of The Poems of John Cleveland. Edited by Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). In Renaissance Quarterly 21 (1968): 496–97. 1970 ‘‘Religion and John Webster.’’ In John Webster, edited by Brian Morris, 207–28. London: Benn, 1970. 1972 ‘‘John Donne’s Critique of True Religion.’’ In John Donne: Essays in Celebration, edited by A. J. Smith, 404–32. London: Methuen / New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972. Review of W. H. Hazelwood, The Poetry of Grace: Reformation Themes and Structures in English Seventeenth-Century Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972); and Annabel M. Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). In University of Toronto Quarterly 61 (1972): 367–72.

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1995 ‘‘Thomas More and the Franciscans.’’ In More’s Utopia and the Utopian Inheritance, edited by A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace, 37–52. Lanham, NY: University Press of America, 1995. 1996 ‘‘John Donne as Medievalist.’’ In Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, edited by Helen Wilcox, Richard Todd, and Alasdair MacDonald, 185–93. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996. ‘‘The Serpent and the Dove: Political Counsel in Machiavelli and Erasmus.’’ In Machiavelli: Figure-Reputation, edited by Joep Leerssen and Menno Spiering. Yearbook of European Studies, 8. 1–25. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. ‘‘The Crisis of Religious Humanism in the Face of the Reformation.’’ In Thomas Morus Jahrbuch 1995, edited by H. Boventer, 37–43. Du¨sseldorf: Triltsch Verlag, 1996. ‘‘Florens Wilson: A Distant Prospect.’’ In Stuart Style 1513–1542: Essays on the Court of James V, edited by J. Hadley Williams, 1–14. East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 1996. 1997 Review of R. J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe: The Prince of Humanists, 1501–1536 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). In The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (1997): 170–72. ‘‘The Crisis of Religious Humanism in the Face of the Reformation.’’ In Europa: Wiege des Humanismus und der Reformation, edited by H. Boventer and U. Baumann, 97–110. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997 [Reprint of ‘‘The Crisis of Religious Humanism in the Face of the Reformation.’’ In Thomas Morus Jahrbuch 1995, edited by H. Boventer, 37–43. Du¨sseldorf: Triltsch Verlag, 1996.] Expositions of the Psalms. Edited by Dominic Baker-Smith. Collected Works of Erasmus 63. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. ‘‘Thomas More and Plato’s Voyage.’’ In Great Political Thinkers, edited by J. M. Dunn and Ian Harris, 21 vols. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997): More, 2: 39–45. [Reprint of Thomas More and Plato’s Voyage. Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 1978.] 1998 Counsel and Caprice: Seneca at the Tudor Court. Valedictory lecture given in the University of Amsterdam, September, 9, 1998. Amsterdam: Vossius Press / Amsterdam University Press, 1998. ‘‘Utopie, leidraad of valkuil.’’ In Utopie—leidraad of valkuil? 97–123. Amsterdam: Boom, 1998. 1999 Review of Colloquies, edited by C. R. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus, vols. 39 and 40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); and Spiritualia and Pastoralia, edited by J. O’Malley, Collected Works of Erasmus, 70 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). In The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50 (1999): 582–84.

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2000 Review of Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). In Canadian Journal of History 35 (2000): 137–38. More’s ‘‘Utopia.’’ Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts, 11 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). [Reprint of More’s ‘‘Utopia’’ (London: Harper Collins, 1991).] ‘‘Erasmus as Reader of the Psalms.’’ In Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 20 (2000): 1–18. Review of J.V. Andreae, Christianopolis, translated by E. H. Thompson (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), in Seventeenth-Century News 58 (2000), 164–67. 2001 ‘‘Shakespeare and the Court.’’ The Court Historian 6 (2001): 93–122. ‘‘The World to Come: Aldous Huxley and the Utopian Fable.’’ In Aldous Huxley: Between East and West, edited by C. C. Barfoot, 101–12. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 2002 Review of Robert Coogan, Erasmus, Lee and the Correction of the Vulgate: The Shaking of the Foundations (Geneva: Droz, 1992). In Moreana 39, no. 149 (2002): 147–56. 2004 Review of Bruce Mansfield, Erasmus in the Twentieth Century. Interpretations c. 1920– 2000. In Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55 (2004): 808–9. ‘‘ ‘The Honour of the Garter’: George Peele’s Antiquarian Poetics.’’ In Living in Posterity: Essays in Honour of Bart Westerweel, edited by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Paul Hoftijzer, Juliette Roding, and Paul Smith, 11–17. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004. 2005 Expositions of the Psalms, edited by Dominic Baker-Smith, Collected Works of Erasmus 64 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Review of Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). In Renaissance Studies 19 (2005): 119–23.

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Contributors Ton Hoenselaars is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is the author of Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1992). He has edited, alone or with others, Shakespeare’s Italy (1993), The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama (1997), English Literature and the Other Languages (1999), The Author as Character (1999), Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (2003), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (2004), and Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad (2004). He is also the founding chair of the Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries, and managing editor of its journal Folio. He is currently writing a monograph on Shakespeare and Richard Wagner. Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is Director of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. His studies of Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (l986) and Contintental Humanist Poetics (l989) followed a monograph on Thomas More’s Utopia published by the Center for Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has lectured and written frequently on humanism, most recently at a plenary session of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics in the fall of 2004. The founding editor of English Literary Renaissance and president of the Renaissance English Text Society, he cochaired a conference with Dominic Baker-Smith on Sidney in Leiden, the Netherlands in l986 and co-edited the proceedings with him (1987). R.J. Lyall is Professor of Literatures in English at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, having previously taught English at Massey University, New Zealand and Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has edited several early modern Scottish texts, and published numerous articles in the field. His critical study of Alexander Montgomerie will shortly appear in the Arizona Medieval and Re318

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naissance Texts and Studies series. He is currently editing John Ireland’s Meroure of Wysdome for the Scottish Text Society and working on a study of Henryson’s Morall Fabillis. Elizabeth McCutcheon is Professor Emerita, the University of Hawaii, where she taught in the Department of English. Her fields of research include Thomas More, Erasmus, Margaret Roper and other women writers, humanism, rhetoric, utopias in early modern England, the letter, genre theory, and, more generally, prose and poetry from 1500–1660. Publications include an edition of Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae and a monograph, My Dear Peter: The Ars Poetica and Hermeneutics for More’s ‘‘Utopia.’’ She co-edited ‘‘Utopia’’ Revisited (Moreana nos. 118–19), was the North American editor for the Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Abulensis, and co-edited Moreana nos. 151–52. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous essay collections and major journals, including Biography, English Literary Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam Yearbook, Moreana, Studies in English Literature, Studies in Philology, and Utopian Studies. She is currently editing William Bullein’s Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence (1564), which contains the first quasi-utopia written in English. Kees Meerhoff is Professor of French Literature and Civilization at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Rhe´torique et poe´tique au XVIe sie`cle en France: Du Bellay, Ramus et les autres (1986) and of Entre logique et litte´rature. Autour de Philippe Melanchthon (2001). He has published widely on French poetical theory and practice, humanist rhetoric, dialectic, and ethics. John Neubauer is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam, at present a Fellow at the Collegium Budapest. He has also taught at various universities in the United States, including Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Harvard, and is a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include Symbolismus und symbolische Logik (1978), The Emancipation of Music from Language (1986), and The Fin-de-sie`cle Culture of Adolescence (1992). He is currently editing with Marcel Cornis-Pope a four-volume History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, of which the first volume appeared in May 2004. Victor Skretkowicz is Senior Lecturer in English in the University of Dundee, Scotland. He has produced definitive editions of Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia)

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(1987) and of Florence Nightingale’s Notes On Nursing (1992). In 1992 he was elected convener of the Joint Council for the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, and directed completion of the final four volumes of that twelve-volume work (1931–2002). He has recently directed the Dictionary of the Scots Language project, creating a free, fully searchable Internet edition of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, representing the Scots language from 1200 to 1967 (⬍http://www.dsl.ac.uk⬎). He is in the process of completing a monograph on Renaissance erotic romance in relation to Sidney, Shakespeare, and Mary Sidney Wroth. Marijke Spies is Professor Emerita of Dutch Literature until 1770 at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and of the History of Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Arctic Routes to Fabled Lands (1997) and Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics (1999). With Willem Frijhoff she wrote 1650: Hard-Won Unity (2004). Donald Stump is Professor of English at St. Louis University and author of numerous articles on Sidney, Spenser, and Renaissance drama. His research has concentrated on the court literature of Elizabeth I and on the reception of biblical and classical texts in sixteenth-century England, particularly those influenced by Greek and Roman tragedy. He served as primary editor of ‘‘Hamartia’’: The Concept of Error in the Western Tradition and as principal author and Project Director for Sir Philip Sidney: An Annotated Bibliography of Texts and Criticism (1554–1984). He is also editor of the websites Sir Philip Sidney, On Line and Edmund Spenser, On Line. He and Carole Levin founded the Queen Elizabeth I Society, of which he is currently President. Richard Todd is a graduate of University College London, and has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric verse, with emphasis on Anglo-Dutch cultural relations in the period ca. 1540–1672. He is an assistant textual editor to the ongoing Variorum Edition of the poetry of John Donne (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995–), concentrating in particular on editing from scribal manuscript the Donne poems translated into Dutch by Constantijn Huygens in 1630 and 1633. His contribution to the present collection stems from his work on that project. He has also written Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (1996), Iris Murdoch (1984), and Iris Murdoch: The Shakespearian Interest (1979), and

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has published a short monograph on A.S. Byatt (1997). He is Professor of British Literature after 1500 at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, having previously taught at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 1988–89 he was Visiting Netherlands Professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Germaine Warkentin was born in Toronto, Canada. She has a BA in Philosophy (Toronto), MA in English (Manitoba), and PhD in English (Toronto). She taught (1959–60) at United College, now the University of Winnipeg, at the same time doing film criticism on radio and television, and also at the University of Toronto (1970– 99). She was director of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto (1985–90). Her central interests are later medieval, early modern and early Canadian book history, and she has published widely in those fields. Major project is an edition of the Sidney family library catalogue (ca. 1665). Her current activities include editing the writings of the explorer Pierre-Esprit Radisson for the Champlain Society and a volume of Northrop Frye’s early writings on critical theory for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Her most recent publication is The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage and Related Documents (2004). Andrew D. Weiner did his undergraduate work at the City College of the City University of New York from 1961 to 1966 and his PhD at Princeton University from 1966 to 1969. He joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty in 1969 and taught there until his retirement in May 2003. He was also an Affiliated Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Weiner is the author of Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism (1978) and over twenty articles on Erasmus, More, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Fulke Greville, Giordano Bruno, and Milton. He was one of the founding editors (with Leonard V. Kaplan, University of Wisconsin Law School) of the monograph series, Graven Images: Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred and co-editor of five volumes in that series. He is currently working on books on Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Helen Wilcox is Professor of English at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and the author and editor of many books and articles on early modern authors including Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton and their female contemporaries. She is (as Dominic Baker-Smith was until his retirement to Thomas Browne’s East Anglia) an English academic working in the Dutch university system—where, it must be pointed out in all fairness, there are not

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too many drunken singers nowadays. She also shares with Dominic a love of music, which influenced the choice of topic for her contribution to this volume in his honor. She is married to a jazz bass player, thereby writing with some personal experience of the attractions and pitfalls of a (modern) musician’s life.

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Index Abyngdon, Henry, 81–82 Actes and Monuments (Foxe), 214–15 Action Franc¸aise, 260 Aczel, Amir D., 44 Adagia (Desiderius Erasmus), 67–68 Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon) 222 Aeneid (Virgil), 175, 177 n. 20, 216, 220, 222 Aeropagitica (Milton), 216 Aesop, 77, 275 Africanus, Leo, 244 Agricola, Rudolph, 14, 27, 91–93, 102, 105–6 nn. 25–28, 32, and 36 Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius, von Nettelsheim, 128, 131 Ainsworth, Henry, 246 Alain-Fournier, 260–61 Alardus of Amsterdam, 91, 94, 98, 105 n. 25 Alessandro di Imola, 122 All is True [or Henry VIII] (Shakespeare) 203, 205 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 256 Alton, R. E., 152 n. 8 Amadis de Gaule, 276 Ambrose, Saint, 125 n. 24, 132 Amye de Court, L’ (La Borderie), 123 Amyot, Jacques, 191, 192 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 84 Andre´, Bernard, 81 Annals (Tacitus), 238–39 Anne of Denmark, Queen of Scotland and England, 186 Annotations upon the five bookes of Moses (Ainsworth), 246 Antimorus (Brixius), 82 Antiprobale (Maudit), 250 n. 18 Aphtonius, 91 ‘‘Apologie of Raymond Sebond’’ (Montaigne), 49

Apophthegmata (Erasmus), 128, 310 n. 12 Appel au soldat, L’ (Barre`s), 260 Appel des armes, L’ (Psichari), 16, 254–61 Appolonius of Rhodes, 115 Aquinas, Thomas, 120, 125 n. 24, 281 Arc, Jeanne d’, 258–59 Arcadia (Philip Sidney), 15, 154–78, 181, 182, 185, 193 Archibald Douglas, sixth Earl of Angus, 186 Archimedes, 244, 250 n. 20 Ariosto, Ludovico, 23, 42 Aristotle, 70, 77, 92, 95, 96, 100, 101, 106 n. 32, 155, 157, 172, 217, 224, 239, 250 n. 19, 293 Arnaud, Cardinal d’Ossat, 242, 243, 252 n. 50 Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham), 41 Arte of Rhetorique (Wilson), 27, 53 n. 7 Ascham, Roger, 27–28, 41, 154, 215 Athenæus, 115 Augustine, St. [⳱ Aurelius Augustine], 124 n. 11, 238, 246 Augustus, Emperor, 216 Averroes [⳱ Ibn Roesjd], 70 Ayrault, Pierre, 241–42, 246, 253 n. 57 and 58 Babbling (Visscher), 133 Bacon, Anne, Lady, 215 Bacon, Francis, 7, 15–16, 48, 51, 52, 209–28, 215, 231 Badalic´, Hugo, 264 Baker-Smith, Dominic, 13, 17–22, 35, 49, 52, 90, 311–17 Bale, John 210–12, 220 Ba´nk Ba´n (Erkel), 265 Barbour, John, 123–24 n. 1 Barbusse, Henri, 256 Barker, Nicolas, 152 n. 8 Barker, Pat, 256

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Barre`s, Maurice, 260 Barrymore, Lionel, 275 Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste du, 174, 186 Bartered Bride, The (Smetana), 265 Basil, Saint, 132 Basilicon Doron (King James I), 196 Bayley, John, 299 Beal, Peter, 138, 140, 150, 152 n. 2 and 8, 23 Beauchamp, Gorman, 279 Bede [⳱ Baeda Vereabilis], 241 Beecher, William, 252–53 n. 51 Beerbohm-Tree, Herbert, 272 Bellenden, John, 109–11, 113, 117 Bennett, Josephine 215 Bentley, Eric, 281 Bernard Shaw among the Innocents (E. W. and M. M. Robson), 269, 278 Bible: Authorized Version (1611), 246, 274, 276; Corinthians, 118; Ecclesiasticus, 118, 119; Ephesians 209; Epistle to the Colossians (St. Paul), 106 n. 31; Exodus, 90, 99, 118, 118; Genesis 118–20; Jerome, 120, 121; John, 118; Kings, 120; Letter to the Romans (St. Paul), 99; Luke, 125 n. 24; Matthew, 90, 118, 120; New Testament (Erasmus), 60–62, 210–11; Proverbs (Salomon), 100, 106 n. 35, 118; Psalms, 174, 253 n. 64; Revelation, 294; Samuel, 182; Song of Songs, 118, 119, 263; St. John, 78; St. Paul (Letters), 90, 99, 100, 106 n. 31 Bibliotheca sancta (Siena), 233 Bibliothe`que historiale (Vignier the Elder), 242 Birch, Thomas, 239, 245, 248, 250 n. 22 Blandy, William, 35 Bloch, Ernst, 214 Blundeville, Thomas, 42–44 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 112, 115, 116, 124 n. 11 Bodin, Jean, 239 Boethius, Hector [⳱ Boece], 109 Bo¨gels, Theo, 153 n. 16 Bolgar, R. R. 209–10 Book of Songs and Sonetts (Whythorne), 7, 16–17, 291–300, 303, 304–6 Bosboom-Toussaint, A. L. G., 92 Bouchel, Laurent, 242

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Bradner, Leicester, 88 n. 16 Bredero, Gerbrand Adriaensz., 127, 128, 133 Brittannia (Camden), 243 Brixius, Germanus, 77, 78, 82, 87 n. 14 Bromfield, William, 298 Brouwsma, William, 231 Browne, Thomas, 290, 293, 308 Bruno, Giordano 218–19 Brus (Barbour), 123–24 n. 1 Buchanan, George, 230, 239 Bude´, Guillaume, 13, 25, 33–34, 101 Bugenhagen, John, 90 Burckhardt, Jacob, 273, 274 Burgtheater (Vienna), 262 Burton, Robert, 84, 248 Busleyden, Jerome, 34 Buyk, Jacob, 126 Calepinus, Ambrosius, 116, 124 n. 15 Cal Tech, 225 Calvin, Johannes, 174, 229–30 Calvisius. See Kallwitz, Seth Camden, William, 230, 241, 243 Campion, Edmund, 155 ‘‘Candidus,’’ 78 Captains Courageous (Fleming), 276 Cardano, Girolamo, 232–33, 250 n. 20 Carion, Johann, 242, 245 Carlson, David R., 76, 81–84 ‘‘Carmen Gratulatorium’’ (More), 83 Carolus Magnvs Redivivus (Stuck [⳱ Stuchius]), 7, 187–90, 195 Carroll, John, 85 Casaubon, Isaac, 230 Casserius, Julius, 250 n. 20 Catena, Giovanni, 242 Caravajal, Luis de Ma´rmol, 242 Carter, Huntly, 272 Casimir, John, 189 Castiglione, Baldasare, 12, 39–43 Catherine de Me´dicis, 179, 185, 192, 194 Catherine of Navarre, 186 Cecil, Robert, 189, 221 Cecil, William, Lord Burlegh, 221 Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (Toronto), 22 Chapel Royal, 81 Chaplin, Charles, 271 Charles I, King of England, 233–34, 309

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Charles IX, King of France, 186, 189 Charteris, Henry, 123–244 n. 1 Chartier, Roger, 52 Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois-Rene´ de, 260 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 214, 308, 310 n. 29 Cheke, John, 27, 116, 154 Chettle, Henry, 11 Chmielowski, Piotr, 256 Christian IV, King of Denmark, 16–17, 291, 299–304, 306, 310 n. 22 Chronicle (Johann Carion), 245, Chronicle at Large (Grafton), 243 Chronicon Carionis (Carion), 242 Chronicon Chronicorum Politicum (Gualterius), 230 Chronicon Chronicorum EcclesiasticoPoliticum (Gualterius), 230 Chronologia, ex autoritate potissimum sacrae scripturae (Kallwitz), 242 Chrysostom, St. John, 132 Churchill, Winston, 270 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 14, 19, 20, 26, 28, 30–31, 77, 90, 93–96, 98–101, 105 n. 23, 106 n. 35, 107 n. 40, 127, 191, 195, 197, 199–200, 239, 241 Civil War, English, 210–11, 226 n. 8 Civil Wars, The (Daniel), 195 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, first Earl of, 232, 234, 240, 248 Claude, Duke of Guise, 185 Clement, John, 27 Clement VIII, Pope, 185, 189, 197 Cleopatra (Daniel), 195 Coiro, Ann Baynes, 79–80, 82–83 Coke, Edward, 239, 241, 243–44 Collick, John, 280 Commentarius solutus (Bacon) 222 Compendio Historial di las Chronicas (Garibay y Zamalloa), 242 Conduct of Understanding, The (Locke), 248 Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg), 181 Constable, John, 79 Contra novam academiam Petri Rami oratio (Gallandius), 107 n. 41 Cooper, Gary, 276 Coornhert, Dirk Volkertsz., 126–28 Cottrell, John, 271 Council of Trent, 182, 196, 204 ‘‘Counsel and Caprice’’ (Baker-Smith), 22

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Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, The (Wroth), 185 Couronne margaritique (Belges), 112 Court of Venus (Rolland), 14, 108–25 Cowley, Abraham, 225 Crane, Mary Thomas, 79–80, 86 n. 6 Croft, P. J., 152 n. 8 Cromwell, Oliver, 212 Crowther, Bosley, 279, 280, 288 n. 23 Cujas, Jacques, 241 Cusanus [⳱ Nicholas of Cusa], 219 Cymbeline (William Shakespeare), 15, 203–7 Daily Express, 284 Dakin(s), Margaret, 180 Danaeus, Lambertus, 128, 131, 132 Daniel, Samuel, 195, 197–98 Dante Alighieri, 26, 272 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus), 191 Darwin, Charles, 270, 279, 282 Daudet, Le´on, 260 Davila, Enrico Caterino, 243 Dawbeny, Oliver, 47 ‘‘Death Unassisted Kills Tyrants’’ (More), 89 De civitate Dei (St. Augustine), 246 De constantia (Lipsius), 231 De Copia (Erasmus), 31 Decretorum Ecclesiae Gallicanae (Bouchel), 242 Defence of Poetry (Philip Sidney), 16, 20, 41, 49, 59–60, 192, 216, 218, 272–77 Defense of the English Church (Jewel), 215–16 De Finibus (Cicero), 30–31 De formando studio (Agricola), 98 De genealogia deorum (Boccaccio), 112, 115, 116 De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarium et artium (von Nettelsheim), 128, 131 De inventione dialectica (Agricola), 91, 93, 94, 98 Deipnosophistoi (Athenæus), 115 De iure belli ac pacis (Grotius), 243 De Iustitia (Luis de Molina), 243 Dekker, Thomas, 11 De ponderibus et mensuris liber (Juan de Mariana), 252–53 n. De Sensibus Hieronymi Provenzalis . . . tract-

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atus (Hieronymus Provenzalis), 250 n. 33 Dekker, Thomas, 11 Del Giudice, Filippo, 289 n. 33 Delle guerre civili in Francia (Davila), 243 Delle istorie memorabili de suoi tempi (Ziliolo), 242 Denny, Robert, 154, 176 n. 2 De officiis (Cicero), 100 De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani (Sanders), 233 De ponderibus et mensuris liber (de Mariana), 252–53 n. 51 ‘‘De Principe Bono Et Malo’’ (More), 78 De principiis atque originibus (Bacon), 222 De rerum varietate libri xvii (Cardano), 232–33 De rhetorica libri tres (Agricola), 96 Dering, Edward, 236–37 De Sanctis, Francesco, 256 De Saltatione (Lucian), 131 De sapientia veterum (Bacon), 222 Descartes, Rene´, 224 Descripcion general de Africa (Ma´rmol Caravajal), 242 De Sensibus Hieronymi Provenzalis . . . (Provenzalis), 250 n. 20 De Thou, Jacques Auguste, 230, 243 De utilitate ex aduersis capienda libri IIII (Cardano), 232–33 Deutsches Museum, 255 Deux dialogues du nouveau langage franc¸ois (Estienne), 192 Devereux, Penelope, 179 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 179– 81, 185, 190, 194–95, 197–201, 221 Dialecticæ Partitiones (Ramus), 105 n. 21 ‘‘Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation’’ (More), 55 Dictionarium (Calepinus), 116, 124 n. 15, 125 n. 18 Dictionarium proprium nominum (Estienne), 113–15, 124 n. 14 Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 125 n. 20 Discourse of Life and Death (Plessis-Mornay), 195 Disney, Walt, 275 ‘‘Distresses of the Comon Welt, The’’ (Wade), 35

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Diuers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of America (Hakluyt), 44–48 Diverse et artificioise machine, Le (Rameli), 50 Divinarum Institutionem (Lactantius), 113 Divorce of Lady X, The, 271 Donne, John, 14–15, 135–53, 229 Donne Variorum project, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152–53 n. 13, 153 n. 14 Doordt, Jacob van, 310 n. 26 Dorp, Martin (van), 24, 60–63, 70, 72, 91 Dorsten, Jan van, 21, 230 Douglas, Gavin, 117 Douglas, James, Earl of Morton, 110 Dousa, Janus, 230 Dowland, John, 308 Doyle, Charles Clay, 87 n. 21 Drake, William, 232, 237, 248 Du Chesne, Andre´, 243 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 154, 174, 180, 192, 215 Duffy, Eamon 210, 225–26 n. 4 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 173 Durie, Andrew, 109–10 Durkan, John, 110 Ecloga Theoduli, 114, 124 n. 13 Edict of Nantes, 179, 196 Edward VI, King of England, 180 Eglantine, the, 126, 127 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 28 Elegies (Donne), 149 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 15, 35, 45, 46, 48, 154, 155, 161, 167, 170, 177–78 n. 22, 179, 186–87, 189–96, 198, 200, 204, 210, 213–15, 274, 276, 277 Elizabeth of York (wife to Henry VII), 185, 198 Elizabeth Stuart (daughter of James I), 189, 222 Elucidarius carminum et historiarum (Torrentinus), 115 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 116 Encomium Moriae. See In Praise of Folly (Erasmus) Epictetus, 19 Epigrammata (More), 14, 75–89. For separate items (epigram number followed by

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page number) see: no. 19 (83, 88–89 n. 49); no. 21 (83); no. 40 (83); nos. 45–46 (83); nos. 49–50 (89 n. 55); no. 115 (78); no. 80 (80, 83, 89 n. 60); no. 106 (84); no. 107 (83); no. 108 (83); no. 110 (83); no. 119 (89 n. 60); no. 143 (88–89 n. 49); no. 159 (81) no. 160 (81); no. 161 (81); no. 162 (89 n. 59); no. 180–81 (89 n. 59); no. 198 (84, 85, 89 n. 55); no. 201 (83); no. 258 (80); no. 262 (85); no. 263 (80) Epigrams (Thomas More). See Epigrammata (Thomas More) Epistle to the Colossians (St. Paul), 106 n. 31 Epitome (B. Latomus), 94, 101 Erasmus, Desiderius, 11–13, 14, 19, 22, 24, 31–32, 43, 55, 60–68, 70, 72, 73, 76, 81, 84, 91, 92, 94, 101, 128, 129, 210–13, 215, 220, 226 n. 7, 226–27 n. 14, 229–30, 310 n. 12 Erkel, Ferenc, 265 Essais (Michel de Montaigne), 48–49 Essays (Francis Bacon), 216–18, 221 Estienne, Henri 181, 191–92 Estienne, Robert, 113–15, 124 n. 14 Ethics (Aristotle), 101, 155 Ethics, that is the art of living well (Dirk Volkertsz. Coornhert), 129 Ethiopian Story, An (Heliodorus), 191 Euphues (Lyly), 41 Expositio Euangelii Secundum Lucam (St. Ambrose), 125 n. 23 Eye in the Door, The (Barker), 256 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 193, 216, 218–19, 222 Farber, Manny, 278 Fasti (Ovid), 112 Ferrabosco, Alfonso, 301, 310 n. 23 Feu, Le (Henri Barbusse), 256 Film Answers Back, The (E. W. and M. M. Robson), 269, 270, 272, 274, 286 Filmer, Robert, 236–37 Fire over England, 277, 288 n. 16 Fish, Stanley, 52 Flaubert, Gustave, 260 Flavius, Josephus, 241 Fleming, Victor, 275 Florio, John, 48 Flynn, Dennis, 151–52 n. 1

................. 11360$

Fonseca, Pedro, 233, 250 n. 20 Foucault, Michel, 214 Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Skinner), 58 Fox, Alistair, 81 Foxe, John, 210–12, 214, 217 Franc¸ois I, King of France 91, 102, 111, 185, 187 Franc¸ois II, King of France, 186 Franc¸ois, duc d’Alenc¸on (later duc d’Anjou), 170, 186, 191–92 Frederick IV, Elector Palatine, 187–88, 196 Frederick V, Elector Palatine, 189, 233 Froben, Johann (or John), 37, 76 Fussell, Paul, 256 Gable, Clark, 275 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 20 Galilei, Galileo, 218, 224 Galland, Pierre [⳱ Gllandius], 96, 101–2, 107 n. 41 da Gama, Vasco, 44–45 Gardner, Helen, 153 n. 15 Garibay y Zamalloa, Esteban de, 242 Garnier, Robert, 194–95 Gascoigne, George, 23, 25 Geduld, Harry, 277–78 Geldenhouwer, Gerard, 90–92, 94, 99 Gellius, Aulus, 113, 241–42 Georgics (Virgil), 216, 222 Geraerts [or Gheeraerts], Marcus, 230 Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (Schlegel), 255, 257 Ghost Road, The (Barker), 256 Giles, Peter, 13, 25, 27, 28, 34, 35, 42, 45–47, 60, 63, 64 Giraudoux, Jean, 256 Goede Vrijdagh Rijdende Westwaert (trl. Constantijn Huygens), 139 ‘‘Goodfriday 1613. Riding Westward’’ (Donne), 14–15, 135–53 Good Soldier Schweik, The (Hasek), 256 Goulart, Simon, 191 Grace, Damian, 79–80, 82–83 Grafton, Anthony, 52, 231, 238, 245 Grafton, Richard, 243 Grand Meaulnes, Le (Alain-Fournier), 261 Great Dictator, The, 271

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INDEX

Great War and Modern Memory, The (Fussell), 256 Greenblatt, Stephen, 13, 54–56, 58, 177 n. 15, 225–26 n. 4 Gregor, Walter, 113 Greville, Fulke, 269, 273 Grierson, H. J. C., 135, 136, 148, 151– 52 n. 1 Griffith, Richard, 280 Grotius, Hugo, 231, 233, 239, 242–43, 253 n. 59 Gru¨ninger, Johann, 125 n. 18 Gruterus, Janus, 230–32 Gualterius, Joannes. See Gruterus, Janus Gunpowder Plot, 197, 204 Hakluyt, Richard, 13, 44, 52 Halka (Stanislaw Moniuszko), 265 Hamlet (William Shakespeare), 12, 203 Hammerstein, Notker, 229–30 Hammond, Henry, 236 Hargreaves, Alec G., 258 Harington, John, 42, 189 Har(r)iot, Thomas, 47, 240–41 Hart, John, 292 Hartung, Philip, 278 Harvey, Gabriel, 238, 245, 246 Hasek, Jaroslav, 256 Hatton, Christopher, 35 Hay, James, 235 Hays, William Harrison, 284 Hays code, 284–85 Heliodorus, 191, 193 Henri II, King of France, 179, 185–86 Henri III, King of France, 179, 181, 186–87, 191–95, 204, 205 Henri IV, King of France [orig. Henry III of Navarre], 15, 179–80, 186, 189, 191, 194–96, 198, 204, 205 Henri, duc d’Anjou, 186 Henry V, 16, 269, 277–87 Henry V (Shakespeare), 16, 269, 277–87 Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3 (Shakespeare), 198 Henry VII, King of England, 44, 80, 82, 185, 198–99 Henry VIII, King of England, 11, 47, 78, 79, 81, 83, 180, 185, 210–11 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 203, 205, 277 Henry, Lord Darnley, 186 Henryson, Robert, 123–24

................. 11360$

Henry the Navigator, 44 Herbert, Henry, second Earl of Pembroke, 180 Herbert, Philip, 198 Herbert, George, 290 Herbert, William, 198 Hermanssschlacht (von Kleist), 264 He´roe¨t, Antoine, 123 Heroides (Ovid), 114 Hesiod, 116 Heyden, Gaspar van der, 128 Heywood, John, 295 Heywood, Thomas, 111 Higden, Ranulf, 243 Hirsch, Foster, 279 Histoire ge´ne´alogique de la Maison de Montmorency et de Laval (Du Chesne), 243 Historia Belgica (van Meteren), 233 Historiae (Bacon), 216 Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem (Twysden), 237 History of Richard III (More), 77 Hitler, Adolph, 270, 271, 273, 274 Hobbes, Thomas, 231, 248 Hoby, Thomas, 39 Hoenselaars, Ton, 11–17, 269–89 Hogg, James, 181 Holbein, Ambrosius, 37 Holbein, Hans, 37 Holden, Anthony, 280 Holderness, Graham, 287 Holinshed, Raphael, 243 Hollywood, 271, 274, 275, 284 Homer, 131, 177 n. 19 Hooker, Thomas, 239, 241 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 11–12, 210, 309 Howard, Jean, 173 Hugo, Victor, 254, 259–60, 265–66 n. 1 Hull, Felix, 234 Hulse, Clark, 224 Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture (Carroll), 75 Hundred Sundrie Flowers (trans. Gascoigne), 23 Hunyadi La´szlo´ (Erkel), 265 Hutten, Ulrich von, 24 Hutton, C. Clayton, 278 Huygens, Constantijn, 14, 135, 136, 139–41, 145–46, 147 Hymni Christiani (Andre´), 81

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Ill May Day, 11 Imperial College of Science and Technology (London), 225 In Defense of Moovie (E. W. and M. M. Robson), 269–89 In Praise of Dancing (Hendrik Laurensz. Spiegel), 14, 126–34 In Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 60–61, 63, 84 In Praise of Philosophy (Agricola), 98 Inscriptiones antiquae (Gruterus and Scaliger), 230 Instauration Magna (Bacon), 51, 52, 209, 217–18, 220 Institutes (Coke), 242 Institutes (Justinian), 241 Institutionum dialecticarum libri octo (Fonseca), 233 Institutio scholae christianae (Geldenhouwer), 91 Inventaire general del’Histoire de France (de Serres), 242 Itinerarium totius orbis (Reusnerus), 243 James IV, King of Scotland, 185 James V, King of Scotland, 109, 110, 113, 185 James VI and I, King of Scotland and England, 15, 48, 110–11, 179, 182, 186–87, 189, 191, 193, 196–99, 201–7, 222, 229 Jameson, Frederic, 221 Jardine, Lisa, 238, 245 Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (Massis and de Tarde), 260 Jewel, John, 214–15 Jonas, Justus, 90 Joyce, James, 219 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 201 Junius, Franciscus, 230, 246 Justinian I [⳱ Petrus Sabbatius], 241 Juvenal [⳱ Decimus Junius Juvernalis], 241 Kallwitz, Seth [⳱ Calvisius], 242, 243, 246 Kincaid, John, 109 King Lear (Shakespeare), 168, 202 King’s Men, 202 Kinney, Arthur F., 13, 18–22, 23–53 Kintgen, Eugene R., 32

................. 11360$

Kleist, Heinrich von, 263–64 Korda, Alexander, 277, 288 n. 16 Ko¨rner, Theodor, 256–57, 261–65, 268 n. 27 Kraye, Jill, 92 La Borderie, Bertrand de, 123 Lactantius, 113 Laertius, Diogenes, 77 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 171 Languet, Hubert, 154, 160, 181, 189 Laslett, Peter, 237 Latomus, B., 14, 90–107 Laud, William, 232, 234 Laus Stultitiae. See In Praise of Folly Laws (Plato), 132 Laqueur, Thomas, 173 Lee, Edward, 60, 72 Lee, Henry, 177–78 n. 22 Lee, Sidney, 276 Leerintveld, Ad, 151–52 n. 1 Lemaire, Jean, de Belges, 111, 112 Leo X, Pope, 210 Letter to Queen Elizabeth (Sidney), 192 Letter to the Romans (St. Paul), 99 Lettres de l’illustrissime . . . (Cardinal d’Ossat), 242 Leviathan (Hobbes), 248 Levine, Laura, 173 Lewis, C. S., 215 Libro del Cortegiano, Il (Castiglione), 39–41 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The, 270, 279 Life of Lycurgus (Plutarch), 29–30, 49 Lily, William, 79 Limburg brothers, 284 Lindgren, Ernest, 280 Lindheim, Nancy, 155 Lindsay, Sir David, 109–11, 113, 117, 123–24 n. 1 Lion Has Wings, The, 288 n. 16 Lipsius, Justus, 230–31, 250 n. 11, 252 n. 48 Littleton, Thomas, 239 Lives (Plutarch), 191, 233 Livy, Titus, 230, 238–39, 241–42, 245, 253 n. 53 Loci Communes (Melanchton), 99, 106 n. 30 Locke, John, 231, 248

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Longus, 191, 193 Lorich, Reinhard, 91 Louis XIII, King of France, 204, 233 Love, Harold, 136 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 180, 186, 190–91, 206 Loy, Myrna, 275 Lucian, 28, 31, 77, 131 Lucubrationes aliquot (Agricola), 105 n. 25 Lupset, Thomas, 25, 33, 35, 39 Luther, Martin, 90, 99, 100–101, 210– 11, 226–27 n. 14 Lyall, Roderick J., 14, 108–25 Lycurgus, 29–30 Lyly, John, 41 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 196, 202–3 Macdonald, A. A., 109 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 12, 25–27 Mack, Peter, 102 Madeleine de Valois, 185 Magister, Karl-Heinz, 155 Maino, Jason del, 122 Mair, John, 121 Major, John, 110 Malmesbury, William of, 241 Marlowe, Christopher, 93 Manutius, Aldus, 115 Manvell, Roger, 280 Marc Antoine (Garnier), 194–95 Maret, Philip, 229, 232, 248–49 Margaret of Navarre, 187 Marguerite de Valois, 185–86, 189, 204 Mariana, Juan de, 252–53 n. 51 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 261 Marot, Cle´ment, 111 Marotti, Arthur, 226 Marriot, John, 137–39, 141, 144, 148, 151–52 n. 1 Marsden, John, 80 Marten, Thierry, 35 Martial [⳱ Marcus Valerius Valerius], 77 Mary of Guise, 110–11, 185 Mary, Queen of Scots, 185–86 Mary, Queen of England, 185, 213–14, 226 n. 11 Mason, H. A., 81, 82 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 225

................. 11360$

Massacre at Paris, The (Marlowe), 93 Massis, Henri, 260 Matthias II, Emperor, 229 Maudit, John, 232, 250 n. 18 Maurras, Charles, 260 Maximilian I of Bavaria, 232 Maximilian, Emperor of Austria and Hungary, 264 Maximillien de Be´thune, 204 McCutcheon, Elizabeth, 14, 75–89 McFarlane, I. D., 123 McKitterick, David, 152 n. 8 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 112 Medici, Giulio de, 185 Medici, Lorenzo de, 185 Meerhoff, Kees, 14, 90–107 Melanchton, Philip, 14, 90–107, 229– 30, 242, 245 Melissus, Paulus [⳱ Paul Schede], 230 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 300 Mercure Franc¸ois, 239 Mersenne, Marin, 231 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 112, 113 Meteren, Emanuel van, 230, 233, 250 n. 20 Metternich, Klemens, 255, 264, 268 n. 33 Miller, Clarence, 84 Miller, Peter, 231 Milton, John, 175–76, 209–13, 216, 220– 21, 224 Mise´rables, Les (Hugo), 265–66 n. 1 Molina, Luis de, 243 Monau, Jacob, 39 Moniuszko, Stanislaw, 265 Montaigne, Michel de, 48–49, 52 Morall Fabillis (Henryson), 123–24 n. 1 More, Thomas, 11–14, 19, 20, 22, 89, 91, 215, 274, 310 n. 27 Moss, Ann, 92, 239–40, 245, 253 n. 52 Mousnier, Roland, 181 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 276 Munday, Anthony, 11 Mundus Novus (Vespucci), 18 Munk, Kirsten, 306 Music and Silence (Tremain), 16–17, 290–91, 299–309 Myrick, Kenneth, 155 Nabucco (Verdi), 265 Napoleon, 254, 257–59, 263–64

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Naucratis (Appolonius of Rhodes), 115 Nero, Emperor, 67 Neubauer, John, 16 New Atlantis (Bacon), 211, 219–21, 222, 224–25 ‘‘New Golden Age, A’’ (Rundle), 83 New Spirit in the Cinema, The (Carter), 272 Nicholas of Lyra, 121 Nicholaus de Tedeschis (Panormitanus), 122 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 214 Niklas Zrini oder (Werthes), 268 Nikola Sˇubic´ Zrinski (Zajc and Badalic´), 265 Noctes Atticæ (Aulus Gellius), 113 North, Roger, 191 North, Thomas, 191 Northbrooke, John, 269, 285, 287 Norton, Glyn P., 86 Nouvel amour, Le (Papillon), 123 Novum instrumentum (Erasmus), 226 n. 7 Novum Organon (Bacon), 216 Octavia (Seneca, the Younger), 67 Odo of Picardy, 114 Odo [⳱ Eudes] de Fouilloy, 124 n. 13 ‘‘Of Experience’’ (Montaigne), 48–49 ‘‘Of the Force of the Imagination’’ (Montaigne), 48 ‘‘Of the Inconstancie of Our Actions’’ (Montaigne), 48 ‘‘Of the Uncertaintie of Our Judgement’’ (Montaigne), 49 Olivier, Laurence, 16, 269, 271, 277–87 ‘‘On a Cat and a Mouse’’ (More), 85 ‘‘On a Fool’’ (More), 84 ‘‘On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others’’ (Petrarch), 61–62 ‘‘On the King and the Peasant’’ (More), 83 ‘‘On the Use of History’’ (Baker-Smith), 19 ‘‘On the Vanity of this Life’’ (More), 89 n. 60 Opera Moralia (Plutarch), 191 Opinion, L’, 261 Oratio de studiis humanitatis (B. Latomus), 94, 106–7 n. 38 Oration on the Dignity of Man (Mirandola), 63

................. 11360$

Organon (Aristotle), 95 Orlando Furioso (Ludovico Ariosto), 42 Ortelius, Abraham, 7, 39, 40, 230 Orthographie (John Hart), 292 Out of Africa, 21 Ovid [⳱ Publius Ovidius Naso], 26, 112, 113, 115, 241 Owen, Wilfred, 256 Palatine Library, 229–30, 232 Palice of Honoure (Gavin Douglas), 117, 123–24 n. 1 Papillon, Almanque, 123 Paradoxa Stoicorum (Cicero), 14, 127 Paraclesis (Erasmus), 62, 70–71, 226 n. 7 Paradise Lost (Milton), 175–76 Paradise Regained (Milton), 175–76 Pareus, David, 231 Parfaicte Amye, La (He´roe¨t), 123 Parius, Matthew, 241 Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer), 310 n. 29 Pascal, Blaise, 260 Patriarcha (Filmer), 237 Patterson, Lee, 71 Paul V, Pope, 204–206 Pe´guy, Charles, 260 Pentaestheseion, (Casserius), 250 n. 20 Perelman, Chaı¨m, 98 Peril of Szigetva´r, The (Zriny), 262 Petrarch (Franceso Petrarca), 19, 26, 61–62, 93, 231 Peucer, Caspar, 242 Phaedrus (Plato), 49 Philip II, King of Spain, 126, 185, 187, 193, 194 Philip, Earl of Arundel, 210 Philomorus (Marsden), 80 Philopseudes (Lucian), 31 Phrissemius, J., 98, 105 n. 25 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 63 Pigeon, Rene´e, 251 n. 35 Pike, Lorna, 125 n. 20 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 76, 87 n. 17 Plantin, Christopher, 252 n. 48 Planudean Anthology, 77, 84 Plath, Sylvia, 305 Plato (of Athens), 18, 19, 24, 28–29, 40, 45, 52, 60, 77, 98, 102–3, 131, 132 Plautus, 67, 77 Pleningen, John von, 93

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Plessis-Mornay, Philippe du, 174, 181, 195 Plutarch, 19, 28–30, 77, 191, 193, 195, 197, 238, 241–42 Poet’s Corner (Westminster Abbey), 214 Pole, Reginald, 214 Politics (Aristotle), 101, 155 Poliziano, Il [⳱ Agnolo degli Abrogini], 231 Polychronicon (Ranulf Higden]), 243 Pomponius Mela, 242 Powel, Michael, 270, 279 Practises of the Earl of Leycester, The (Maudit), 250 n. 18 Praise of Eloquence (Melanchton), 98–99 Praise of Prison (Dirk Volkertsz. Coornhert), 127 Premonition to all Most Mightie Monarches (King James I), 204–5, 207 Pressburger, Emeric, 270, 279 Preston, Thomas, 238 Principall Navigations (Hakluyt), 44 Principe, Il (Machiavelli), 26–27 Private Life of Henry VIII, 277 Pro archia poeta (Cicero), 100 Progymnasmata (Aphtonius), 79, 91 Projet de l’oeuvre (Estienne), 192 Projet d’e´loquence royale (Amyot), 191, 192 Prolege Manilia (Cicero), 105 n. 27 Pro Milone (Cicero), 100, 106 n. 36 Protestant League, 155, 161, 167 Provenzalis, Hieronymus, 250 n. 20 Proverbs (Solomon), 100, 106 n. 118 Prynne, William, 241, 243 Psichari, Ernest, 16, 254–61 Puttenham, George, 41, 42, 52 Querelle des Amyes, 123 ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ (Renan), 256 Quintillian, 91, 93–95 Radbertus, Paschasius, 120 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 47, 209, 214, 216, 221 Rameli, Agostino, 50 Ramus, Peter, 14, 90–107 Rape of Lucrece, The (Shakespeare), 15, 181–85, 190, 195 Rauf Coilyear (Anon.), 123–24 n. 1

................. 11360$

Redford, Robert, 21 Regeneration (Barker), 256 Remarque, Erich Maria, 256 Remonstrance for the Right of Kings (King James I), 205 Remedia Amoris (Ovid), 114 Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Stephen Greenblatt), 13, 54–56 Renan, Ernst, 256, 257, 266 n. 9 Reports (Coke), 242 Republic (Plato), 19, 102, 28, 30, 49 Rerum ab omni antiquitate (Ayrault), 241 Reuchlin, John, 93 Reusnerus, Nicolaus, 243 Rhenanus, Beatus, 76, 77, 87 n. 9 Rhetorica ad Herrenium, 241 Rich, Nathaniel, 138, 140, 143 Richard II (Shakespeare), 195, 199–201 Richard III (Shakespeare), 198–99 Rivi1ere, Jacques, 261 Robinson, Ralph, 65 Robson, E. W. and M. M., 16, 269–89 Rogers, Daniel, 230 Rolland, John, 14, 108–25 Roper, William, 24 Rose, Mary Beth, 175 Ross, John, 108 Rossi, Paolo, 222 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 257 Royal Society, 225 Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, 154, 155, 204 Rule of Reason (Wilson), 310 n. 10 Rundle, David, 83 Russell, Conrad, 232 St. Bartholomew’s Day, 93, 186, 189 Sainte-Beuve, Charles A., 260 Salk Institute for Biological Studies (San Diego), 225 Samson Agonistes (Milton), 175 ‘‘Sandarus.’’ See Sanders, Nicholas Sanders, Nicholas, 233, 250 n. 20 Sassoon, Siegfried, 256 Savonarola, Girolamo, 226–277 n. 14 Scaliger, Josephus Justus, 230 Schlegel, Friedrich, 255, 262, 268 n. 27 School for Maidens (Dirk Volkertsz. Coornhert), 128 Schoolmaster, The (Ascham), 27–28 Schwert und Leier (Ko¨rner), 268 n. 29

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Scotorum historiae (Hector Boethius [⳱ Boece]), 109 Scott, Jonathan, 239 Seauin Seages, The (John Rolland), 108–9, 110, 123–24 n. 1 Selden, John, 239 Semaine, La (Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas), 174 Sempill, Robert, 110 Seneca (the Younger), 19, 22, 28, 67, 77, 195 Serres, Jean de, 242 Servitude et grandeur militaires (de Vigny), 259 Sessions, W. A., 15–16, 209–28 Sextus Empiricus, 49 Shakespeare, William, 11, 15, 122, 179– 86, 190, 191, 193, 195, 197–207, 209, 215, 222, 225–26 n. 4, 269, 272, 274, 276–87, 295, 305, 310 n. 24. See also individual plays Shakespeare in Love, 305 Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp, The (E. W. and M. M. Robson), 269, 270 Sharpe, Kevin, 232 Shawcross, John, 136, 148 Shephard, Robert, 238 Shepheardes Calendar (Edmund Spenser), 191–93 Sherman, William, 35, 39 Sidney, Henry, 154, 180, 234 Sidney, Philip, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 41, 49, 59–60, 154–82, 184–85, 189, 190, 192–93, 195, 197, 209, 214, 216, 269, 272–89, 194, 22–30, 233, 235, 237–38, 240 Sidney, Robert (father), 154–55, 176 n.3, 180, 181, 189, 195, 197–98, 229–30, 233, 235, 237–38, 250 n. 21 Sidney, Robert (son), 2nd Earl of Leicester, Viscount Lisle, 16, 229–53 Sidney Herbert, Mary, 180, 194–95, 197–98 Sigoniu, Carlo, 243 ‘‘Sileni Alcibiades’’ (Erasmus), 67–68 Silvæ (Statius), 112 Simon le pathe´tique (Giraudoux), 256 Sint-Aldegonde, Philip van Marnix van, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134 n. 13 Sir Thomas Browne Institute (Leiden), 21

................. 11360$

Sir Thomas More (Munday et al.), 11–13, 17 Sisto da Siena, 233, 250 n. 20 Siuqila (Lupset), 35, 39 Sixtius V, Pope, 187 Skretkowicz, Victor, 15, 179–208 Skinner, Quentin, 13, 33, 56–58, 60, 71 Smetana, Bedrich, 265 Smith, Thomas, Jr., 238 Socrates, 19, 28–29, 131 Society for Renaissance Studies, 22 ‘‘Sola Mors Tyrannicida Est’’ (More), 80 Sophocles, 275 Speed, John, 243 Spencer, Gilbert, 236 Spenser, Edmund, 15–16, 192–93, 209–28 Spiegel, Hendrik Laurensz., 14, 126–34 Spies, Marijke, 14, 126–34 Spoto, Donald, 289 n. 34 Statius, 112 Stewart, William, 109, 110, 117 Storia della letteratura italiana (De Sanctis), 256 Streekstra, Nanne, 151–52 n. 1 Stringer, Gary, 151–52 n. 1, 152 n. 2, 153 n. 14 Stuck [⳱ Stuchius], Johan Guilielmo, 187–90, 196, 197 Stump, Donald, 15, 154–78 Sturm, Johannes, 27, 92, 95, 101, 230 Suarez, Francisco de, 239 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus), 239 Sulleman II, 262–63 Sullivan, Ernest W, II, 151–52 n. 1, 153 n. 14 Sullivan, Margaret, 173 Summa Theologica, 281 Suppositi, I (Ariosto), 23 Surtz, Edward, 28 Sydnean Society, 285 Symonds, John Addington, 274 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 230–31, 238–39, 241–42, 252 n. 48 Talon, Omer, 95, 96, 107 n. 41 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 295–96 Tannenbaum, Dorothy and Samuel, 272–73

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Tarde, Alfred de, 260 Tasso, Torquato, 215 Tatius, Achilles, 193 Taylor, John Russell, 270, 286 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 205, 222 Testament of Cresseid (Henryson), 123 Test Pilot, 275 Theatre of the empire of Great Britaine (Speed), 243 Theophania (anon.), 236, 251 n. 35 Thomas, R. S., 309 ‘‘Thomas More’s Epigrammata’’ (Grace), 80 Thomson, R. S., 152 n. 8 Thornton, Dora, 235 Tibullus, Albius, 26 Tilly, Johann Tzerclas, Count, 232 Tillyard, E. M. W., 286 Timaeus (Plato), 29, 49 Times Literary Supplement, 138 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 199 ‘‘To Candidus’’ (More), 88–89 n. 49 Todd, Richard, 14, 135–53 Topica (Cicero), 241 Torrentinus, Hermannus, 115, 124 n. 15 Tottel, Richard, 292 Tottel’s Miscellany (ed. Tottel), 292, 309 n. 8 Trakl, Georg, 256 Tracy, Spencer, 275, 276 Traite´ des danses, 128 Treatise against Idleness (Northbrooke), 285 Trebizond, George of, 90, 94 Tremain, Rose, 16–17, 290–91, 299–309 Tremellius, Immanuel, 246 Trew Law of Free Monarchies, The, 182 Trinkaus, Charles, 246–47 Triplici Nodo (King James I) 204–5 Trueness of the Christian Religion (PlessisMornay), 174 True Order (Blundeville), 42–44 Tuck, Richard, 232 Tucker, Margaret, 185–86 Tullius, Marcus, 40 Turne`be, Adrien [⳱ Adrianus Turnebus], 96, 107 n. 41 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 94 Twysden, Roger, 236–37 Udall, Nicholas, 310 n. 12 Urbino, 39

................. 11360$

Utopia (More), 13, 18, 19, 23–53, 55–56, 58, 63–73, 77, 79–82, 84–85, 91 Valla, Lorenzo da, 220, 231 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare ), 180– 81, 182, 190, 195 Verdi, Giuseppe, 265 Vespucci, Amerigo, 18, 45 Vettori, Francesco, 25–26 Victoria the Great, 277 Victory of Samothrace, 261 Vignier, Nicolas, the Elder, 242 Vigny, Alfred de, 259–60 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (PlessisMornay, Estienne, and Languet), 181, 191–92, 198 Virgil (Maro), 59, 114, 177 n. 19, 209– 13, 215–16, 219–22, 224–25 Visscher, Roemer, 127, 128, 129, 131, 133 Vita del gloriosissimo Papa Pio Quinto (Catena), 242 Vives, Juan Luis, 246 Vossius, Gerard, 19–20 Wackher a Wackenfels, J. M., 39 Wade, Armigail, 35 Walsingham, Frances, 180 Walsingham, Francis, 45, 174, 180 Walter, J. H., 286 Warkentin, Germaine, 16, 229–53 Warkes (Lindsay), 123–24 n. 1 Washington, Mary, 272–73 Waterloo, battle of, 265–66 n. 1 Weiner, Andrew, 13, 54–74, 176 n. 9 Werfel, Franz, 256 Werthes, Friedrich August Clemens, 268 ‘‘What is the Best Form of Government’’ (More), 84 Whitbread Prize, 299 White, Hayden, 71 Whythorne, Thomas, 7, 16–17, 290– 300, 303, 304–9 Wilcox, Helen, 16–17, 290–310 Wilcox, Herbert, 277 William of Orange, 126, 128, 155, 180, 189 Wilson, Florens, 108, 124 n. 2 Wilson, Thomas, 27, 53 n. 7, 116, 310 n. 10

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Wilson Knight, G., 286 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 179, 195, 202, 205 Wolphius, Joannes, 187 Wolsey, Thomas, 55 World is My Cinema, The (E. W. and M. M. Robson), 269, 278, 280 Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton, 181, 190, 197–98 Wroth, Mary, 185 Wyatt, Thomas, 309 n. 8

................. 11360$

Xenocrates, 293 Xenophon, 40, 59 Zajc, Ivan, 264 Ziliolo, Alessandro, 242 Zriny (Ko¨rner), 262–65, 268 nn. 28 and 32 Zrinyi, Miklo´s (hero), 262 Zrinyi, Miklo´s (poet), 262, 268 n. 27 Zrinyi, Petar, 262

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