Chapter V

ROMANCE

Sixteenth-century poetic has no specific relation to Renaissance

development of verse narrative. The more pervasive counsels and habits

of imitation agree in exalting Vergil. Vergil did, indeed, guide the

narrative sequence of Tasso; but narrative sequence is not a general

Renaissance concern. Malory, Boiardo, Ariosto, Spenser, seek other

narrative values. What they have in common preoccupation and common

achievement is romance. Romance in a period of classicism, romance

written in spite of humanism and sometimes by humanists—what should it

be? It was response to the special audience of the courts; for, whatever

humanism might say, the courts liked romances. It was response also

to the wider audience steadily increased by printing. The response,

both in medieval continuance and in distinctive Renaissance direction,

constitutes an important chapter in literary history.

1. THE ROMANTIC CONTRAST

The good old times recreated by poetry for refuge and inspiration were

found by Malory and Spenser at the court of Arthur; by the Italian

romancers, at the court of Charlemagne. These, of course, are the two

main medieval fields of romance, _matière de Bretagne and matière du

roi_; and into either of them may enter incidentally the matter of Troy

with the progeny of Aeneas or “Hector’s arms.” Though the Charlemagne

tradition may be somewhat more distinct with its twelve paladins and

its one traitor, the two are essentially alike in being, for the actual

world out of joint, kingdoms of chivalry. Thither the Renaissance turned

from the Wars of the Roses or the hired soldiers of Italy. Gunpowder had

abolished single combat; feudalism was gone; chivalry had been reduced

to ceremony. Therefore romance was out of date. No; the fact that

romance survived the Renaissance shows that it has no date. The romantic

_therefore_ is that poetry must once more revive ideals. Sinister

violence in Warwickshire or Ferrara denies chivalry; romance revives it.

This fundamental motive strikingly unites the two fifteenth-century

soldier romancers Malory and Boiardo.

Sir Thomas Malory (1394?-1471) was attached in his young

manhood to the retinue of the great Richard Beauchamp, Earl of

Warwick, widely celebrated as a pattern of chivalry. After much

military service he sat in the Parliament of 1445. Arraigned in

1451 before a local court at Nuneaton on the charge of breaking

into the abbey of St Mary at Coombe and robbing it, and further

of ambushing the Duke of Buckingham, he was remanded to the

King’s Bench and imprisoned for most of his last twenty years.

In Newgate Jail he finished his _Morte d’Arthur_ (1469-1470).

These few facts, opening much inference, tell us surely that he

was imprisoned for violence in a time of violence. The chivalry

that he celebrates in the greatest English literary work of a

sterile period has the relief of contrast.

Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-1494), usually called “the Count,”

was brought up at the brilliant ducal court of Ferrara. He was

sent on embassies, married a Gonzaga, was gentleman of honor

to Eleonora, and governor (_Capitano_), first (1480) of Modena,

and then (1487, the year in which he published the first two

books of his _Orlando innamorato_) of Reggio. Tradition has

him genial and easy-going, and adds picturesquely that when

he found a sonorous name for one of his Carolingian heroes he

volleyed his castle bells.

His writing was abundant, various, characteristic of his time:

ten Latin eclogues and several Latin epigrams; many Petrarchan

sonnets, with _canzoni_ and madrigals; ten Italian eclogues;

_capitoli_ on fear, jealousy, hope, love, and excellence

(_virtù_); a five-act comedy, _Timone_, drawn from Lucian;

translations from Herodotus, Xenophon’s _Cyropaedia_, the

_Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, and the _Lives_ of Cornelius Nepos.

Different enough in fortune, the two had the same experience of actual

war, and turned from it with the same literary motive, a wistful and

generous desire to animate the dislocated and groping present with the

courage and devotion of an idealized great past. Poetry of escape, this

is also poetry of faith. It lifts Symphorien Champier’s clumsy _Gestes

ensemble la vie du preulx chevalier Bayard_ (1525) with the ideal of a

knight “sans peur et sans reproche.” It will seize upon the death of Sir

Philip Sidney as romantic. It will survive the allegorizing of Spenser.

It is the refuge from the industrial age in Tennyson’s _Idylls of the

King_. If fighting and politics remain as ugly as in the fifteenth

century, Edwin Arlington Robinson will not be the last poet of romance.

Boiardo makes the contrast very explicit.

[The robber replied] “What I am doing every great lord does in

your upper world. They make havoc of their enemies in war for

aggrandizement and to cut a bigger figure. A single man like

me makes trouble for seven, perhaps ten; they rage against ten

thousand. And they do still worse than I in that they take what

they do not need.” [Said Brandimarte] “It is indeed a sin to

take from one’s neighbor as my world does; but when it is done

only for the state, it is not evil; it is at least pardonable.”

[The robber replied] “A man is more easily pardoned when he

frames the charge himself. And I tell you, and make full

confession, that I take what I can from any one who can less”

(II. xix. 40).

O Fame, attendant of emperors, nymph so singing great deeds in

sweet verse that thou bringest men honor even after death and

makest them eternal, where art thou fallen? To sing ancient

loves and tell the battles of giants. For the world of this thy

time cares no longer for fame or for excellence (II. xxii. 2).

Then with choice rhymes and better verse shall I make combats

and loves all of fire. Not always shall the time be so out of

joint as to drag my mind from its seat. But now my songs are

lost. Of little avail to give them a thought while I feel Italy

so full of woe that I cannot sing, and hardly can I sigh. To

you, light lovers and damsels, who have at heart your noble

loves, are written these fair stories flowering from courtesy

and valor. They are not heard by those fell souls who make

their wars for despite and rage (II. xxxi. 49-50).

The distinctive difference between the two fifteenth-century romancers is

that Malory translates; Boiardo rewrites. Malory may contract or expand,

adapt or add; but in general he follows what he calls “the French book.”

Boiardo, finding the Italian versions vulgarized (_tra villani_, II. xii.

3), wishes to make the old tradition once more literary. To restore their

dignity, he gives the paladins more than verse. So romance throughout

the Renaissance, as before and since, both survived and was changed.

It was rehearsed, translated, printed in its medieval forms; and it was

shaped to a distinctive Renaissance pattern.

2. SEPARATE ROMANCES

What the presses most readily carried on from the Middle Age was the

separate romances that had not been merged in one of the cycles. The

old fairy-mistress story told by Jean d’Arras as _Mélusine_ (1387) was

printed at Geneva in 1468. _Pontus and the Fair Sidoine_, translated into

German in 1468, was printed in French at Lyon in 1484 and in German at

Augsburg in 1548. _Amadis of Gaul_ traveled from Brittany to Spain and

Portugal and back to France. The French prose version printed in 1540 and

again in 1548,[33] typically romantic in love, adventure, and chivalry,

deserved its popularity also by narrative skill. With some lyric dilation

of love and an occasional allusion to classical mythology, the style

is generally restrained to the narrative purpose. Description, rarely

dilated, is often cleverly inwoven. Dialogue adds not only liveliness,

but some characterization. Though the simple transitions sound like

Malory’s (“Now the author leaves this and returns to the treatment of

the child”), this shifting is not frequent; often it does not really

interrupt; and generally the composition has distinct narrative sequence.

The knighting of Amadis is not merely a scene in a series; it is a

situation, prepared and pointed as at once fulfillment and promise. So

the complication of the rings (Chapter XI) is carried out before our eyes

through suspense to solution.

In such separate romances the Middle Age had advanced the art of verse

narrative. Not only in Chaucer’s masterpiece _Troilus and Criseyde_, but

also in the contemporary _Gawain and the Green Knight_, the story is

carried forward in consistent sequence to a distinct issue of character.

The Renaissance, though generally it had other preoccupations, caught

some of this vigor in the telling of single romances. One of these,

loosely related to the Arthurian cycle without ever being embodied,

is of Giron; and this was put into Italian stanzas by Luigi Alamanni

(1495-1556). An industrious and capable man of letters,[34] who spent

much of his life in France, he was a convinced classicist. His _Gyrone il

cortese_ (Paris, 1548; Venice, 1549), though it was written long after

Ariosto had secured fame by quite other methods, shows that he felt the

obligation of a single story, distinct from a cycle, to keep narrative

sequence.

Alamanni’s Dedicatory Epistle, after relating the Arthur

stories to history, and mentioning some dozen of the Arthurian

heroes, expounds tournaments and the quests of errant knights,

and offers his Gyrone, as Caxton offers his Malory, to educate

toward true valor. Confessing that he has not always followed

his source in detail, he promises later “another new work of

poetry ... made in the ancient style and order and imitating

Homer and Vergil.” [This was fulfilled in the last years of his

life by his _Avarchide_.]

The first five books proceed as follows. After preliminary

adventures, Gyrone goes to his bosom friend Danain at

Malahalto. On news of a tournament they decide to go disguised

in black arms (II). But Danain’s wife languishes for love of

Gyrone and gains permission to go thither also under escort

while the two friends lodge with a hermit. After combats on the

way, they arrive at the tournament as Sagramor is victorious

in the first jousts. The beauty of Danain’s wife arouses the

jealousy of the other ladies and the passion of the Greek king

Laco. His ardor and his threats to seize her are overheard by

Gyrone, who courteously rebukes him in a lecture.

Further description of the combats at the tournament (III)

leads to the final victory of Gyrone and Danain. While Laco

still yearns (IV) toward Danain’s wife, a messenger arrives to

conduct her to a neighboring castle. Laco parts from Meliadus,

as Gyrone from Danain. Thus Laco and Gyrone are left sighing

for the same lady in the same forest. They meet, express their

admiration of each other, and sleep side by side in the wood.

In the morning Laco routs single-handed the lady’s whole escort

(V). The lady appealing eloquently to his honor in vain, Gyrone

arrives and fells him. While the lady debates with herself

whether to reveal her love, and Gyrone is torn by the conflict

of his own with his loyalty to Danain, they are irresistibly

drawn together. In a flowery mead by a spring they prepare for

love. But Gyrone’s lance falling knocks his sword into the

spring. When he has retrieved it, he reads as never before

its inscription summoning to honor, and turns it in shame on

himself. A peasant supervening betrays their sad plight to Laco.

Thus the story is brought definitely to a situation of character. Obvious

as the Renaissance manipulation is in the space given to love, the

handling makes this not merely lyric interlude, but story motive. Though

Alamanni is unwilling, or unable, to carry this through the 28,000 lines

of his twenty-four books, though he often fails to give that salience to

critical situations which is evident here, he nevertheless achieves what

the Renaissance cyclical romances generally ignored, narrative sequence.

All he needed to make his _Gyrone_ shorter, tighter, more compelling, was

firmer control of fourteenth-century narrative art.

For a classicist Alamanni is remarkably sparing of the fashionable

Renaissance allusions. He does, indeed, use that paganizing phrase which

was satirized by Erasmus. “In the consecrated temples, devoutly about the

sacrifices in accordance with true example, they listened, adored, and

besought the immortal Father”; when Malory would say, “They heard their

Mass and brake their fast.” But in spite of many Vergilian similes and of

occasional orations to troops, Alamanni’s classicism is not intrusive.

Apparently he thought it had small place in romance.

3. THE ARTHURIAN CYCLE IN MALORY

Among Renaissance romances presenting a traditional cycle in medieval

form the most distinguished is Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_. Caxton’s

preface is a manifesto of romance; and his table of contents displays

most of the stories that had gradually been brought together by the

Middle Age at the Round Table. Between the “_enfances_” of the first

book and the last great battle in the west are Balin and Tristan; that

Percival, here called Gareth or Beaumains, who was reared apart in the

wildwood; the mighty Lancelot, his mistress the Queen, and Elaine who

died for love of him; the quest of the Grail; the traitor Modred. They

are not composed in a narrative sequence. Balin, Gareth, Tristan, for

instance, remain separate stories. For there is no real connection

in Balin’s glimpse of an earlier Grail story not used in Malory’s

Grail books, or in Gareth’s coming to Camelot and his knighting by

Lancelot. But there is no confusion. The separate stories are told

straightforwardly; the main persons become familiar; and the exposure

of Guinevere makes a crisis contributing to the subsequent ruin of the

goodly fellowship. The _Morte d’Arthur_ is not merely a series. But its

distinction is in style. Malory’s prose follows that medieval habit which

may be called pure narrative, the telling of a story singly for its story

values. It was not the only medieval narrative habit; nor is he the

only fifteenth-century author to follow it; but it stands out both in

contrast to classicism conceived as ornamental dilation and in his own

quiet mastery. Without parade, without pause for ornament, he maintains a

grave simplicity that ranges from homeliness to eloquence. His rhythm—he

has little other sentence art—lingers or quickens with the action, and

answers the emotion.

Is that knyght that oweth this shelde your love? Yea truly,

said she, my love he is. God wold I were his love (XVIII. xiv).

Than syr Bedwere cryed: “Ah! my lord Arthur, what shal become

of me now ye go from me and leve me here allone emonge myn

enemyes?” “Comfort thy self,” sayd the kyng, “and doo as wel

as thou mayst; for in me is no truste for to truste in. For I

wyl in to the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde”

(XXI. v).

4. THE CAROLINGIAN CYCLE ON THE STREET

The other cycle, the Carolingian, was popularized in Italy by street

story-tellers, who seem to have been, on the piazza before audiences of

artisans and shopkeepers, somewhat like the medieval _jongleurs_ before

their successive groups of pilgrims. Their narrative art can be only

guessed; for it was oral. But the guess is helped by the persistence,

even to the present time, of the Carlomagno marionettes. The recital

animated by these large puppets—for it is recital, not drama—is of a

traditional version called _I paladini di Francia_, and goes on day after

day by mere aggregation, and with many tirades.

5. PULCI

Italian literary manipulation of the Carolingian cycle in verse romances

began with Luigi Pulci (1432-1484). His _Morgante maggiore_ (1481, though

largely written by 1470)[35] is selective. Though it bulks large with

more than 30,000 lines of verse, it does not rehearse the deeds of the

paladins by the serial method of installments. At the end of Canto 5 two

main stories, Orlando’s and Rinaldo’s, are brought together. At the end

of Canto IX, having meantime moved together, the two arrive, with the

other persons whom they have picked up on the way, for the relief of

Montauban and of Carlomagno at Paris. There is narrative progress from

salience to salience. The dialogue is lively. Though it does not amount

to characterization, it suffices for speed and for mood.

Said Rinaldo, “Wilt thou be so obtuse as not to look at that

damsel? Thou wouldst not be acceptable as a lover....” Said

Oliver, “Thou art ever for thy jokes. Yonder is something more

serious than word-play” (IV. 61).

Oliver looked at Rinaldo, hardly able to hold his gaze for

weeping, and said: “’Tis true that man cannot hide love and

coughing. As thou seest, dear brother, love has caught me at

last with his claws. I can no longer hide this desire. I know

not what to do, what to decide. Cursed be the day on which I

saw her. What am I to do? What dost thou advise?” Said Rinaldo,

“Believe me, thou wilt leave this place. Leave the lady,

marquis Oliver. Our intention was not to yearn, but to find

Orlando” (IV. 88-90).

The naughty machinations of Malagigi are, indeed, comic interpolations;

nothing comes of them; but the machinations of Gano have narrative

function. There is hardly any separable description. Love laments are

sketched, not dilated. Pulci is interested, and interests us, in his

story as a story. To this end he takes a free hand with events. We have

the usual paynim siege of Paris or of Montauban, but no attempt to

include all the items of tradition. Pulci takes what he wishes and puts

it where he wishes.

To call the poem a burlesque is misleading. The incidental farce, as

in Boiardo and Ariosto, is rather appeal to Renaissance fondness for

the grotesque as contrast. Though Pulci may have wished to pierce the

inflation of the Carolingian street tirades, he was too clever to think

of holding parody through 30,000 lines. Reducing the medieval aggregation

to an intelligible story, he also, with an art more delicate than

burlesque, reduced the style. Turning from both medieval gravity and

Renaissance luster, he brought romance down to earth. Oliver falls in

love promptly, utterly, and successively. The humor of this in real life

Pulci frankly seeks. When two knights dare each other, he renders their

speech not as oration, but as homely flyting. He is irreverent in the way

of fashionable conversation. But his main object and achievement, as it

is not parody, so it is not satire. It is pleasant, often humorous story

of familiar antiquated persons in traditional events and setting, but in

daylight.

6. BOIARDO

Boiardo, indignant at the degradation of the Carolingian heroes among the

vulgar—how did he proceed toward elevation?

Who will give me the voice and the words, and utterance

magnanimous and profound? (I. xxvii. 1).

Till now my song has not ventured far from shore. Now I must

enter upon the great deep, to open immeasurable war. All Africa

lies beyond that sea; and all the world flashes with men in

arms (II. xvii. 2).

The poet seems to nerve himself, as Vergil at the opening of _Aeneid_

VII, for loftier diction. The average Renaissance poet of the next

century would invoke the Muses for that “high style” which had come down

from classical through medieval rhetoric. But the words of Boiardo’s

invocation are not heightened thus; nor is his diction generally. He not

only omits the Muses here; he is very sparing with classical allusion

throughout.

Book I mentions the Cyclops, Circe, Thyestes, Medusa, the Centaurs,

Vulcan, Atalanta, the dragon’s teeth, and Hercules; Book II, a faun,

the easy descent to Hades, the god of love, Pasithea, Narcissus, the

Laestrigonians and Anthropophagi, the goddess Fame, Arion, and the Sibyl.

Hector’s arms are brought in as a piece of medieval derivation from Troy.

Classical similes are inserted here and there, as if conscientiously: the

meeting of two winds, fire in grain, a boar or bear at bay, two bulls or

two lions. Nor does Boiardo strive for other ornament. His heightening is

rather the sheer extravagance of epic brag.

Their blows were heard nearly a mile in the wood (I. iii. 59).

They came with such a battle-cry as made earth tremble, and sky

and sea (I. iv. 51).

The moat brimmed with the blood of the slain (I. xi. 32).

Fire came to his heart and his face, and flamed from his

helmet. He ground his teeth. His knees so clamped Brigliadoro

that the mighty steed sank in the path (I. xv. 19).

The grinding of his teeth could be heard more than a bow-shot

(I. xv. 33).

Otherwise his words are usually as simple as Malory’s. So far, classicism

has made no headway in Renaissance verse narrative.

Boiardo’s sentences, as Malory’s, are typically aggregative, sometimes

even crude. Instead of tightening a sentence or a stanza, he remains

frankly diffuse. Fluent, sometimes slack, he runs on as if orally. His

verse is pleasantly varied. Though he hardly ever lets a line end with a

down-beat, he freely begins either up or down, or shifts to a dactyl. A

stanza rarely runs over; but it is often linked with the next by refrain,

as in popular poetry. Here and there the closing line of his octave

sounds like an experiment in the direction followed later by Spenser.

Inferior in stanza control to Boccaccio and to Ariosto, diffuse, somewhat

careless, he is always agreeably and sometimes charmingly fluent.

Yet description, which became a regular Renaissance cue for dilation,

Boiardo handles economically. Even where he is conventional he does not

dilate; and usually he is both distinct and concise.

That spring was all adorned with white and polished alabaster,

and so richly with gold that it shone in the flowery mead (I.

iii. 33).

A fair rich palace made of marble polished so smooth as to

mirror the whole garden (I. viii. 2).

Secret gardens of fresh verdure are above on the roofs and

hidden on the ground. Gems and gold pattern all these noble and

joyous places. Clear springs unstintingly fresh are surrounded

by shady thickets. Above all, the place has an odor to give

oppressed hearts their joy again (I. viii. 5).

His stories pictured on walls (_depintura istoriata_) whether fresco or

mosaic, have a literary source. They are from the Troy stories pictured

on the walls of Dido’s palace in _Aeneid_ II. Boiardo’s briefer rendering

may have been suggested by the “epigrams” of the Greek _Anthology_, or

by survivals in southern Italy of such pictures with verse inscriptions.

Certainly his palaces and gardens often recall the Norman-Arab art of

Sicily. For it is art that he pauses to note oftener than scenery.

In all this his classicism is both discreet and artistic. He does not

borrow; he adapts.

The larger scene, the field of the traditional struggle of East with

West, receives more definite geography. The haze over medieval Ermonie

had been often pierced by merchant voyagers. Though there are still the

Isole Felice or Lontane, we read now of Aragon and Barcelona, Granada,

Toledo, Seville, Valencia, and Gibraltar; of Agrigentum and Mongibello

as well as of Sicily at large; of Cyprus, Crete, and Rhodes; of Aigues

Mortes, Bordeaux, Gascony, Languedoc, Perpignan, and Roussillon; of

Damascus, Niniveh, Trebizond, and Tripoli.

The traditional chivalric equality of Saracen knights with Christian, as

in Malory, is emphasized.

King Charles the Great with genial face had seated himself

among his paladins at the round table. Before him were also

Saracens, who would not use chair nor bench, but lay like

mastiffs on their rugs, scorning the usage of the Franks (I. i.

12-13).

The paynim king Balugante, divining Rinaldo’s irritation

at some of his fellow Christians, sends him a courteous

and discerning message. Saracen knights are armed, titled,

respected as are Christian, and mingle with them freely. Their

bravery is not merely admitted; Rodomonte is a legendary demon

of force, and Ruggiero in his pagan days is a pattern of both

force and courtesy.

The traditional echoes of folklore are repeated. Feraguto’s strength

revives when he touches earth. A child stolen in infancy is recognized.

Herbs are gathered under a new moon. Ruggiero, as Percival, is brought

up beyond sight of arms. There are waters of forgetfulness, a loathly

lady waiting to be restored by a kiss, a magic steed, a white hart, a

monster adversary transformed, and a retreat under water.

Grotesque interludes, barely touched by Malory, found occasionally

elsewhere, and quite regular in Italian popular versions, are not only

admitted by Boiardo; they are dwelt upon with evident relish. Thus

Rinaldo fights with a giant.

Of no avail the furious assault; of no avail the baron’s nimble

skill. He could not reach so high. Suddenly Rinaldo dismounted

and with one bound leapt upon the giant’s croup when he was

not looking. He knocked his helm and his steel cap to pieces

and, redoubling his strokes as if he were hammering iron at the

furnace, he split the great head in two. Fell the giant with a

rush that made the earth shake (I. iv. 64-65).

Orlando leapt even higher, so that again and again he met his giant face

to face—in the air. Angelica threw into a monster’s mouth a cake that

stuck his teeth together, so that Rinaldo might safely, though with

enormous effort, strangle him. Rodomonte bare-headed at sea hears his

hair rattle with ice. Astolfo is beguiled to board a whale, and Rinaldo

follows, both on horseback.

On Bayard he plunged into the sea after the great fish in

desperation. That whale went slowly, slowly; for it is very

large and by nature grave (II. xiii. 65).

Marfisa, the woman knight, had her horse stolen and pursued the thief

long in vain. The conception is grotesque; the execution, pure farce.

A fortnight had she followed him, nor was fed meantime on

aught but leaves. The false thief, who was most astute, sped

his flight with quite different food. For he was so quick and

so bold that every tavern he saw he would enter and fall to

eating, and then flee without paying his shot. And although the

taverners and their waiters were after him with their pitchers

and jugs in their hands, off he was, wiping his mouth and

grinning (II. xv. 68-69).

Love, announced in the title _Orlando innamorato_ and frequently

asserted, has little more scope in Boiardo than in Malory. Whether the

title expresses an original intention abandoned, or an appeal to court

ladies, or merely a certain period in the hero’s life, Boiardo’s interest

was elsewhere.

Long time Morgan, Alcina, and their magic wiles have kept me

waiting; nor have I shown you a good sword-stroke (II. xiv. 1).

The good sword-stroke is what he gives with both hands, even as Malory.

Since the main interest is single combat, and all the fighters, even the

Saracens, are memorable, there is a long roll of persons. Of the hundred

mentioned in the first five cantos about a third never reappear; few are

characterized consecutively; none is consecutively in action for any

considerable period. The long poem is frankly a series, not a sequence.

Boiardo’s usual method is to carry one of his stories to a crisis, leave

it to pick up another, and so on.

Let us now return to Astolfo, who remained, you know, alone at

the fountain (I. ii. 17).[36]

As the Carolingian recitals on the piazza, or behind the marionettes, the

_Orlando innamorato_ may be entered at almost any point. What is there

heard or read is interesting mainly for itself, very little as arising

from previous action and characterization or as preparing for what

follows. To say, then, that it fuses the two cycles is quite misleading.

Boiardo brings in an Arthurian name, Tristan or Lancelot, as simply as he

adds another Carolingian. He puts Merlin’s well in the forest of Ardenne.

He interpolates Morgan le Fay among the Orlando stories. But fusion,

whether of these Arthurians or of his own Carolingians, is not in all his

thoughts. He is engaged not in composing the Carolingian story, but in

rehearsing the Carolingian stories.

Boiardo’s _Orlando_, then, is a collection of heroes fighting in the

struggle between East and West. Within that frame, as within the frame of

Arthur’s Round Table, tradition had collected many stories. Boiardo finds

room for them, and even for others quite unrelated. Those of the greatest

knights, Orlando, Rinaldo, Oliver, and their ladies and friends, the

obligatory stories, he can tell by installments because they are familiar

and have been already connected. The others he inserts here and there for

variety. Not only does he accept the medieval cyclical aggregation, he

ignores the later medieval achievement of narrative sequence in smaller

scope through characterization.

A certain Tisbina, who has nothing to do with Charlemagne, is in much

the same dilemma as Chaucer’s Dorigen in the Franklin’s Tale; and her

Iroldo’s response is much the same as that of Dorigen’s Arveragus.

Chaucer’s solution is convincing, in spite of impossible marvels,

because it is motivated by Dorigen’s character. Boiardo’s solution is

inferior because it is quite extraneous and casual. His Tisbina is not

characterized sufficiently to motivate the story toward any convincing

issue.

Much less is Boiardo concerned to motivate his whole story. His Orlando

in love is even removed for long stretches from the great struggle; and

Boiardo interrupts both the love and the struggle to tell of Tisbina and

Iroldo or insert a _fabliau_.[37] True, his poem remained unfinished; but

evidently he had no idea of making it a coherent whole. His Latin and

Greek did not suggest to him the shaping of verse narrative. Discernible

in his style, though never intrusive, they do not move his composition;

for composition was not his concern. Ignoring alike the medieval progress

and Pulci’s narrative cleverness with his own material, he was content

with abundant activity, variety, and fluency.

But in another use of the classics he forecast the Renaissance habit of

encomium. Ruggiero, legendary ancestor of his Ferrara patrons, brought up

in paganism and remote from deeds of arms, is sought by Agramante for his

great expedition against the Christian West. Ruggiero’s aged tutor warns

Agramante against the ultimate consequences of taking the marvelous youth

into France. Charlemagne, he says, may be defeated, and our pride and

courage enhanced;

... but afterward the youth will become Christian, and—ah!

traitress house of Maganza, which heaven should not tolerate on

earth—in the end Ruggiero shall have through thee his death.

Would that were the final grief! But his descendants shall

remain Christian, and come to honor as great as any the world

knows today. They shall keep all, all generosity, all courtesy,

sweet love and joyous state in a house the flower of the world.

I see Hugo Alberto di Sansogna descend to the Paduan plain,

expert in arms, in intellect, in all the ways of glory,

generous, noble, and above all humane. Hear, ye Italians: I

warrant you. He who comes with that standard in hand brings

with him all your redemption. Through him shall Italy be filled

with prowess.

I see Azzo I and Aldobrandino III, nor know which to call the

greater; for the one has killed the traitor Anzolino; the other

has broken the Emperor Henry. Behold another Rinaldo paladin. I

say no more of him than Lord of Vicenza, of Treviso, of Verona,

who strikes the crown from Frederick.

Nature shows forth her treasure. Lo! the marquis who lacks no

point of honor. Blest the age, and happy they who shall live in

a world so free! In his time the golden lilies shall be joined

to that white eagle whose home is in heaven; and his domain

shall be the flower of Italy from the one fair seacoast to the

other.

And if the other son of Amphitryon, who there appears in habit

of a duke, has as much mind to seize dominion as he has to

follow good and flee evil, all the birds—not to say the men who

act in this great play—would flock to obey him. But why should

I gaze further into the future? Thou destroyest Africa, King

Agramante (II. xxi. 54-59).

With reminiscence, perhaps, of Dante, this is obviously patterned on

Vergil. The historical vision of the house of Este has its model in the

vision of the Augustans. Encomium with Boiardo is neither so frequent nor

so fulsome as it was to become with Ariosto and with Spenser. Was that,

perhaps, one reason for his double eclipse? He was first superseded by

Ariosto and then rewritten by Berni.

7. ARIOSTO

The brilliant _Orlando furioso_ (1516) of Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)

is one of the most typical verse narratives of the Renaissance, as it

was the most popular. More accomplished than Boiardo in diction, verse,

and composition, and more responsive to the Renaissance, Ariosto still

follows the same serial plan. The two poets differ more in degree than

in kind. Both were trained in the classics; both began by writing Latin;

both offer romance as inspiring contrast with actuality.

O great hearts of those ancient knights! They were rivals;

they differed in religion; they still felt the rude and wicked

strokes aching throughout their bodies; and yet through dark

woods and crooked paths they went together without distrust (i.

22).

[War has been debased through the diabolical invention of

artillery (xi. 22-25)]. How foundest thou ever place in human

hearts, O invention criminal and ugly! Through thee military

glory has been destroyed, through thee the craft of arms

dishonored, through thee valor and prowess so diminished that

oft the knave seems better than the good soldier.

And though Rinaldo was not very rich in cities or treasure,

he was so affable and genial and so prompt to share with them

whatever he had that not one of his meinie was drawn away by

offer of more gold. A man of Montauban never forsakes it unless

great need constrains him elsewhere (xxxi. 57).

O famished, deformed, fierce Harpies, who in blinded and

misguided Italy, perhaps as punishment of ancient sins, bring

to every table divine judgment! Innocent children and faithful

mothers drop with hunger while they see one feast of these foul

monsters devour what might have kept them alive.... [Italy

cries] Is there no one of you ... to free your tables from the

filth and the claws ... as the paladin freed that of the Ethiop

king? (xxxvi. 1-3).

Encomium with Ariosto becomes pervasive. Animated of course by the

personal ends of a court poet, it serves also the literary end of

magnificence, the first aspect in which the Renaissance viewed epic.

Who will give me the voice and the words fit for a subject so

noble? Who will lend me wings strong enough to attain my lofty

conception? Far greater than its customery heat must be the

poetic furor in my breast. For this part I owe my lord, since

it sings of the noble line from which he sprang.

Among the illustrious lords issued from heaven to govern the

earth, never seest thou, O Phoebus who surveyest the wide

earth, a race more glorious in peace or in war, nor any whose

nobility has been kept longer, and shall be kept, if that

prophetic light which inspires me errs not, so long as the

heavens revolve about the pole (iii. 1-2).

The Vergilian vision of Augustan Rome is heard again in Merlin’s

prophecy. Epic rolls of honor muster the English warriors, the women of

Este, even the painters. Besides these are many incidental references,

especially at canto openings.

Of courtesy, of nobility, examples among the ancient warriors

were many, and few are there among the moderns. But of impious

ways enough was seen and heard in that war, Hippolito, whose

captured standards thou hast used to adorn our temples, as thou

broughtest to thy ancestral shores their captive galleys laden

with prey (xxxvi. 2).

The mission of the poet to confer fame, proclaimed by Ariosto and

repeated by Ronsard, is also seen in bitter contrast. The speaker is St

John the Evangelist.

So worthy men are snatched from oblivion worse than death by

poets. O intelligent and wise princes who follow the example

of Augustus in making writers your friends, and thus need not

fear the waves of Lethe. Poets, as singing swans, are rare,

poets not unworthy of the name; for heaven prevents too great

abundance of famous ones by the great fault of stingy lords,

who by oppressing excellence and exalting vice banish the noble

arts. We may suppose that God has deprived these ignorant men

of their wits and darkens their light of reason in making

them shy of poetry, that death may quite consume them. For

wicked as their ways might be, if only they knew how to win

the friendship of Apollo they might rise from their graves in

sweeter odor than nard or myrrh.

Aeneas was not so pious, nor Achilles so mighty, as their fame,

nor Hector so brave. There have been thousands and thousands

who might with truth have been put before them; but the palaces

or great villas bestowed by their descendants have given them

sublime honors without end at the honored hands of writers.

Augustus was neither so holy nor so benign as sounds the

trumpet of Vergil; but his having good taste in poetry brings

him pardon for his unjust proscription. Nor would he who had

against him earth and hell have the less fame, perhaps, if he

knew how to keep the writers his friends.

Homer made Agamemnon victorious, the Trojans cowardly and dull,

and Penelope constant to her husband through the thousand

persecutions of the suitors. If you wish to uncover the truth,

convert the story to its contrary; that the Greeks were routed,

Troy the victor, and Penelope a harlot. On the other hand hear

how fame leaves Dido, whose heart was so chaste, to be reputed

a baggage, only because Vergil was not her friend. Wonder not

that I am oppressed thereat, and that I speak of it at such

length. I love writers and pay them what I owe; for in your

world I too was a writer (xxxv. 22-28).

This strange parenthesis of satire, dubious in its humor, shocking in

its irreverence, sounds today like encomium reduced to advertisement.

It sounds also like the bitter retort of realism to that fiction of the

courtier which was to have literary vogue through Castiglione. Bitter and

foul the actual wars of Italy in contrast to old chivalry; but bitter

also the trade of those who sing them.

Though often oratorical, Ariosto rarely seeks his magnificence by

elaboration of style. He has too much taste, too much concern for popular

appeal. He even admits the appeal of the traditional epic brag. Rodomonte

alone sacks a city; Grifone throws a knight over the wall; great rocks

are hurled from ships; and—triumph of rodomontade—the fragments of a

combat fly up to the sphere of fire and come down lighted.

There are a few reminiscences of the _Aeneid_, fewer of Horace,

fewest of Dante and Petrarch. Classical allusion has become a common

decoration. Aurora is already obligatory for dawn. Occasionally a

classical periphrasis (“Hardly had the Licaonian seed turned her

plow through the furrows of heaven” xx. 82) is obscure; or there is

incongruity in combining Avernus and the Sibyl with Merlin’s grotto,

or the Fates with Death, Nature, and St John. But allusion is neither

paraded nor often intruded. Classical similes, much more frequent than

with Boiardo, are evidently sought for decoration. They are one of the

signs that Ariosto’s time thought of epic in terms of style. But they

are used also for vividness; and they range widely. Besides those drawn

conventionally from beasts of prey or from storm, there are many quite

sharply individual: wood steaming in a fire, grass ebbing and flowing

in the wind, a pile-driver, and a mine cave-in. Ariosto’s decoration

is rarely a hindrance, rarely even elaborate. He is easy to read. The

bearing of a passage here and there may be dubious because of looseness

in the narrative, but never its meaning. He has reconciled dignity with

popularity. Instead of posing as literary, he makes his readers feel

literary themselves. He puts them at ease in fine company.

In sentence and stanza movement Ariosto has made his poem easy to read by

diffuse and various fluency. Writing for entertainment, he uses balance

or other word-play only as occasional means of variety. He is neither

sententious nor pretentious. His metrical skill, remarkable in range

and control, is not put forward for exhibition; it is an accompaniment

so flexible to mood as constantly to enhance the connotation. Rarely

lengthening the final line of the stanza often using refrain to link

stanzas, and sometimes within stanzas, he is most characteristic in

making the _ottava rima_ run on not only from line to line, but from

stanza to stanza. This fluent ease is by no means impromptu spontaneity.

It is the work of ten years. His diffuseness, then, is not carelessness;

it is adjustment alike to the immediate audience of the court and to the

increasing readers of the press.

Especially significant, therefore, is his handling of description. His

landscape is often both brief and conventional.

Winsome thickets of pleasant laurel, of palms and gayest

myrtle, of cedar, of orange with fruit and flowers woven in

forms most various and all beautiful, make a refuge from the

fervid heat of summer days with their thick parasols; and among

these branches in safe flight nightingales go singing.

Among the purpled roses and the white lilies, which the warm

air keeps ever fresh, rabbits and hares are seen at peace, and

deer, heads high and proud, without fear that any one may kill

or take them, feed or chew their cud at rest. Swift and nimble

leap the harts and goats that abound in those country places

(vi. 21-2).

But he has a way of animating convention with a sharp word of his own.

When the trembling brooks (_trepidi ruscelli_) began to loosen

the cold ice in their warm waves (xii. 72).

Architecture and decoration often remain generalized, or offer few

details. Ampler is pageantry.

With triumphal pomp and great festivity they return together

into the city, which is green with branches and garlands.

All the streets are hung with tapestries. A shower of herbs

and flowers spreads from above and falls upon and around the

victors, cast in handfuls from loggias and fair windows by

ladies and damsels.

In various places where they turn a corner they find improvised

arches and trophies displaying pictures of the ruins and fires

of Biserta and other worthy deeds; elsewhere, balconies with

divers games and spectacles and mimes and plays; and at every

corner is inscribed the true title: To the Liberators of the

Empire.

With sound of shrill trumpets and mellow clarinets, with

harmony of every instrument, mid laughter and applause, joy and

favor of the people, who could hardly come close enough, the

great Emperor dismounted at the palace, where several days that

company stayed to enjoy itself with tournaments, _personnages_

and farces, dances and banquets (xliv. 32-34).

This is a preciously distinct picture of actual Renaissance pageantry.

More vividly detailed is the funeral of Brandimarte. Even these, however,

are not dilated. They are appropriate to their narrative function. The

long descriptive summary of Astolfo’s journey through the Valley of the

Moon is an interlude of satire; and Orlando’s battle with the monster

Orc is pure grotesque. He rows into the Orc’s mouth, casts anchor there,

and, when the monster plunges, tows him ashore. Moreover, both these are

narrated; neither is a descriptive pause.

Ariosto does pause, however, to dilate description of the beauty of

women. Seven stanzas enumerate the charms of the enchantress Alcina (vii.

10-16).

The fair palace excelled not so much in surpassing the richness

of every other as in having the most delightful folk in the

world and the noblest. Little did one differ from another in

flowered age and in beauty; only Alcina was most beautiful of

all, as the sun is more beautiful than any star.

In person she was as well formed as the industry of painters

can imagine: her blond hair long and tressed; gold is not more

splendid and lustrous. Rose mingled with hawthorn white spread

over her delicate cheek. Of polished ivory was her joyous

forehead, and of just proportion.

Beneath two black and fine-spun brows are two black eyes, as

two clear suns, sympathetic in gaze, frugal in movement, about

which Love seems to sport and fly, and from which he empties

his quiver and visibly steals hearts. Thence descends a nose in

which Envy herself could find no fault.

Beneath this, as between two valleys, the mouth besprent

with native cinnabar, wherein are two rows of choice pearls,

enclosed or opened by fair, sweet lips, whence issues speech

of courtesy fit to soften even a base heart, and whence rises

the winsome laughter that brings paradise to its place on earth

[and so on for three more stanzas].

This is the conventional description called by the Middle Age _blason_.

It is used again for Olimpia bound to the rock, where the situation

itself is conventional. A bit of very old folklore, and coming down

also through classical mythology as Perseus and Andromeda, it was a

commonplace for dilation.

But what Ariosto dilates oftenest is emotion. His characteristic pauses

are lyric. Thus he interpolates the medieval _compleint d’amour_ not only

again and again, but for long exhalations. Bradamante alone utters a

whole series of these laments. The second begins as follows:

Then shall it be true (said she) that I must seek him who

flees me and hides? Then must I prize him who scorns me? Must

I implore him who never answers me? Shall I endure to hold at

heart him who hates me, who thinks his qualities so rare that

an immortal goddess must descend from heaven to kindle his

heart with love?

In his pride he knows that I love him, that I adore him; nor

will he of me for lover nor for slave. In his cruelty he knows

that I yearn and die for him; and he waits till after death to

give me help. And lest I tell him of my martyrdom, fit to move

even his stubborn will, he hides himself from me, as the asp

who to keep her venom refuses to hear the charm.

Ah! Love, stay him who hastes so free beyond my slow running,

or restore me to the state whence thou hast taken me, when

I was subject neither to thee nor to any other. Alas! how

deceitful and foolish is my hope that ever prayers should move

thee to pity! For thou delightest to draw streams of tears from

our eyes; nay, thereon thou feedest and livest (xxxii. 18-20).

Substantially the same is the famous madness of Orlando. Though Ariosto

cleverly gives it narrative enough to relieve its prolongation through

twenty-five stanzas, it is a dilated lyric interlude.

The art that dilates these lyrics is rhetoric. Thus they answer not only

the learning, but the taste of the Renaissance. With Alcina’s charms and

Olimpia’s, they were the favorite passages of the Pléiade. Ronsard, using

them often, was especially fond of Orlando’s madness. Beyond the Pléiade,

they open a long vista toward Italian opera. To look the other way, back

to the Middle Age, is to meet the sharp contradiction of Dante. Paolo and

Francesca, or Ugolino, is the poetic antithesis to Bradamante and Orlando.

Such dilated interludes would interrupt any progress of the whole story;

and they are not the only interpolations. Traditionally the cyclical

romances might pause to add incidental stories, usually told by errant

damsels seeking help. Ariosto inserts these freely, and quite as freely

others having even less relevance. The story of Ginevra, Ariodante,

and Polinesso (Canto V), for instance, though it falls among Rinaldo’s

adventures, has its own intrigue and motivation. Equally separable,

the _fabliau_ of Fiammetta is told for sex, and prolonged by appended

dialogue and comment. “Ladies,” it begins, “and you who hold ladies

in esteem, for heaven’s sake give no ear to this story.... Omit this

canto; for my story needs it not and will be no less clear without it.”

Evidently Ariosto has not planned his cantos as chapters.

A mere glance through the summaries prefixed to each canto will show that

the many interruptions are not breaks in the sequence of the whole. There

is no such sequence. The poem is a collection of parallel stories taken

up in turn, and only thus combined, not integrated in a single scheme.

Accepting Boiardo’s method, he uses the same frank transitions.

But to another time I will defer the story of what ensued from

this. I must return to the good King Charles, against whom

Rodomonte was coming in haste and whose folk he was killing

(xviii. 8).

He even turns them to humor.

I am reminded that I ought to tell you (I promised to, and then

I forgot) of a suspicion that the fair lady of the grieving

Ruggiero had concerning the other lady less pleasing and more

wicked and of sharper and more venomous tooth, so that through

what she heard from Ricciardetto it devoured the heart in her

breast.

I should have told you, and I began something else because

Rinaldo intervened; and then Guidone gave me enough to do,

so that he held me off a bit on the way. From one thing

to another I became so involved that I hardly remembered

Bradamante. I remember her now, and I am going to go on with

her story before I tell of Rinaldo and Gradasso.

Before I speak of her, need is that I speak a bit of Agramante

(xxxii. 1-3).

Such narrative art as Ariosto exhibits is in detail, not in the

onwardness of the whole story. The close is both interrupted and delayed.

Canto XXXVI, which finally brings Ruggiero and Bradamante together,

ends without their actual reunion. There is no meeting, no dialogue.

Canto XXXVIII takes Ruggiero from her, to support his honor; “and

that, ladies, is strange.” Canto XLIV still postpones, as lesser

issues have been postponed, _the_ issue, their marriage. Canto XLVI

ends characteristically on description of the wedding and encomium

of Ariosto’s patron Ippolito; but that the poem may conclude as the

_Aeneid_ with the defeat of Turnus, it gives Ruggiero one more victory.

Boccaccio’s art of the long narrative poem, to say nothing of Chaucer’s,

is ignored.

This is not careless; it is intentional. Some of the delay at the close

was added in the final revision of 1532. Ariosto designed not sequence,

but abundance and variety. His opening _Arma virumque cano_ is: “I sing

the ladies, the loves, the courtesies, the bold emprise of the time when

the Moors crossed the sea from Africa and did such harm in France....

Of Orlando too will I tell, how for love he went mad.” These loves,

traditional in still subscribing to _amour courtois_, are more various

than Boiardo’s. But though much of the appeal is by amorous descant,

the staple of this Carolingian romance is still single combat. As for

Orlando’s love madness, announced in the title and in the opening lines,

it is not reached till Canto XXIII; and once his fury is spent, he

disappears once more for some six cantos. He is hardly even a leading

character. The principal role, for encomium of the house of Este, belongs

to Ruggiero. Stories of the other paladins are often brought into

connection, sometimes skillfully, sometimes ingeniously, rarely to the

extent of making a situation, never in such an onward scheme as Chaucer’s

_Troilus and Criseyde_. For that demands what Ariosto never sought,

consistent motivation by progressive characterization from scene to

scene. Such characterization as Ariosto offers remains separate. Zerbino

has more space than is warranted by any distinct function. Oliver, coming

in casually, is less a person than a great traditional name. Astolfo’s

miraculous journey, with its interesting geographical list has so little

visible function that it might as well have been made somewhere else,

or by some one else. Leone, one of the most distinct characterizations,

comes in only toward the end. Even Ruggiero meets Bradamante when he

least expects or deserves her.

Ariosto is a typical example of the popular poet gauging and answering

his public. His elegant ease is flattering. His decoration is distinct.

His diffuseness relieves us of all coöperative thinking. A scene is

dilated through every phase of its emotion, and then discharged as

finished in and for itself. The next will be pleasantly different, or,

if unpleasantly, may be skipped. The dilation, the variety, that Vergil

turned his back upon, and after him Tasso, Ariosto frankly sought.

He has no care for poetic sequence beyond neat transitions, no poetic

austerity of sustained single purpose. Renaissance poets, for all the

cult of classicism, often revived the ancient world in Alexandrian

decadence, saw in Vergil only his high style, conceived poetic as

rhetoric, and ran after the “Greek Romances.” Ariosto was one of these

Alexandrians.

8. TASSO AND SPENSER

The contrast between Tasso and Spenser is heightened by the fact that

they were closely contemporary. Spenser’s birth was eight years after

Tasso’s; his death, but three years. Tasso began his _Gerusalemme

liberata_ in his twenties, published it at thirty-one, kept it on his

mind throughout his working life, and finally rewrote it. Spenser

published three books of his _Faerie Queene_ at thirty-eight, three more

at forty-three, and left it unfinished. Tasso’s is the shortest of the

Renaissance verse romances; Spenser’s was to be the longest. Tasso turned

away from Ariosto toward Vergil; Spenser moved even farther than Ariosto

from epic sequence. Allegory, hardly more than a figure of speech with

Tasso, is announced by Spenser as his plan. Religion having more place

in these two romances than in any of the others, Tasso’s is conceived

as uniting western Europe, Spenser’s as nationalistic. Tasso’s poem is

one of the greater European books, and has been widely read in England;

Spenser’s great reputation has been very slow to cross the Channel. The

latter years of the sixteenth century, then, carried on verse romance

in two distinct directions: the classical direction from Aristotelian

theory and Vergilian practice toward narrative singleness and sequence;

the allegorizing of the medieval cycles toward a series of counsels for

individual and social conduct.

(_a_) _Tasso_

Tasso’s is the only one of the Renaissance romances of chivalry whose

title is its subject. Malory’s subject is far more than the death of

Arthur, Pulci’s than Morgante. Boiardo’s subject is not Orlando in

love, nor Ariosto’s Orlando mad for love. Spenser’s title merely makes

his encomium part of his allegory. But Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_

exactly sums up his scope and his theme. The Carolingian tradition,

still furnishing the scene and the persons, no longer furnishes the

pattern. The persons are fewer; and they are recreated to function in a

continuous story. Thus Soliman and Peter the Hermit have definite roles;

and Godfrey becomes the protagonist. The time is idealized to assemble

the heroic past about the medieval enterprise of deliverance, to bring

into one sequence the _chansons de geste_, the Carolingian cycle of

romance, and several crusades. The struggle of the West with the East, no

longer background or setting, is brought forward. It appears much less

as the exploits of individuals, much more as an enterprise in common.

Further it is an enterprise of religion, to rescue the holy places from

unbelievers, to restore them to Christendom as a shrine of pilgrimage. It

is animated by _pietas_, the Vergilian motive Christianized, the sense

of mission. The individual warriors, no longer adventurers, are soldiers

of the Cross. Though the actual crusades were medieval, they were still

in men’s minds as unfinished. Boiardo laments the postponement of a

recent proposal to revive them. Tasso writes not to further this, or any

other present movement, but to present crusade as historic. He focuses

all crusades in one historic action. His narrative of Godfrey and the

paladins is controlled by the idea of crusade as deliverance.

Such singleness of purpose naturally reduces encomium. The expected rolls

of honor celebrating the house of Este, are fewer and more detached.[38]

Reduced also, with one important exception, are lyric interludes. Turning

conventional themes to beauty, Tasso pauses less often to dilate emotion

with Ariosto than to interpose reflection or the escape of pastoral.

[In the garden of Armida] See how the rose pricks modest and

virgin from the green. Half-open yet, half-closed, the less she

shows herself the fairer she. Lo! bold already, she reveals her

breast naked; lo! again it droops and is not seen. It is not

seen which had been desired by a thousand maids and a thousand

lovers.

So passes, at the passing of a day,

Of mortal life the flower and the green.

April cannot be halted nor return

To flower again, to green a second spring.

Gather we roses handsome as the morn

Of this our day, which soon will lose its calm,

Roses of love. Ah! let us love betimes,

When loving we may still be loved again (xvi. 14-15).[39]

Scenery, handled with the usual Italian restraint, is often woven

expertly into the narrative. We are made to feel Jerusalem before it is

described; and the grave and restrained description of the great Mass is

inseparable from the action. Tasso’s subordination of literary means to

literary function dominates his style. The frequency of his classical

similes is apparent only on review; it does not challenge attention, much

less interrupt. His classical allusions are not extraneous decoration,

much less parade. His word-play is used oftenest to mark the close of a

stanza. His verse is harmonized. These are various aspects of artistic

conscience. Tasso never plays the virtuoso; he is too great an artist.

The onwardness of the whole story, which is most distinctive in this

achievement, could hardly be carried out in Tasso’s time with entire

consistency. Though there is none of the former easy shifting from tale

to tale, though tactics and strategy are made to control and subordinate

the traditional single combats, there are a few interpolated tales:

Sofronia and Olindo in Canto II; Sven, isolated and picturesque in Canto

VIII; Clorinda’s origin in Canto XII. Canto X is less a stage than a

pause to tell what was said and thought on one side and on the other. The

enchantment of the wood in Canto XIII is a parenthesis in the siege. The

most serious deviation is for Rinaldo and Armida. Armida has too much

stage—as Dido has in the _Aeneid_, yes, but with less warrant. While

the siege waits, Cantos XIV and XV detail the infatuation of Rinaldo

and linger over the journey for his recall. Nothing of this counts for

the sequence of the poem but his defection at a critical point and his

return. The rest is dilated for its own picturesqueness and passion.

But the flaw is conspicuous only because Tasso’s sequence is beyond any

previous attempt. The Rinaldo episode could be added without disturbance,

here or there, in Boiardo’s poem, Ariosto’s, or Spenser’s. Tasso has

taught us to expect more.

To a degree hitherto unattained in the romances, and rarely even

attempted, his persons are characterized for their function. Even Armida

thus functions early (Canto V) in the whole scheme as disintegrating.

She is more than a type of enchantress, more than a personification

of lust. Though toward the end her despair at losing Rinaldo may be

too oratorical and too much like Dido’s, her revenge breaks down for

love. In other cases, too, magic and demons are more acceptable because

the visible human motives and action reduce them almost to figures of

speech. For instance, the magic borrowed from the _Aeneid_ in Canto X

is merely a device for having Soliman present, acting in his own fate.

Personifications are rare; and even the stock hermit has more distinct

function. Godfrey is much more than Arthur or Charlemagne. His largeness

of view is at once intelligence and faith. A cardinal example of Tasso’s

art is the creative use of the archangel St Michael. He comes as light

and allies the heavenly host to the earthly. _Jerusalem Delivered_ is

not only the integration of the traditional hero stories; it is also the

realization of the Renaissance dream of epic.

(_b_) _Spenser_

Spenser’s most obvious peculiarity of style is archaism. Some of the

_arts poétiques_ repeat perfunctorily the rhetorical advice to revive

old words; but none of the other romancers follows it with conviction.

Though archaism is historically one of the habits of sophistic oratory,

with Spenser it was animated rather by the desire to revive the English

poetic tradition. Failing in this through ignorance of language, he but

made his diction more difficult.

The style of the _Faerie Queene_ is of its time in decorative classical

similes. In classical allusions Spenser leans more heavily on legend

and mythology. Sometimes he inserts lore gratuitously. Throughout he

throws together classical and medieval, Christian, and pagan.[40]

Occasionally mythology is made a vehicle for contemporary politics and

religion. Usually decorative, his mythology is generally incidental, not

functional. Thus his angels, too, are disappointing beside Tasso’s.

Following thus generally the Renaissance habit of learned elegance,

Spenser shows his own hand in concreteness. He is less often content

with mere epithet. He specifies even the details of a kitchen; and he

specifies habitually in abundant sensory images, even of ugliness.

Therewith she spewd out of her filthie maw

A floud of poyson horrible and blacke,

Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw,

Which stunck so vildly that it forst him slacke

His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:

Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,

With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,

And creeping sought way in the weedy grass.

Her filthie parbreake all the place defiled has (I. i. 20).

Oftener picturesque, such vividness decorates even the traditional

extravagance.

Thus long they trac’d and traverst to and fro,

And tryde all waies, how each mote entrance make

Into the life of his malignant foe;

They hew’d their helmes, and plates asunder brake,

As they had potshares bene; for nought mote slake

Their greedy vengeaunces but goary blood,

That at the last like to a purple lake

Of bloudy gore congeal’d about them stood,

Which from their riven sides forth gushed like a flood (VI. i. 37)

For Spenser’s diction is habitually overloaded.

The verse is surcharged with alliteration.

O how great _s_orrow my _s_ad _s_oule a_ss_aid (I. ii. 24).

Sometimes her head she fondly would a_g_uize

With _g_audy _g_irlonds or _f_resh _f_lowers dight

About her necke, or _r_ings of _r_ushes plight (II. vi. 7).

Day and night keeping _w_ary _w_atch and _w_ard

For _f_eare least _F_orce or _F_raud should unaware

Breake in (II. vii. 25).

That her _b_road _b_eauties _b_eam great _b_rightness threw (II.

vii. 45).

Spenser’s metric, often obscured by fanciful spelling or uncertain

pronunciation, is expertly varied. The Spenserian stanza, undoubtedly

skillful, is nevertheless inferior to the Italian octave for narrative.

It carries on with less ease. The sheer metrical task of the six

completed books (3,732 stanzas, or 33,588 lines) was beyond Spenser’s

revision. Some rhymes remain forced by stilted transposition, or upon

insignificant words, as in the last line of the first example above, and

in:

And henceforth ever wish that like succeed it may (I. i. 27).

And each the other from to rise restraine (II. ii. 64).

Though he uses expertly the variation of throwing together two stresses,

he has also left many lines clogged with more than can be uttered without

scanting or even stumbling. Thus in the second canto of the first book:

And to him calls “Rise, rise! unhappy swaine” (l. 4).

He could not rest; but did his stout heart eat (l. 6).

Did search, sore grieved in her gentle brest (l. 8).

O too deare love, love bought with death too deare! (l. 31).

In both style and verse the _Faerie Queene_ is the least facile of the

chivalric romances.

For the composition of the whole, Spenser’s scheme is not narrative.

The most descriptive of all the romancers, he has made his total effect

not merely abundant separable ecphrasis but pageantry. For holding the

pageantry together he proposes in his preface moral allegory, “fashioning

a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” This end,

Caxton’s preface to Malory proclaims, is attained without allegory, by

the romances themselves as stories. But now romance, having been first

rewritten in Renaissance style, and then recomposed as Vergilian epic,

is to be moralized. Further, the allegory is political. Artegall is Lord

Grey de Wilton; Duessa and Radegund, Mary Queen of Scots; Archimago, the

Pope. The poem is anti-Catholic with the Elizabethan political bias.

Its attacks on abuses of the Church, no louder than those of _Piers

Plowman_, are essentially different in that Elizabethan England has

broken with the medieval vision of unity. Spenser speaks for the most

self-sufficient of the rising nations, and makes its national mission

his own. For the divine mission of the poet in Renaissance classical

phrase means practically the claim of the poet to support by the court.

The new nationalism but intensifies encomium. Spenser was a court poet

in the same way as Ariosto, and to an even greater degree. He celebrates

not only England, but the Queen and his immediate patrons. He prefixes

a letter to Raleigh and seventeen poems to lords and ladies; and he

interposes the usual references and allusions. None of the chivalric

romances is more devoted to encomium than the _Faerie Queene_.

To weave all these strands into any large single sequence is probably

beyond the capacity of allegory, and certainly beyond Spenser’s

achievement. The legendary history of Britain in Book II has little

enough to do with the theme of constancy; the long pastoral in Book

VI with the theme of courtesy. Even single books, then, do not always

hold together. Within a single virtue we have at most a medieval series

of _exempla_. Even if Spenser had lived to subsume all his virtues in

Magnificence, the Renaissance _virtù_, he would have achieved only the

summary of a series. The earlier critics of the _Faerie Queene_ were

embarrassed by their obligation to consider it as epic. Spenser’s quoting

of the Horatian _in mediis rebus_ “A poet thrusteth into the middest”

in his preface, and his beginning thus “A gentle knight was pricking on

the plaine” are merely superficial. No long poem is farther removed from

epic than the _Faerie Queene_. Dryden, in a digression of his _Essay

on Satire_ (1693), said more significantly: “There is no uniformity of

design in Spenser.”

Instead of being ruled out as merely Dryden’s preoccupation with French

seventeenth-century “regularity,” this may well be pondered. Later

criticism of the romantic period, indeed, was inclined to reply: “What

of it? The _Faerie Queene_ offers so much else that we are content to

dispense with uniformity of design.” But still later criticism has not

been so sure; and, what is more important, many readers have balked. The

poem does not carry through. Today those who have read the six books are

inclined to boast. Doubtless the forming of a gentleman has less appeal

as an idea than Tasso’s common enterprise of deliverance. Certainly

the poetic machinery of knight errantry allegorized as the triumphs of

virtues over vices has less appeal than crusade. Motive and method are

insufficient to integrate the _Faerie Queene_ and carry it forward.

Its very timeliness has faded into insularity. _Don Quixote_, full of

seventeenth-century Spain, is significant to the whole western world; the

_Faerie Queene_ is sometimes significant only in terms of Tudor politics.

But probably the main reason for the waning of the _Faerie Queene_ is

the insufficiency of the conception to animate a long poem and of the

composition to carry it forward. Beside _Paradise Lost_, to say nothing

of the _Divina Commedia_, it is seen to have “no uniformity of design” in

the sense of lacking effective integration.

Chapter VI

DRAMA

Revival of drama is not a Renaissance achievement. The Renaissance has

no drama distinctively its own. Even the sixteenth century prolonged a

period of transition. Elizabethan comedy found new ways only in its last

decade; Elizabethan tragedy, French tragedy and tragicomedy, matured

in the seventeenth century. Medieval sacred plays continued, and the

moralities proved too feeble dramatically to survive. Court shows of

various kinds and degrees did, indeed, experiment dramatically with

mythology, pastoral, and even rustic realism; but quite generally they

lingered in allegory and pageantry, and their dramatic successes did not

widen dramaturgy till 1590. While it practiced popular drama in _mystère_

and _miracle_, the Middle Age had repeated that definition of drama which

made it not so much a distinct form of composition as a style. This

conception persisted through the Renaissance, especially in tragedy.

Tragedy was still the fall of a prince; and it was rather a dialogue in

high style than a sequence of action on the stage. Renaissance tragedy

was classicized, indeed, in style; but in composition it remained as

immune to the example of the Greek tragedians as the poetics[41] to

the theory of Aristotle. It still imitated Seneca and quoted the “Ars

poetica” of Horace. Often it was not even intended for the stage.

Comedy had better auspices and somewhat earlier development. Plautus and

Terence, already familiar to the Middle Age, had the great advantage of

being acted. Latin school plays, translations, imitations, kept before

the Renaissance the pattern of Latin Comedy. Narrow and conventional, but

definite and stirring, this had been found adaptable to the _fabliau_

situations of medieval farce, and was still active. Indeed, it was the

starting point of many a Renaissance dramatist. Until Greek tragedy

finally became active in dramaturgy, the only classical model for play

composition that went beyond Seneca was Latin Comedy.

1. SACRED PLAYS

The most widespread stage drama of the fifteenth century was medieval.

_Mystère_ and _miracle_, _sacre rappresentazioni_, continued, indeed,

well into the sixteenth century. The _Annales d’Aquitaine_ of Jean

Bouchet is quite specific.

The King of France, by his letters patent issued the 18th day

of January, 1533, commanded all the nobles of Poitou ... to

appear with such [troops and equipment] as they owed for his

service in the following May; and the review (_monstres_) was

before the Seneschal of Poitou in the city of Poitiers....

On the 14th of July the mayor, échevins, and bourgeois of

Poitiers also gave their review for the king’s service in

the aforesaid city. And on the morrow were made joyous and

triumphal presentations (_monstres_) of the mysteries of the

Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension

of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the mission given by the

Holy Spirit, which mysteries were played for a fortnight in

the old market of the aforesaid city, in a theater built most

triumphally around it (_en un théatre fait en rond, fort

triomphant_). And the aforesaid play began on Sunday, the 19th

day of the aforesaid month, and lasted continuously for the

eleven days following, wherein were very good actors and richly

costumed.... The Passion and Resurrection were played also

three weeks afterward, or thereabouts, in the city of Saumur,

where I saw excellent acting (page 473 of the edition of 1644).

This description applies in essentials to the English Corpus Christi

cycles, which we have in fifteenth-century texts, and to the general

European tradition. What was that tradition in terms of drama? Typically

a saint’s legend (_miracle_) is less available for a play than a Bible

story. The external life of a saint represented as a series of trials

may be unwieldy or monotonous. The great moments of the Magdalen,

indeed, have as clear stage possibilities as the sacrifice of Isaac;

but generically the _miracles_ yielded less effective drama than the

_mystères_. The distinction between the two soon ceased to be current

in England; there the word _miracle_ came to be applied to either.

_Mystère_, applied as above to Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, and so

forth, refers more properly to a series than to a single play. Was there

drama, then, in a whole series of sacred plays?

Yes, abstractly in idea, as when we speak of the drama of the Terror

in France. But the dramatic values of a whole period can be only

suggested; they are rather pervasive than controlling. The suggestion was

heightened for the medieval audience by familiarity with the habit of

conceiving the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New and by typical

characterization. In sculpture, glass, or poetry the Baptist is not only

the immediate forerunner; he is the last of the prophets. The burning

bush is not only a portent for Moses; it prefigures the Virgin kindled

but intact. Piers Plowman, besides being a particular person in a poem,

is typically the _bon laboureur_; and on the higher plane he is the Good

Shepherd. The medieval audience, alive to such suggestions, more readily

saw in a given play the larger drama behind the particular action, felt

the communal emotion, and took the typical experience to itself.

The series as a whole, however, sacred history presented as a scheme

of divine providence, offered no specific training to a playwright.

Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac should suggest the great sacrifice; but that

would not make it a play. The immediate task was the realization of the

immediate dramatic values: Isaac’s growing fear, Abraham’s cumulative

struggle. Though the series included items intractable to representation,

it offered many situations worthy of the highest skill. These the

medieval dramatists had abundant practice in handling as distinct plays.

The unknown authors show real dramatic experience and sometimes clear

dramatic achievement. The English evidence is especially convincing.

The guild, of course, keeping the scrip of a given play along with the

costumes and properties, was free to revise or even to supersede. Some

of the devices, such as the comic struggle with Noah’s wife, evidently

arose from the actual performance. None the less certain plays stand out

as dramatically composed: the admirable progress of the Brome _Abraham

and Isaac_, the diction of both Mary and Joseph so purely answering the

action of the York _Nativity_, the rapid, direct, free handling of the

Towneley _Secunda Pastorum_. The sacred plays, then, constituted within

limits an important dramatic tradition; and that tradition was still

active in the sixteenth century.

2. TRAGEDY

The tragedies of Seneca are so oratorical as to suggest rather

declamation than acting.[42] The great persons of Greek tragedy, Oedipus,

Medea, or the house of Atreus, are revived not to interact toward their

doom, but to make speeches. Nevertheless the vogue of pieces so inferior

as drama, holding over from the Middle Age, had long and wide Renaissance

authority. There is no clearer example alike of the preoccupation with

oratory and of the habit of conceiving poetic as rhetoric. The printing

of the great Greek plays, and even their translation, were slow in

counteracting Seneca. Nor was Seneca altogether a hindrance. Encouraging

the fustian or dullness of lesser men, he invited the magnificence of

Marlowe. But he delayed the progress of dramaturgy by confirming the

Renaissance neglect of composition for style.

“There is no one in France,” says Turnebus in a note[43] to his friend’s

tragedies, “with any pretensions to the humanities but knows George

Buchanan.” The humanists, lest after all their eminence in Latin should

not be ratified by posterity, prudently praised one another. Joseph

Scaliger called Buchanan the first Latin poet of Europe (_ommes post se

relinquens in Latina poesi_), as Heinsius was to call Joseph Scaliger

the greatest scholar and man of letters. The complacent certitudes have

suffered so much from the irony of time that we should be careful to give

the sixteenth-century humanists their due. The type of international

scholar for whom Latin was the literary language persisted in Buchanan

(1506-1582). Spending some thirty years in France, he may have been

more familiar with French than with his northern vernacular; but all

his writing was in Latin. Such a humanist might well sustain his rank

in Latin poetry not only by lyric verse and didactic, but also by

dramatic (_Georgii Buchanani Scoti ... opera omnia_, ed. Ruddiman,

Edinburgh, 1715; Vol. II, “Poemata,” dated 1714), and is quite typical of

Renaissance tragedy in Latin.

His Latin translation of the _Medea_ of Euripides seems to have been

presented by students at Bordeaux in 1543.[44] His _Jephthes_, printed at

Paris in 1554, recalls the passage of the Red Sea classically.

Quum, te jubente, pigra moles aequoris

Posuit procellas, mobilis stupuit liquor

Cursu coacto, et vitreus crystallino

Muro pependit pontus hinc et hinc, viam

Praebere jussus (p. 5).

Serial iteration is sharpened by antithesis.

Ut trudit undas unda, fluctus fluctui

Cedit sequenti, pellitur dies die;

Sempee premuntur praeterite novis malis;

Dolor dolori, luctui est luctus comes (p. 2).

The capable verse rises to metrical skill in the choruses. In _Baptistes_

(1576) the first chorus points with epigram the Sapphic familiar to the

Middle Age.

Occulit falsus pudor impudentem,

Impium celat pietatis umbra,

Turbidi vultu simulant quieta,

Vera dolosi (p. 19).

Classicism is even certified by pagan phrase; but there is no classical

dramatic composition. In all its declamation and debate _Jephthes_ has

little dramatic movement. The long speeches of _Baptistes_ hardly achieve

even characterization. If Buchanan had learned from Euripides what made

_Medea_ a play, he was not making one himself; he was casting Latin

poetry in dialogue and dividing oratory into five acts. In this he is

typical of humanistic Latin tragedy. Learned, allusive, competent in

style, it is not drama.

Classical tragedy in the vernacular is sufficiently exemplified by Robert

Garnier (1544-1590, _Œuvres_, ed. Lucien Pinvert, Paris, 1923, 2 vols.).

Knowing Greek tragedy as well as Seneca, appreciative, capable in style,

making some dramatic advance in his seven tragedies from 1568 to 1583, he

yet stopped short of the Greek type of composition, the dramaturgy that

reduces a story to its crisis in order to move the play by compelling

sequence of action. For his tragedies, though some of them may have been

presented, were poems written to be read.

The argument of _Porcie_ (1568) closes thus:

“Here, then, is the summary of the history on which I have

planned this tragedy. You will find it in Dio’s 47th book,

in Appian’s 4th and 5th, and in Plutarch’s lives of Cicero,

Brutus, and Antony. I have also interwoven the fiction of the

death of the Nurse, to involve it further with gloom and sorrow

and make the catastrophe more bloody.”

Act I consists of (1) a monologue by the Fury Mégère, a fine

piece to say, and (2) a chorus of six rhymed stanzas. It is

rather a prelude than an act.

In Act II Portia’s monologue is followed by a chorus imitating

Horace’s second Epode, and the Nurse’s monologue by their

dialogue and another Horatian chorus. There is no action. The

dialogue gives a hint of characterization when Portia in her

doubt and fear regrets the death of Caesar.

Act III. Upon a Senecan monologue by Areus breaks Octavius to

announce the rout and death of Brutus. The ensuing dialogue of

balanced contrasts passes to Senecan speeches. After a chorus

Antony vaunts the deeds of his mythical ancestors and his own

prowess. The only function of Ventidius is to listen. Antony,

Octavius, and Lepidus, in balanced dialogue, then in longer

speeches, agree to divide the world. The chorus of soldiers

rejoices in the prospect of booty.

Act IV brings the rout and death of Brutus to Portia by

messenger. Her long tirades culminate in her speech on

receiving the urn of ashes, and are followed by a chorus.

Act V is an epilogue. The Nurse reports the death of Portia,

and engages in responsive lyrics with the chorus of soldiers.

Not really five acts, then, but three frame a piece without dramatic

action. Though it is focused on a brief period, it does not thereby

realize dramatic sequence. Consisting of oratory and lyric, it is

conceived as a poem, not as a play.

The style, careful in the balances of the dialogue, has effective

oratorical iteration: “C’est trop, c’est trop duré, c’est trop acquis.”

Jupiter, qui _voit tout, voit_ bien qu’il ne te reste

Pour avoir _tout_ ce _rond_ que la _rondeur_ céleste.

_Il ha peur_ pour soymesme, _il hi peur_ que tes bras.... (I. 21).

The more pervasive suggestion of internal rhyme is combined with this

again in the fifth act.

_Or’_ il est t_em_ps d’_ou_vrir la p_or_te;

Il est t_em_ps de m_ou_rir, l_an_g_ou_reuse vieillesse,

Vieillesse lang_ou_reuse, hélas! qu’att_en_s-tu plus? (V. 82).

Of the same type are the two tragedies of 1574, _Hippolyte_ and

_Cornélie_.

Act I of _Cornélie_ is again a prelude consisting of a fine

monologue and a chorus. In II Cornelia and Cicero remind each

other of the past and moralize on human life. The theme of

mutability, carried out in the chorus, ends on the hope of

another deliverance from tyrants. In III the chorus continues

this theme after dialogue with Cornelia and her receiving

of Pompey’s ashes. IV brings on first Cassius and Brutus,

then Caesar and Antony. V, though more nearly an act, makes

extravagant use of the messenger.

_Marc-Antoine_ (1578), surer perhaps in its oratory and finer in its

lyric, is no more dramatic.

Philostratus, a minor person, is added (II. i) merely to

expound the situation in a monologue. Octavius and Agrippa

appear only in IV. Lucilius is in III only to receive the

exhalations of Antony; and Charmion has little more function in

II and V. Once more V is mainly a series of tirades. Act II,

scene iii adds to Cleopatra’s oratory a flash of jealousy and

the suggestion of Diomedes that she save the situation by using

her fatal beauty on Caesar; but neither is carried out.

In _La Troade_ (1579) Garnier turned to Euripides.

Act I, for the first time more than a prelude, consists

nevertheless, after Hecuba’s opening monologue, of responsive

lyrics between her and the chorus. The envoy Talthybius arrives

toward the end. Act II, mainly a debate between Andromache

and Ulysses, introduces Helen and Astyanax and closes with a

chorus. Act III, bringing back Hecuba and Talthybius, adds

Pyrrhe, Agamemnon, Calchas, and Polyxena. Act IV brings

together Hecuba and Andromache. The murder of Astyanax and

the death, already forecast, of Polyxena are announced by

messenger. Act V gives main place to Polymestor, who appears

for the first time. The act is in effect an appendix, adding

the _Hecuba_ of Euripides to Seneca.

Evidently Garnier has not grasped the composing habit of Greek tragedy.

At most he has managed somewhat more interaction between such groups

of persons as he had begun by keeping apart in separate acts. He is

working at literature, not at drama. Hence his evident intelligence

carries his experience only so far. The argument of _Antigone_ (1580)

cites the Theban plays of all three great Greek dramatists, and adds

Statius to Seneca. The plot generally uses Seneca for the first three

acts, the _Antigone_ of Sophocles for the last two. The combination is

rather piecing than fusion, and shows no appreciation of the dramaturgy

of Sophocles. In 1582 Garnier was adventurous enough to attempt a

dramatization of Ariosto. _Bradamante_, which he calls a tragicomedy,[45]

is hardly more than a division of certain parts of the _Orlando_ into

scenes which are far from being dramatic units. As in the earlier plays,

the five acts are in effect three. Some characterization is achieved

in the minor persons Aymon and Beatrix. Bradamante herself is chosen,

of course, for those lyric tirades with which Ariosto had delighted the

century.

But Garnier lived to vindicate tragedy within his own limits. _Les

Juifves_ (1583) has more values for representation and, in the pervasive

suggestion of the inextinguishable mission of Israel, a certain unity

of tone. “The subject is taken,” says the argument, “from the 24th and

25th chapters of the fourth book of Kings, the 36th chapter of the second

book of Chronicles, and the 29th chapter of Jeremiah, and is more amply

treated by Josephus in the 9th and 10th chapters of his Antiquities.”

The persons are the Prophet, Nebuchadnezzar, Nabuz, and Amital; the

Jewish Queens and Nebuchadnezzar’s Queen; a Duenna and a Provost; and the

frequently appearing Chorus. Two other main persons, Zedekiah and the

High Priest, appear first in IV; the Prophet, only in I and V. As in the

earlier tragedies, I is a monologue of lamentation on the Captivity plus

a chorus, that is, an expository prelude; and V, reporting the slaughter

of the children, is an epilogue urging submission to the will of God and

the hope of deliverance by Cyrus. Though the groups are somewhat better

combined, there is little change in the habit of composition.

Such effectiveness as this tragedy has beyond spectacle is mainly lyric.

The abundant choruses and responses are both expert as verse and inspired

by Psalms and Prophets to eloquence: Adieu, native land (II. v); How

shall we sing in a strange land? (III. iii); Wretched daughters of Sion

(IV. i). Though there is some interaction of plea and refusal, some

suspense, all the decisions have been made beforehand. There remain to

animate a play the sight and sound of communal fortitude. _Les Juifves_

is a noble poem; its literary type is still clear in the nobler _Samson

Agonistes_ of Milton.

That Garnier’s classicism is thoroughly of his time is vouched by forty

editions in less than thirty years. He was classical superficially in

following the custom of mythological ornament. He was classical further

in imitations on classical themes with classical persons, and still

further in going from Seneca to Euripides and even to Sophocles. But his

classicism kept sixteenth-century limits in looking away from composition

to style. As to the Middle Age, dramatic meant to his time not a

distinctive movement, but a certain style. Though he was intelligent and

serious enough to use Seneca in his own way, less than the Elizabethans

for melodrama, more for moral urgency, he did not see beyond the Senecan

conception of drama as oratory plus lyric. He found his own oratory,

his own lyric; but his progress was rather in tragic diction than in

tragedy.[46]

3. HISTORY PLAYS

The most distinctive Elizabethan stage experiments of the waning

sixteenth century were the “histories.” Generally lacking focus,

series rather than sequence, often made over, sometimes nationalistic

propaganda, they still keep some of their Elizabethan stir. For the

putting of great men on the stage not only satisfied a story appetite

growing too fast for print; it showed prowess, as no story can quite

show, in action. Thus a history play, though it might be tragedy only in

the medieval sense of the fall of a prince, though it might be Senecan

enough in style, might teach stage values beyond Seneca. Widening

the field of tragedy beyond Greek legend to the opening East and to

national history, it also opened other methods of characterization and

other dramatic forms than were taught by either the Greek or the Latin

tradition.

The story play, then, should not be ruled out as _a priori_ undramatic.

Aristotelian theory and classical experience exhibit dramatic movement

as typically distinct from narrative, not the telling of the story, but

the compelling of its crisis to an emotional issue. In this aspect the

Greek tragic theater exhibits sharp contrasts to the Elizabethan: the one

vast, open, removing the audience so far as to compel orotund delivery

and preclude facial expression, the other small, closed, bringing the

audience so near as to invite facial play and even aside; the one limited

to a few persons, the other inviting many; the one unifying plot for

the sake of unbroken, cumulative sequence to an inevitable issue, the

other dispersing it over time and space for narrative values and for

individualizing characterization; the one crisis play, the other story

play. But the contrast is not absolute, nor does it establish exclusive

superiority. Greek tragedy is too great in its kind to need any cult

of it as the _beau idéal_. The sixteenth century might have progressed

faster for understanding that dramaturgy; but Shakspere came before

Corneille and by another road. Elizabethan drama, often bungling,

sometimes sprawling at first, and slow to master the essentially dramatic

method of interaction, was yet a school of various experience. Though the

experience of the “histories” was valuable mainly as preparatory, it also

vindicated the dramatic validity of a story play.

Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_ (1587) is poetry not only in what the Middle

Age called high style, but in dramatic conception. Though his sequel

failed to make it a tragedy, it is history brought home in heroic action.

The fourth act, indeed, lapses into spectacle; the fifth pushes the

ruthlessness beyond credibility, and the close is a formal gesture;

but for three acts we are in the thick. Not sustained as a sequence,

this activity is nevertheless dramatic to the extent of being typically

distinct from Seneca. For all its oratory, _Tamburlaine_ is story in

action. Thus was opened the way for Shakspere’s “histories” of the 90’s.

We shall do his revolting _Richard III_ more justice if we neither excuse

it as carrying over an earlier appeal of blood, nor blame it for failing

to focus the monster in a tragedy. _Richard III_ is not tragedy dulled by

dispersion; it is dramatic story, dramatic in the interactions of that

princely world poisoned by treachery, story in cumulative damnation.

Shakspere had written the _Merchant of Venice_ and was writing _As You

Like It_, when he put on another “history” in _Henry V_ (1599).

4. PASTORAL AND RUSTIC COMEDY

Before the dramatic experience of the “histories” bore its best fruit

in a widening of tragedy, another sort of story enriched comedy.

Dramatic training through Latin comedy had been continuous from the

Middle Age through the Renaissance. As Ariosto had begun with _I

suppositi_ in 1509, so Shakspere wrote the _Comedy of Errors_ in 1591.

In Latin and in vernacular, in translation and in imitation, the quick,

smart formula of Plautus and Terence[47] continued its lessons. But

the abundant Renaissance pageantry of solemn entries, the court shows,

and the vogue of pastoral, had yielded here and there some dramatic

experience. This is evident as early as Poliziano,[48] whose _Orfeo_ is

classical in its pagan gods and demigods, specifically pastoral in its

shepherds. It is also myth, both in the original story of Orpheus and

Eurydice and in Poliziano’s shaping. His myth is effective spectacle;

his dialogue more than conventional responses. He has action enough

to conclude upon vociferous melodrama. _Orfeo_ is a play so far as it

goes; but it is too brief to make its dramatic sequence convincing.

Mythological drama is rather opened than established. In 1573 Tasso,

fulfilling a similar commission for a court show at Urbino, conformed

his _Aminta_[49] strictly to unity of place and time. But its sequence,

though uninterrupted, is hardly dramatic. It proceeds oftener by musical

recitative than by action. Lovely to see and hear, it gives more hints

for opera than for drama. Battista Guarini (1538-1612), professor of

rhetoric and poetic at Ferrara, and chief court poet after the withdrawal

of Tasso, spent years on his pastoral drama _Il pastor fido_.

Begun in 1580, finished in 1583, read aloud, revised, it was finally

published at Venice 1589/90. Apparently it was first staged in 1595. The

Venice edition of 1602 is the twentieth. Called tragicomedy, tragedy in

its crisis of life and death, comedy in its satyr and in its happy issue,

it is above all, in its persons, its scene, its mythology, consistently

pastoral. A prologue celebrating Arcadia as a blest retreat of peace,

and Caterina d’Este as worthy of her illustrious house, is spoken by

the river Alfeo. Besides this personification, and four choruses, there

are eighteen personae. Of these the majority are servants or companions

serving merely as interlocutors. Three, the temple officiant Nicander,

Corisca’s lover Corydon, and a messenger, are quite superfluous. No

person is characterized except as a type: the hero Mirtillo as a

devotedly faithful lover, the heroine Amaryllis as virtuous, Corisca as a

plotter. All are duly paganized.

I. The play opens with old Linco’s advice to athletic young

Silvio: go love betimes. A dialogue between Mirtillo expounds

the plot. Corisca’s monologue tells the audience that she is

in love with Mirtillo, and must have revenge for his disdain.

Three elders, Tityrus, the priest Montano, and Dameta, further

expound the situation in reminiscence. A satyr, in a monologue

on love, vows to seize the tricky Corisca. The persons having

been thus presented in separate sets, the act ends with a

chorus.

II. Mirtillo tells Ergasto how he fell in love forever with

Amaryllis. Dorinda in vain woos Silvio by detaining and

restoring his hound. Corisca’s monologue exults in the outlook

of her plot, and her dialogue misleading Amaryllis ends with

soliloquy. The satyr seizing her, she cajoles, insults, and

finally breaks away, thus providing action for the first time.

The concluding chorus moralizes the past.

III. Mirtillo, after apostrophizing spring and love, is

brought, through a game of nymphs devised by Corisca, to

Amaryllis, declares his passion, exchanges longer and longer

speeches, and finding her obdurate, vows to die. In a monologue

she tells the audience that she loves him nevertheless. Corisca

tricks them separately into seeking a cave. Each exhales a

monologue on the way. This is the complication. The satyr

unwittingly furthers it by blocking the cave with a rock, thus

imprisoning the two innocents. The chorus meditates on love.

IV. At this point all that remains of the action is to disclose

Corisca’s trick, correct the mistaken identity, and reveal the

true intent of the oracle. But since the play must have five

acts Guarini reserves all this to V, and makes IV a stalling

interlude of monologues, reports, and choruses. The only action

is in the last scene (ix), where Silvio, accidentally wounding

Dorinda, begins to fall in love with her.

V. Mirtillo’s foster-father, arriving from far, finds him about

to be sacrificed, having offered himself in place of Amaryllis.

The disclosure that these two are the fated couple meant by the

oracle is made gradually through five scenes, and capped by the

arrival of the blind seer Tirenio in vi. Silvio is reported

duly in love with the healed Dorinda. Even Corisca is pardoned;

and the play ends with hymeneal choruses.

The play is not moved by the actions of its persons. Complication,

indeed, comes through Corisca, who is the only person carried through the

play; but the solution is through persons brought in at the end solely

for that purpose. As with Garnier, the persons are presented in separate

groups; and they are on the stage to talk. The style is expertly careful.

Guarini has learned from Tasso how to modulate his verse. The notes

record constant reminiscences of the classics, both Greek and Latin, and

many borrowings; but the surcharging, again after the example of Tasso,

is discreetly harmonized. Pastoral drama, then, rather prolonged pastoral

than advanced drama. But its opportunities for spectacle, dance, music,

and imaginative suggestion were among the motives finally woven into a

play by Shakspere.

Meantime real rustics also, actual farmers, laborers, villagers, had long

been dramatized for gentlefolk and bourgeois by amateurs and increasingly

by professional companies. Angelo Beolco (1502-1542), called from one of

his favorite impersonations Ruzzante, even localized them on the stage in

Ferrara and Venice by Paduan dialect. As the shepherds of the Towneley

_Secunda pastorum_, his rustics are presented realistically. Here is

the essential difference from pastoral. The actual rudeness of such

impersonations, may, indeed, be dramatically exaggerated; but it must

always seem actual. Ruzzante’s vivid realizations transcend his Paduan

dialect by the appeal of actual peasant life, rudeness, shrewdness,

lewdness unveiled by the social conventions of a higher society, talking

in their own terms. Such rustic drama in time helped to discover a

dramatic interest beyond types in individuals. Types remain useful in

comedy because they are readily recognizable, the braggart soldier or the

clever rascal; and dramatic theory urges nothing more. But the stage

attempts with rustic persons sometimes opened in comedy of manners the

further appeal of characterization. The verisimilitude and propriety of

the theorists gave way to dramatic creation. As later in the “histories,”

so in rustic comedies, theory was widened by stage experience.

Ruzzante’s life was too short to bring his art to maturity. At forty,

though he had already triumphed in single characterizations, he was still

groping in the forms of Plautus. Much of his work is what is now called

sketch, rather dialogue or even monologue than play.

A characteristic piece is his _First Dialogue_. A soldier, reminiscent

here and elsewhere of the _miles gloriosus_, but characterized with some

individuality, is returning from the war ragged and wistful, but still

boastful. Catechized by an old friend, he gives his experiences, his

theory of life, and something of himself. So far the form is hardly more

than monologue; for the friend merely listens, questions, and comments.

There is no interaction. The effect, however, even in print, is dramatic

to the extent of vivid representation. The racy language has constant

suggestions of manner, gesture, stage business. It differs essentially

from the diction of Garnier. We come to know this man.

Then the soldier meets his wife. She is interested, not moved. Having had

to shift for herself in his absence, she cannot now break off convenient

relations for sentiment. Here is interaction, even a situation, and the

lines given to the man and to the woman clearly suggest it; but more than

lines are needed to make it a play. So Ruzzante took this second part

for the motive of his _Second Dialogue_. He saw the situation; he gave it

some complication, and closed upon violent action; but he did not sustain

the interaction of man and woman, and his third person, her senile lover,

remains almost separate.

So Ruzzante’s collected pieces[50] generally show less achievement

than promise. He was learning rapidly from the stage itself. Imperfect

playwright at his untimely death, he was already famous as a writer and

actor of “parts.” These Italian stage experiments of the 1530’s were

essentially like the Elizabethan fifty years later in giving to an old

field new stage values. Though they had rather a local success than any

general influence, they are significant now for what they opened.

In 1586 John Lyly gave the persons of his _Endymion_ Greek or Latin

names. But the myth suggested by his title does not take shape as

plot. Indeed, there is hardly any action, none that is dramatically

determining. The persons are on the stage to talk, the main persons in

orations, the Latin-comedy servants in repartee. Endymion’s dream is

presented by a dumb show in Act II, and recounted in Act IV. The close is

flatly by Cynthia’s fiat. The allegory, clearer of course to the audience

than to us, seems to be both personification of qualities and suggestion

of actual persons, as in Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_. In both aspects it

now makes a dull play duller.

Peele’s _Old Wives’ Tale_ is as random as its title, adding rustics to

classics and allegory to folklore. Not a story play, it is a collection

of little shows, each rather for itself than for any sequence. The

folklore material and the rustics are interesting; the play is not. That

anything so shapeless could have gained the stage in 1590 is sufficient

evidence of Elizabethan willingness to experiment. Within five years

Shakspere found the dramatic solution of myth and pastoral, folklore

and rustics, for court show in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. Forthwith

Lyly’s pedantic encomium and clumsy dumb show, Peele’s jolly rustics

and half-fairies, become as antiquated as the many Elizabethan gropings

through the moralities and pastoral. The court show has arrived at

fairyland. For this is all faery: the ancient heroic world from Boccaccio

and Chaucer, and the sprites with classical names. The classical story

of Pyramus and Thisbe is transmitted by rustics; and Bottom himself is

translated. Through all hovers the authentic elfin minister Puck.

_Midsummer Night’s Dream_ is a complete fusion, not only of style as

Tasso’s _Aminta_, but also in dramatic movement. As Theseus, Puck, and

Bottom, the lovers and yokels, are all conformed to the same world, so

they all interact in a single sequence toward a uniting issue. Even

the place is single. Such slight shifts as there may have been in the

Elizabethan theater are negligible; for of all its many presentations the

most convincing have stayed on a lawn before a green thicket. _Midsummer

Night’s Dream_ is a one-act play, Greek dramaturgy beyond Garnier’s or

Tasso’s. But instead of saying that Shakspere conformed to the dramatic

unities, we should rather say that he learned the dramatic importance of

holding fairyland together. Sixteenth-century stage experience, then, as

well as classical theory and imitation, opened the great drama of the

seventeenth century. The experience of court shows with the feebleness of

allegory, the escape of pastoral, the vitality of rustic realism, opened

the way for both romantic and realistic comedy. The experience of the

“histories” opened a new appeal in tragedy. For Corneille, as well as

Shakspere, was a man of the stage.

Chapter VII

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY POETICS

The revival of classical Latin was promoted by manuals and discussions,

and accompanied by still others directed to vernacular poetry. Though

none of these ranks as a poetic in the sense of a contribution to the

theory of poetry, not a few reveal or define habits of thought and taste,

directions of study, literary ideals and methods. Thus their importance,

far beyond their intrinsic values, is in their clues to literary

preoccupations and trends, their indications for a Renaissance weather

map.

1. VIDA

The ecclesiastic, Marco Girolamo Vida, addressed his three cantos of

Latin hexameters _De arte poetica_ (1527) to the Dauphin, son of Francis

I, with due invocation of the Muses.

Sit fas vestra mihi vulgare arcana per orbem,

Pierides, penitusque sacros recludere fontes,

Dum vatem egregium teneris educere ab annis,

Heroum qui facta canet, laudesve deorum,

Mentem agito, vestrique in vertice sistere montis.

It invites noble youth to write Latin poetry. The doctrine is mainly an

expansion of the “Ars poetica” of Horace;[51] the exemplar is Vergil.

I. Though heroic poetry is the highest, choose according to

your talent heroic or dramatic, elegiac or pastoral. Let the

great work wait while you sound and explore it; but meantime

seize those parts that come at once, and make a prose sketch of

the whole. The preparation of schooling in poetic and rhetoric

is necessary as training in appreciation. [The rest of the

canto is addressed, over the pupil’s shoulder, to teachers.]

Greek, established in Italy by the Medici, and especially

Homer, stimulate comparison. Of the Latins, the Augustans,

especially Vergil, have first claim. The others may wait till

taste has been matured by these. The master’s function is to

awaken and guide love of the best poetry without forcing it.

Even recreation may be pointed by classical suggestions. Calf

love must be handled with care. So soon as young ardor has

penetrated through passion to poetry, the boy should study its

monuments and taste the other arts. Though travel is useful,

and some experience of war, the central thing is unremitting

study of the poets. Thus metric, instead of remaining merely a

set of rules, becomes the testing of one’s own adjustments by

memories of reading, the oral revision of a mind full of great

poetry. Young ambitions should not be quelled by too severe

criticism, nor lack the privilege of retirement and freedom.

The world that grudges these owes its glory nevertheless to

poets, who have sacrificed worldly rewards to live in their own

peace. As the fire stolen by Prometheus, poetry is a divine

gift.

II. The second canto repeats Horace’s counsel: begin on a

subdued tone and at the crisis (_in mediis_). The action,

planned as a whole and clearly forecast, should control the

description. Greek is more tolerant of descriptive dilation

than is becoming to us Latins. Need I caution against the

dilation that comes from gratuitous display of erudition?

The detail of Vulcan’s shield for Aeneas has the point of

exhibiting the history of Rome. Variety has its claims;

but rolls of kings, legends, myths, comic relief, though

delightful as description, should not deviate. Be careful of

verisimilitude. Do not plan for length. Work day and night

on a conception limited and tried out this way and that. If

amplification seems desirable afterward, Vergil shows many

ways. [The citations are mainly descriptive.] Inspiration comes

when it will, and does not obviate revision. Study nature: the

ways of age, of youth, of woman, of servants and of kings, for

appropriateness, as in Vergil; for so you learn to move, as

Vergil by Euryalus. Study in others, especially in the ancient

Greeks, their conceptions (_inventa_) without hesitating to

borrow as Vergil from Homer. So may Rome ever excel in the arts

and teach the world. Alas for our discords and the bringing in

of foreign tyrants! though distant nations had already honored

Tuscan Leo and the Medici. The crusade against the Saracens

became only a dream.

III. Flee obscurity; let poetry be clear in its own light. Vary

to avoid repetition. Figures give vividness to both poetry

and oratory; but verse is freer with hyperbole, metonymy,

personification. Figures should avoid display, incongruity,

dilation. Style must always be appropriate. Follow the

classics, use suggestions from other poets, adapting the old

to the new, even borrowing. As a poet need not fear new words

that are already recognizable, so he may go to Greek, as his

classical ancestors before him. He may venture cautiously on

archaism, periphrasis, compounds, adaptations. Never let words

carry you beyond your meaning, except to serve the music of

verse. Verse is a shrine closed to the mass of men, open to the

few by a narrow way. For it must range beyond mere correctness

to harmony with the persons, with the scene, with each of

the three styles. Such counsels, sure as they are, will not

guarantee high achievement. That can be given only by Apollo.

Let us close by celebrating the supreme poet Vergil.

Commonplaces of rhetoric, from a source commonplace for centuries, why

were these put into elegant Vergilian hexameters? Hardly to make the

Dauphin a Latin poet; hardly to interpret what was already too well

known; hardly to advance poetic. The poem is an exhibition of competence

in learning, in teaching, and in Latin verse, a sort of thesis for the

degree of humanist. The person that it seeks to establish as a Latin poet

is its author.

2. TRISSINO

_The seven divisions of poetic_ (1529, enlarged 1563) by Giovan Giorgio

Trissino occupy the first 139 pages of the second volume of his collected

works (Verona, 1729). The first four divisions are devoted to diction,

metric, and verse forms. The fifth and sixth are substantially an Italian

paraphrase of Aristotle’s _Poetic_[52] with insertions from the “Ars

poetica” of Horace. Trissino repeats Aristotle without grasp of his

distinctive ideas. He has read also Dionysius of Halicarnassus (105);

he has the independence to disparage Seneca (101); and he considers why

Dante called his great work _Commedia_ (120); but he thinks that pastoral

eclogue is of the same poetic genus as comedy, and he does not make clear

that Aristotle’s distinction of dramatic from epic is in composition.

Though Trissino had not penetration enough to be constructive, or even

suggestive, he opened Aristotle early in the century to the wider circle.

3. GIRALDI CINTHIO

Giraldi Cinthio published together two essays on the composition of

romances,[53] comedies, and tragedies (_Discorsi ... intorno al comporre

de i romanzi, delle commedie, e delle tragedie ..._ Venice, 1554). In the

one on comedy and tragedy (pages 199-287, written in 1543) he moves, as

Trissino, over the surface of Aristotle’s _Poetic_ without grasping the

import of poetic as a distinct form of composition. For style he even

prefers Seneca (220) to the Greeks. In the essay on verse romances (pages

1-198, written in 1549) he speaks of having presented the subject in oral

teaching, and refers (4) to Vicentio Maggio’s lectures on Aristotle.

The word _romance_ has the same meaning with us as epic

with the Romans (5); and the form originated in France (6).

Considering first the plot (_favola_), as Aristotle bids,

we see in Boiardo and Ariosto that romance is the adorning

(_abbellimento_) of the strife of Christians with their

enemies (9). Though thus like epic or tragedy in imitating

illustrious deeds, romance has not a single action (12), but

several, perhaps eight or ten. Its organization (_orditura_)

is unhappily compared to that of the human body: the subject

being the skeleton; the order of parts, the nerves; the

beautification, the skin; the animation, the soul. This is the

plan of the treatise.

A single action is too restrictive for romance (22), whose

many actions are more desirable, as conducive to variety

(25). But the actions should be connected in a continuous

chain (_continua catena_) and have verisimilitude. The parts

should cohere as the parts of the human body. The poem

should be fleshed out at suitable places (26) with fillings

(_riempimenti_): loves, hates, laments, descriptions of places,

of seasons, of persons, tales made up or taken from the

ancients, voyages, wanderings, marvels [in short, anything for

sophistic display]. For there is nothing in heaven above, nor

in the earth beneath, nor in the very depth of the abyss, which

is not at the call of the judicious poet—provided (27) each be

appropriate in itself and to the whole.