Conversations

Classical and Renaissance intertextuality

Syrithe Pugh

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526152664
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For educated poets and readers in the Renaissance, classical literature was as familiar and accessible as the work of their compatriots and contemporaries – often more so. This volume seeks to recapture that sense of intimacy and immediacy, as scholars from both sides of the modern disciplinary divide come together to eavesdrop on the conversations conducted through allusion and intertextual play in works from Petrarch to Milton and beyond. The essays include discussions of Ariosto, Spenser, Du Bellay, Marlowe, the anonymous drama Caesars Revenge, Shakespeare and Marvell, and look forward to the grand retrospect of Shelley's Adonais. Together, they help us to understand how poets across the ages have thought about their relation to their predecessors, and about their own contributions to what Shelley would call 'that great poem, which all poets…have built up since the beginning of the world'.

Introduction

Syrithe Pugh

This volume had its origin in a small interdisciplinary symposium which took place at the University of Aberdeen in the summer of 2015, bringing together a group of classicists and Renaissance specialists to discuss their shared fascination with the practice of allusion, imitation and intertextuality in poetry of both periods. Our title, ‘Conversations’, is chosen in part to commemorate the animated and illuminating conversation enjoyed at the original symposium, and long into the evening, between those represented here and other friends now absent. It also has several other intended connotations. Firstly, it is meant to convey a sense of literary imitation as a lively process of give and take, as the poets discussed here read and respond to one another’s words, and the allusive text takes on the character of an interplay of voices, with memories and echoes of the old heard afresh and given a new turn, like a kind of reply or series of replies both from and through the later writer. Secondly, beyond the individual poets, it evokes the broader conversation between ages, cultures, world-views and languages, as poets self-consciously adapt an ancient original and adjust its meaning, reflecting on the different conditions which pertain to their own time and circumstances, and sometimes drawing on the voices and values of the past in an attempt to change the present. Finally, it refers to the lively conversation now under way in the wider world of academia between the disciplines of Classics and Renaissance Studies, which can be overheard in an increasing number of conferences, publications and even journals devoted to classical reception, and which is attracting ever more participants from both sides of the traditional disciplinary divide. The symposium and this volume set out to foster and contribute to that wider conversation, which promises to bring a wealth of new understanding to our study of the texts of both periods.

One thing, indeed, which is shared by all the contributors represented here, is a sense that the separation of Classics and Renaissance Studies into different specialized disciplines and departments in modern universities has sometimes been a barrier to our understanding of what ought to be considered, at a deep level, a single object of study.¹ A word often used to try to capture this singularity is ‘tradition’, but this is perhaps not an ideal description: the term may suggest something handed down to be preserved unchanged, bringing in its train unwelcome and inappropriate connotations of ideological conservatism or reverential obedience to elders. This would not be a true reflection of the kinds of continuity traced here. Rather, the body of literature which demands the attention of classicists and Renaissance scholars alike is open-ended, evolving, polyvocal, fractured, dynamic; marked by play, contradiction, dispute and innovation; but also bound together by the intricate interconnections and responsiveness between its separate parts. It is in fact more like a very long conversation, in which, for instance, a speaker in seventeenth-century England brings his or her peculiar concerns and ideas to bear, but may still be replying to another speaker who entered the conversation seventeen centuries earlier in Rome, and doing so in the light of contributions from others, early or late. Dividing the constituent parts of that conversation into different specialisms for study, along the lines of language or of periodization, impedes our ability to listen properly to it, and distorts our sense of what Renaissance culture was like. To those who enjoyed a formal education in the Renaissance, classical Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek) literature was as familiar as the most widely known modern vernacular works: indeed, in what was effectively their bilingual culture, the language of Virgil and Cicero was the medium not only for much official business but also for many new literary works – the large body of neo-Latin literature which is still only beginning to be catalogued and studied. Moreover, in the age of humanist scholarship and the early days of print, classical texts newly ‘discovered’, amended by the efforts of editors, or appearing in their first printed editions, could themselves come with the shock of the new. Latin and vernacular, ancient and modern existed side by side in the literary culture in which Renaissance authors were participating, as they did on the ever-expanding library shelves. Our very disciplines have grown out of the interactive simultaneity of that culture, as Renaissance writers interpreted and responded to their classical predecessors, and the methods and concerns of Renaissance scholars contributed to the evolution of our current view of classical literature and approaches to studying it.

This sense of a paradoxical contemporaneity between classical and Renaissance literature was also reflected in the title of the original symposium, ‘Reviving the Dead’, chosen to evoke the trope by which Renaissance writers commonly present themselves as bringing authors of the past back to life through their reading and their own imitative work – a rhetorical expression of what Thomas Greene calls ‘the necromantic superstition at the heart of the humanist enlightenment’.² A late and attractively light-hearted example is Robert Herrick’s ‘A Lyrick to Mirth’, where Herrick invites his musician friends to join him for an evening of poetry, music and merry-making, in which they will not only ‘Sing o’re Horace’ but ‘Rouze Anacreon from the dead’ so effectively that he becomes one of the revellers: at the end of the party they will have to ‘return him drunk to bed’. On the surface this is a piece of elegant whimsy, and indeed it is intrinsic to the poem’s style that it gives little hint of hidden depths. But if we peer through its translucent surface, it has much to tell us about how Herrick and his contemporaries view their relation to antiquity. We should notice first that this is not simply a statement that Anacreon’s verse is immortal. The revival imagined here happens not merely through reading and recital, but also through imitation, both in the behaviour being pictured, and in the literary form it is given. Herrick’s poem is designed to recall the many symposiastic lyrics in the Anacreontea (a collection of verse which he and his contemporaries attributed to Anacreon, though it is now believed to be itself an assemblage of later imitations of Anacreon’s poems), first-person poems in which the poet enjoys a symposium – a party at which respectable male citizens meet to drink wine, but also to listen to poetry and music, and to enjoy refined conversation (such as that recorded in Plato’s Symposium) – and which seem to have been composed for performance at symposia.³ It is one of many such poems scattered through the Hesperides, to the extent that the symposiastic scene of alcohol-fuelled and convivial song becomes not only a recurrent motif but an implicit metaphor for Herrick’s volume. Some of these poems describe habitual or future gatherings with living friends, some look back nostalgically to ‘lyrick feasts’ hosted by Ben Jonson, now dead, many involve the recitation of Anacreon or Horace (whose Odes also contain anacreontic and symposiastic songs) as well as newly made verse, and in some – as here – it is hard to distinguish the living guests from the dead. In ‘To Live Merrily and Trust to Good Verses’, we realize only gradually that Herrick is drinking alone, in a room which feels crowded by the ghostly presences of the catalogue of classical poets to whom he raises a glass. In ‘The Apparition of his Mistresse, calling him to Elizium’, there is even an uncanny moment when, during a catalogue of the poets of the past whose shades Herrick is told he will meet there, the speaker promises

Ile bring thee Herrick to Anacreon,

Quaffing his full-crown’d bowles of burning Wine,

And in his Raptures speaking Lines of Thine. (32–4)

Mere temporal distinctions and questions of life or death have become so insignificant that it no longer matters which poet is considered the original and which the imitator. Herrick and his contemporaries seem to exist in the same time as long-dead poets of Greece and Rome.

Such a thought might seem naïvely a-historicist, at the opposite pole from, and therefore of little interest to, the rigorous historicism which has enriched our understanding of the period in so much recent criticism. But in fact historical context is needed to see what is really at stake here. Though many of the poems it contains had originally been composed for private manuscript circulation as early as the 1610s and 1620s, the Hesperides was collected for print publication in 1648, at the end of the Civil Wars. Bearing a large crown on its title-page, and dedicated to Prince Charles, it is an unabashedly royalist publication, forming part of a ‘rush to print’ in the late 1640s by royalist poets who, having previously scorned the medium as socially beneath them because of its associations with paid work and trade, look to it now as ‘a safe haven for their work and a sign of political resistance to the authority of those who had defeated the king’s forces’.⁴ Herrick’s symposium poems take on a new significance in this context. Not only does convivial drinking, and especially the drinking of wine, take on a distinctly anti-Puritan edge and connotations of defiant Cavalier culture (at a time when ale-houses and traditional festivities were being suppressed, public morals becoming a focus of legislation and the dispersal of the royal court and the elite social networks associated with it making such convivial gatherings harder to arrange), but imitation of Anacreon specifically carries a complex freight of contemporary cultural and political meaning.⁵ It is particularly associated with the Order of the Black Riband, a literary fraternity formed by Thomas Stanley at the Middle Temple, in or by 1646. Stanley extended patronage mainly to royalist poets impoverished by the disbanding of the court and by the war, possibly including Herrick after he had been deprived of his ecclesiastical living for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant; its sign, the black riband, apparently symbolizes mourning for the Caroline age.⁶ The central activity of Stanley’s Order, like that of Ben Jonson’s ‘Tribe’ in the 1620s, was the reading, composition, exchange and appreciation of poetry; looking back on this period after the Restoration of monarchy, in a poem he never published, ‘A Register of Friends’, Stanley remembers their meetings as symposia where, ‘withdrawne from the dull ears of those / Who licens’t nothing but rebellious Prose,’ they ‘Love and Loyalty did … sing’, in defiance of ‘th’Usurpers’ and without the acquiescent ‘caution of that guilty Multitude’.⁷ But the Order of the Black Riband focussed especially on the translation of classical, modern European vernacular and neo-Latin poetry. Stanley was in particular a Greek scholar. In 1663 he would publish an edition of Aeschylus, with Greek text, Latin translation, textual notes and commentary, but at this time he was working on Anacreon: the expanded 1651 edition of his Poems and Translations would include the first complete English translation of the Anacreontea; John Hall already praises the first edition in 1647 as ‘breath[ing] new life into the Teian Lyre’. In the late 1640s and 1650s, imitations and translations of Anacreon were also produced by several other royalist poets whom we can confidently place in Stanley’s group (Richard Lovelace, Edward Sherburne and Alexander Brome), as well as others identified as ‘on its fringes’ (Robert Herrick, Charles Cotton the younger).⁸ These poems frequently seem to respond to one another, as for instance when Stanley titles his translation of Anacreontea 43 ‘The Grasse-hopper’, in an apparent nod to Lovelace’s poem, which adapts the same poem more loosely and in combination with an Horatian ode: as Revard suggests, à propos of a similar plurality of translations of a neo-Latin poem by Secundus, it seems that ‘poets of the circle were serving as audience and respondents to one another’, perhaps in ‘some kind of poetic competition’.⁹

The elegant and humorous gesture in Herrick’s ‘Lyrick to Mirth’, then, needs to be read against the background of a cultural moment in which a flowering of anacreontic verse emerges out of serious humanist scholarship and mutually responsive poetic composition, within a community of contemporari...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• List of illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Flying with the immortals: reaching for the sky in classical and Renaissance poetics
• 3 In and Out of Latin: diptych and virtual diptych in Marvell, Milton, Du Bellay and others
• 4 Reviving Lucan: Marlowe, Tamburlaine, and Lucans First Booke
• 5 Citizenship and suicide: Shakespeare’s Roman plays, republicanism and identity in Samson Agonistes
• 6 Adonis and literary immortality in pastoral elegy
• Bibliography
• Index