Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy

Literary Transvaluation

Literary

Transvaluation

From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean

Tragicomedy

Barbara J. Bono

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1984 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bono, Barbara J.

Literary transvaluation: from Vergilian epic to Shakespearean tragicomedy.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Virgil—Influence. 2. Virgil—Influence— Shakespeare. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PA6825.B66 1984 87?’.OI 83-1069

ISBN 0-520-04743-5

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

To Jim

Amore e T cor gentil sono una cosa.

(DANTE, La vita nuova)

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Introduction

I. Vergil’s Dido and Aeneas:

Interpretative Problems

The Dido Episode

Interpretative Legacy

II. From Vergilian Epic to Romantic Epic: Three Transvaluations

Augustine

Spenser

From Renunciation to Accommodation

III. Renaissance Dramatic Transvaluations

Alessandro Pazzi de Medici, Lodovico Dolce, Cesare de Cesari, Celso Pistorelli

Giovambattista Giraldi Cinthio

Etienne Jodelle

Robert Garnier, Samuel Daniel

Christopher Marlowe

Epic into Tragedy, Romantic Epic into Tragicomedy

IV. The Shakespearean Synthesis:

Prologue

History: Tragedy and the Herculean Hero

Philosophy: VJhat Venus did with Mars, or the Debate of Love and Strife

Fiction as Myth: Of Isis and Osiris, or the Myth of Egypt

Summary: From Verg Eoaic tnpli Shakespearean Tragicomedy

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgments

I cannot but be grateful to my masters and my authors. Many are cited in the course of my argument, but some of the most sweet are reserved for here. For several years now I have been sustained by the strong confluence of professional and personal lives. This study began at Brown University through the illumination of the late Rosalie Colie. It was first drafted and revised under the loyal and intelligent direction of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Its meaning for me grew and clarified in exchange with fine students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Theresa Krier and Janis Butler Holm stand for dozens of others. My colleagues there helped in many ways: I remember especially the practical aid of Ejner Jensen and Jay Robinson, and the detailed, long-standing intellectual support of C. A. Patrides and Ralph Williams. A fellowship grant from the Horace Rackham School of Graduate Studies of the University of Michigan allowed me to continue revisions rapidly. I completed editing and proofreading during the glorious otium of a year as junior fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. Karen Reeds encouraged submission of the manuscript to the University of California Press, and Doris Kretschmer has ably directed its progress there. I am grateful to the careful readers for the Press; although I have not always been able to follow their recommendations completely, they have much improved this book. In particular, Amy Einsohn was a most attentive and intelligent editor of the whole. I owe a special debt of friendship to Steve Lavine and to Michael and Marie-Pierre Ellmann.

My husband’s parents, Jean and the late Joseph Bono, and my own, Jane and John Nowik, were patient and understanding through many years of work that often kept us from them. I have, I hope, come to understand more closely the meaning of family, in both its genetic and extended senses, during the last several years, when I have so often had to trust my child to other true care-takers. My thanks to them all, especially to the Nobilette family. My husband, James Bono, is a talented historian who has helped me more than I can say, in every phase of this project, and yet never forgotten to warm the everyday. To Jim, then, and to our Joey, the most gentle thanks.

A Note on Sources

Unless otherwise noted, all editions cited are those listed alphabetically in the Bibliography under Sources or Studies. In quotations I have retained old spelling and punctuation, but have expanded contractions. For ancient texts I have supplied quotations in the original language where relevant for close analysis, and either Renaissance or readily available modern English translations as seems most appropriate in context. For example, when analyzing Vergil, whom most Renaissance authors would have known well in the original Latin, I quote the Latin and English of the Loeb edition for the convenience of the modern reader; whereas in discussing Shakespeare I quote Plutarch and Apuleius in the form he would have known, the English translations of Sir Thomas North, Philemon Holland, and William Adlington. Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from the new Arden editions, general editors Harold F. Brooks and Harold Jenkins.

Introduction

We need a more precise lexicon of literary imitation and influence, one that can mediate between narrowly defined source studies and sweeping claims about the patterns and directions of culture, one that can mediate between the conscious theoretical statements of a period and an actual literary practice that may respond to unrecognized forces.1 This study hardly fills this need, although it does appropriate a term—transvaluation—to describe generally my observations of a single highly significant chain of influence from Vergil to Shakespeare.

What began long ago as an investigation of the sources of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra soon broadened to include a recognition of that play’s conscious reversal of the values of Vergil’s Aeneid and an inquiry into the literary and cultural means of that inversion. Investigation of those means led me into that large creative middle ground where literary imitation is neither uncritical copying nor willful misprision, but rather what I call transvaluation, an artistic act of historical self-consciousness that at once acknowledges the perceived values of the antecedent text and transforms them to serve the uses of the present. Implicitly recognizing the complexities of the antecedent text and its destabilization through interpretation, the authors of such transvaluations seek to re-create it within history, sustaining a tradition through change. They supply the materials for a subtle literary history and, in the case of transvaluation of the Aeneid, for an important strand of cultural history as well, since especially in that text self-consciousness coincides with cultural consciousness.

This book studies Vergil’s Aeneid as itself the unstable source of a series of literary transvaluations within the western European narrative and dramatic tradition up to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Throughout the Latin Middle Ages and the Renaissance Vergil’s poem was our greatest literary classic, the subject of countless imitations. However, it is not this monumental heritage, but rather Vergil’s own struggles with the problem of change, that make the Aeneid so fertile a ground for transvaluation. Vergil’s artistic model is the Homeric epic, his cultural context the assimilation of the Hellenistic world into Roman rule. He contracts this model and this context into his poem’s opening movement, the story of Aeneas and Dido. At Dido’s banquet Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, and with it the fall of the active Homeric hero. Modeled after Greek tragic heroines and Apollonius’s Medea—regal, but also passionately violent and tinged with decadence—Dido sympathetically recapitulates Troy’s catastrophe. Her tragedy, proleptically tied to the defeat of Cleopatra, defines Aeneas’s epic mission and a more general myth of the Roman mind: in the face of rapid cultural change and the demands of world governance, individual will must be subordinated to the common good.

The care with which Vergil makes this argument—and the difficulty—is the matter of my first chapter, a detailed analysis of the story of Aeneas and Dido, set within the painful uncertainties of the poem as a whole. Later authors who are aware of Vergil’s achievement and its cost unerringly focus on the story of Dido; as she was for Vergil the means of articulating his indebtedness to, yet distance from, Homeric epic, so she became for them the means of defining their poetic and historical identity. In the second chapter I focus on reminiscences of Dido in three major narrative transvaluations of Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

These are three texts—others might be argued—whose rich and precise transvaluations centrally illustrate a major movement from the cultural constraints experienced by Vergil to the expressive freedom of the Renaissance. Augustine, who later explicitly appropriates the language and values of the Aeneid to Christian eschatology in The City of God, unconsciously assimilates the thwarted love of Dido in the Confessions and uses it to fuel his intensely personal quest for a transcendent subject of desire. Dante in turn appropriates Augustine’s Christian autobiography in The Divine Comedy.

Through the intimacy of his fictionalized relationship with Vergil, he specifies the difference between the Roman social hero and the Christian confessional hero. Using the language of Dido, he implies that Vergil’s own resonant longing can take him and his poetic father to the very threshold of salvation:

Adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae.

(Aen. 4.23)

Conosco i segni dell'antica fiamma.

(Purg. 30.48)

(I know the marks of the ancient flame).

Yet this longing must be radically redefined for Dante to cross that threshold. Spenser, writing within the context of Christian neoPlatonic syncretism in The Faerie Queene, tolerantly includes the Aeneid in his redefinition. The unresolved tensions in the Aeneid can be harmonized in the feminine epic quest of Britomart, who seeks to merge that poem’s tragic incommensurability between eros and civilization in a reciprocal dynastic marriage. In her highest expressions she is a figure for the Renaissance ideal of the artist as co-creator with God, triumphantly assimilating classical epic in romance.

A comparable movement occurs in Renaissance classical drama that takes the Aeneid as its generic source—a heroic drama descended from epic—and its moral matrix. The third chapter surveys Renaissance vernacular dramas of the story of Aeneas and Dido and the typologically related history of Antony and Cleopatra. It does so to illuminate, from the perspective of drama, Shakespeare’s long preoccupation with the poem, most thoroughly displayed in Antony and Cleopatra. Some of these plays, although they contain lengthy passages imitating Vergil’s poem, do little to transvalue it, to re-create the poem within a contemporary context. However interesting they may be for other reasons, they are characterized only briefly here. Others, although in no way direct sources for Shakespeare’s practice, illustrate a growing crisis in interpretation analogous to his own. Giovambattista Giraldi Cinthio uncomfortably imposes imperial and providential order on developing romantic expressiveness. Étienne Jodelle, writing within a context of an aspiring French Holy Roman Empire, develops a philosophical and religious defense of Dido’s love as an implied corrective to oppressive Roman tyranny. Yet other dramatic texts are arguably sources for Shakespeare, contributing widely varying specific features: Robert Garnier’s development of Plutarch’s Herculean Antony, Samuel Daniel’s language of transcendent release, Christopher Marlowe’s ironies toward his own hyperboles. Almost all these Renaissance plays interpret the Aeneid’s central tension as debate: individual versus community, love versus duty, will versus reason, eros versus civilization, nature versus power. In several instances the depth and intensity of the woman’s appeal presses heroic tragedy toward a resolution romantic in theme, tragicomic in structure.

Shakespeare combines a Renaissance transvaluation of the interpretative crisis in the Aeneid with the limitations and potentials of dramatic form. In Richard ZZ, examining his own country’s history, he depicts a fall from a former heroic ideal, from traditional authority, and from Adamic meaning. However, his path back to that ideal is increasingly not through abnegation of the personal and passional, but through creative collaboration of both characters and audience. Imitating the Aeneid, in the second tetralogy he implies the strain, as well as the creative pleasure, of forging one’s own myth of deity, of making theodicy. Transvaluing the Aeneid, he emphasizes the potential of the human creator. In the dramatic absence of an assured theological framework for his action, he encourages us, as audience, to collaborate in mortal attempts to make defect perfection. Such immanence leads him to emphasize responsible emotional engagement and human sexuality, not only as social fact but also as metaphor for creative potential. From the appeal to skepticism of the great tragedies and the intricate marriage dance of the mature comedies comes the powerful discordia concors of Antony and Cleopatra. There the orthodox interpretation of the Aeneid, the powerful historical literalisms of the common liar at Rome, become the means of testing the romantic hyperbole of the lovers and elevating them, through our assent, above their tragic defeat. The play contextualizes the Aeneid, implying through its depiction of an Egyptian regeneration myth of transcendence achieved through immanence that its literal tragic action is a metaphor for tragicomic re-creation. In this way it prepares for Shakespeare’s late tragicomic romances.

The detailed analysis of Antony and Cleopatra in the fourth chapter proceeds through a mythological and generic analysis of this discordia concors. The Roman tragedy of a Herculean Antony yields to the progressive reinterpretations of What Venus did with Mars. The variety of Renaissance interpretations of Venereal energy here define the crisis of the Aeneid as a debate between love and strife. The pressure of Roman reality causes the lovers to understand their former romantic hyperbole as playful rehearsal for a serious transforming endeavor. At the peripetia of the play Shakespeare transvalues the Aeneid as Antony’s motives for suicide change from Stoic resignation to transcendent erotic embrace, imagining the story of Aeneas and Dido as eternal romantic union, turning tragedy into tragicomedy. In its second climax, Cleopatra seeks to confirm this transvaluation as myth by evoking a neo-Platonic interpretation of the Egyptian regeneration myth of Isis and Osiris as the reunion of the Many of this world with the originative One. Through its constant emphasis on the humanity of the lovers and the staged literalism of their action, the play seeks to elicit our collaboration in the fulfillment of its skeptical late-Renaissance evocation of the powerful re-creative artist.

The impelling past here epitomized by the influence of the Aeneid was also a tremendous burden to sustain. The Faerie Queene and Antony and Cleopatra are among the great late-Renaissance recapitulations of culture. What in them is still a powerfully molded record of fact becomes for the next generations of artists a metaphor for the creative process, which they can appropriate with little or no reference to its historical details. This study closes with a brief analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where ancient Carthage, modern Tunis, and Bermuda voyages are already rapidly conflated in a myth of creative power. The Aeneid is subtly remembered there, but the audience can understand the main outlines of the play’s powerful psychological conflict without reference to its sources outside and within Shakespeare’s art. Much of the depth and specificity of the Aeneid’s power as a re-creative source declines as universal Latin culture fades, and with it a particular ideal of the historically responsible artist. Milton summarizes history at the end of Paradise Lost precisely in order to illuminate the paradise within; Pope dismisses the fable from The Essay on Man; and Wordsworth assimilates culture to the self in The Prelude.

Today, in another age of rapid change, literary critics must constantly rethink the degree of historical responsibility they wish to exercise in deconstructing a text or a canon. This book in many ways remains a traditional influence study; nonetheless, it broaches questions of authorial intention, textual openness, and interpretative freedom at a historical distance from the workings of literary change that allows us a tentative description of what has occurred. It argues for that historical period a rich re-creative relationship with its past. If it does so with some sense of the intricacy, pluralism, and hope of that process, then it may in its own turn be useful for other studies.

1 The most subtle general work I know on Renaissance literary imitation is Thomas Greene’s The Light in Troy.

I.

Vergil’s Dido and Aeneas:

Tensions and Transformations

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. (VERGIL, Aeneid)

Interpretative Problems

One’s final judgment of Vergil’s Aeneid is likely to depend on whether the unity in and among the various levels of the poem— moral, historical, metaphysical—seems achieved through a process of necessary sublimation or one of harsh repression. Does Vergil depict a problem difficult enough to warrant the extreme solutions the poem presents? And how adequate are these solutions? Historically, the chief interpretative focus of this discussion has been the first third of the poem, the story of Aeneas and Dido. Vergil’s extraordinary negative capability in this section, his ability to characterize with utter precision and great resonance the course of Dido’s passion and (what has been less frequently recognized) through it the sufferings of Aeneas and his culture, creates an irreducible tragic core in the work. What is sharply at debate is the nature and effect of that tragedy. For many readers it forever disrupts the epic purpose of the poem. The following analysis, in contrast, argues that the poem’s tragedy is a strained and deliberately tentative and indirect means to defining its epic purpose, a shocked and pitying exploration of loss that paradoxically functions as an impetus to faith in what may yet be achieved. The analysis also provides the basis for my succeeding selective examination of how this episode was interpreted, imitated, and transvalued from its own day through the Renaissance. The thwarted abilities of these characters instantiate Vergil’s sharply bridled creative energies that then make the Aeneid a fertile ground for reinterpretation. Vergil’s dialectical poem, often polemically simplified, fuels both sides of a variously shaded debate between the virtues of immediacy and control, between emotion and rule, love and empire. Finally, for those later authors who experience through the Aeneid Vergil’s struggles with change, the poem becomes an index to their own distance from the past.

Modern studies of the Aeneid have emphasized imagery, both verbal and situational; narrative techniques, studied within the work and by comparison with its Homeric and Hellenistic models; and the historical and philosophical significance and correlation of the various levels of the poem. They have made us acutely aware of the problem of gaining perspective within the work.1 To this end Brooks Otis carefully describes the coordination of extremes of human intention and divine will in the poem.

What is important for the understanding of Virgil is what he did with his subjective style. We can define this, in very general terms, as the erection of an inclusive frame of reference that enabled him to correlate the principal elements of his epic material, as Homer and all objectively styled epic could not. Because he empathetically and sympathetically reproduces his divine and human characters’ motives, they can be co-ordinated with one another.

This principle holds for all levels of the plot. … Human and divine, natural and supernatural, physical and psychic are not arbitrarily mingled but logically connected so that a free human act, a plainly human motive or feeling, is at the same time an event on two or more divine levels and has also other repercussions.

(Originality, p. 49)

However, Otis does not stress the degree to which the coordination of the various levels of the poem is a retrospective or abstracting effort that is only hypothetically achieved. The characters in the Aeneid and the subjective narrator, in his wavering identification with them and his periodic immersion in the events he recounts, more often feel the poem’s questioning movement as the fitful revelation of great distances, huge chambers in which the foreground action takes place and which only gradually take on a lambent clarity or an obscure, echoing claustrophobia. They are constantly amazed as the friezelike stability of their former mode of life dissolves, as they try to explore the psychological depths and philosophical extension opening within the old Homeric ethos, to comprehend their place in the ultimate cause and end of things.

What may finally become for the reader Otis’s fully contrived equilibrium is at first experienced in the poem as a tremendous interpretative gap between feeling and form in which error and misapprehension abound and which we labor to fill, often in vain. W. R. Johnson declares:

What Vergil has to imagine is, essentially, unknown and probably unknowable. This means that the Homeric norm and the forms it calls into being, though Vergil can and does make use of them frequently, must often be sacrificed in favor of both of the extreme modes that they mediate between: in favor of the exalted reifications of history and fate which Homer would not understand and which he would doubtless scorn if he could understand them; and in favor of a rich yet radically disordered complexity of impression, evocation, wild emotion, and incantation.

(Darkness Visible, p. 47)

As Johnson and Otis both attest, on differing but complementary critical and historical grounds, the poem reflexively documents in its fiction and stylistic detail the shattering of the objective Homeric eternal present by the pressures of change.

The poem regains an intimation of that objectivity through what Otis describes as the furthest extension of its subjective style, the erection of an inclusive frame of reference; in the poem’s own language, quietum … animum mentemque benignam (1.303—4), the creation in its hero, its narrator, and its reader of a gentle mind and gracious purpose capable of organizing plastic, even cinematic, effects about a latent vanishing point and a postulated transcendent observer.2 This process, scarcely serene, springs from the full experience of the tragic inadequacy of a loved past, and is rooted in a longing to re-create that past on a deeper and more secure plane. It is tentative, forwarded by the subordination—often seemingly suppression—of more partial points of view, points of view we are still aware of as the depths and shadowings of the picture. It remains finally subjective, a construct, because although Vergil at last coordinates his fiction—his gods confirm Aeneas’s hard-won destiny—it is itself presented as a fiction, a mythic displacement of recent tragic Roman history that will possibly, but not necessarily, suggest the positive shape of the Roman future.

Thus the poem remains, as Johnson, following Erich Auerbach, suggests, profoundly questioning, incomplete,

where mimesis does not illumine for us what we ourselves see in our daily lives, or shape or sharpen the focus of our vision or bewitch us or make us forget our own reality for a few hours, but rather forces us to reexamine, indeed to criticize, our own reality which it seeks to overcome.

(Darkness Visible, p. 31)

At its heart Anchises’ prophetic vision dissolves into mourning for the premature death of Augustus’s successor Marcellus; the meaning of the entire nekuia, the descent to Hades, is cast into doubt by the ambiguous leave-taking through the ivory gate of falsa … insomnia (false dreams 6.896).3 Even the next book, the long-awaited Hesperian landing, opens with this weary, skeptical aside on the value of self-sacrifice:

Tu quoque litoribus nos tris, Aeneia nutrix, aeternam moriens famam, Caieta, dedisti; et nunc servat honos sedem tuus, ossaque nomen Hesperia in magna, si qua est ea gloria, signât.

(7.1-4, emphasis mine)

(Thou, too, Caieta, nurse of Aeneas, hast by thy death given deathless fame to our shores; and still thine honour guards thy resting-place, and in great Hesperia, if such glory be aught, thy name marks thy dust.)

Clearly the narrator, too, strains to build a work unflinching and yet compassionate enough to support the continued quest for theodicy, to still his own melancholy fears that in art he, like his hero, feeds on an insubstantial picture, a false dream of suffering pityingly righted as fame.

The Dido Episode

The following analysis of the Aeneas-Dido episode charts the subtle dialectical process through which the narrator struggles to gain for us that perspective, to create that equilibrium. After we are given some broad indication of the tensions that inform the Aeneid, the meeting of Aeneas and Dido at first seems to offer a resolution. However, it is shadowed by a shared tragic past and the complex responses that past elicits. Aeneas’s groping account of the unspeakable horror of the fall of Troy conveys the dimensions of historical change, of divine and human upheaval, that he must try to contain. At the moment he can do so only through retrospective narrative; enacting a solution must be deferred, in large part beyond his lifetime. His tale conveys both his sensitivity and his necessary detachment. Tragically, Dido responds only to the former, ignoring the latter. The indirection of the sequence, its imagery and divine machinery, depicts both the confluence and divergence of their minds, their individual ways of responding to change and history. The lovers are, to a point, complementary images, and it is only the harsh extremism of the world Vergil envisions that tears them apart. Later commentators and imitators who polarize them—sentimen talizing her, chilling and flattening him—distort the poet’s truth. A complete resolution to the poem requires imagining another world.

The opening lines of the Aeneid hint at the great temporal, spatial, and spiritual distances to be explored and the form that may comprehend them. From Troy to Italy, over sea and land, from the first man through his dynasty, at the mercy of a high, mysterious wrath that is named but not fully explained as mythic Juno, both driven and drawn on by fate,4 a man is racked until he becomes a symbolic architecture, a culture as well as a place, altae moenia Romae, (the walls of lofty Rome 1.7). The questioning of that wrath and the description of its lashing storm map in swift, broad, largely discontinuous strokes the many layers of the poem the narrator must labor to unite. Juno’s fury flashes forward and backward in time, ahead to the rivalry of Carthage and Rome, back to the sources of the Trojan War. Yet even these sweeping historical explanations are made to seem, in their primitive anthropomorphism, inadequate to the narrator’s metaphysical probing, tantaene animis caelestibus irae? (Can resentment so fierce dwell in heavenly breasts? 1.11). Vergil exposes from the first the strain between his inherited Homeric-Olympian form and his sophisticated philosophical sensibility. The characterization of Juno here juxtaposes abruptly the petty and the monumental, her envy of Pallas with the evocative, portentous Talia fiammato secum dea corde volu- tans (Thus inwardly brooding with heart inflamed 1.50), in a way that foreshadows the poem’s later psychological synthesis of the detailed and the significant. The maneuverings of the gods are elaborated with a strangely literalizing human political language— the indication that Aeolus is a corrupt constitutional monarch (1.50—64), the interplay between the serene description of Neptune and the constricting simile of the noble orator (1.148-56)5 —that at once reminds us of the contemporary, practical application of this work and forces that relationship. In short, the scope of the poem is arbitrarily, authoritatively laid down, outlined discursively, not yet created, not yet explained.

We then move to the human center on whom these events converge, and to his attempts to interpret them. At once we feel how crushingly this burden descends on him and the overwhelming nostalgia it evokes. In an instant the Trojans’ clear purpose is disrupted; darkness and death rule; the ships are swept and battered from every direction. The line of resistance to these forces is the weakest anywhere in the poem, a supplicating figure whose words imply almost complete surrender. Aeneas’s only detachment here is the knowledge that he did not die at Troy, which at this moment seems to have saved him for a meaningless death, alienated from native land, kin, and his own creative power. His first speech offers us immediate insight into his fragility. The events that follow and his second speech demonstrate how that weakness can be turned gradually into a source of strength.

Aeneas is upheld by a sense of responsibility to his past and the remnant of it he carries with him. As an individual he wishes he could die; as a leader he endures. As soon as the Trojan remnant lands communal activity starts: the men are Aeneadae (sons of Aeneas 1.157); his faithful friend Achates begins the rituals of civilization, and then accompanies his leader on a search for food and their lost comrades.6 Aeneas’s deeply moving address—O socii (O comrades 1.198-207)—is his first attempt to shape the past through memory in order to sustain the future. Alluding here briefly to the tragic history he will later feast on (pascit 1.464) at the Carthaginian temple wall and then revive (renovare 2.3) at Dido’s banquet, he urges his men to try to sublimate these sufferings