Renaissance literary theory and practice

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:

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.

He even turns them to humor.

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.

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.

Oftener picturesque, such vividness decorates even the traditional extravagance.

For Spenser’s diction is habitually overloaded.

The verse is surcharged with alliteration.

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:

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:

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.