Renaissance literary theory Readings for Lecture III ...

Literary Theory 1: Introduction to Literary Theory

BAN 3381 Mondays 1000-1130, room KMTI-1

Dr Richard Major

Renaissance literary theory Readings for Lecture III

(September 29)

The fifteenth-century Renaissance brought a new earnestness to literary theory. Longinus’ idea of sublimity, Plotinus’ idea that a certain aesthetic experience

beings us close to God, almost vanished from sight. There was, instead, a renewed concern with Plato’s case against literature, as

something both frivolous; and inherently deceiving, a bogus imitation of reality. The reply to this case was Horatian: as Horace says, the poet had the

advantage of being an irresistible instructor because he gave delight. Horace’s twin doctrine of “delight and teach” became the watchword of literary theory in the Renaissance, and there was a new enthusiasm for pointing the moral ‘message’ hidden in even the most light-hearted literature.

The sixteenth-century Reformation and Counter-Reformation brought an even more attitude to bear. Now it became important to justify taking literature seriously at all, since ‘literature’ still meant mainly the literature inherited from the Ancient World – pagan poetry. How was a Christian, when all Christendom was locked in civil war, to excuse wasting time over poems about Aphrodite and Paris?

The usual answer was that literature was necessary as a schooling in rhetoric – especially sermons!

Thus a worldling like Terence could be included in every school curriculum partly because “his words be chosen so purely, placed so orderly, and all his stuff so neatly packed up,” but even was chiefly because his comedy was “a mirror of man’s life,” where evil was not taught but exposed. As Marchette Chute says: This may not have been quite what Terence himself had in mind when he wrote his smooth and skillful comedies of manners, and it may not have been the quality that interested the Westminster school boys when they memorized one of his plays to present it to the Queen!

The anxieties of the age produced, in short, a certain prudery in its literary theorising. RJCM

ANCIENT LITERARY THEORY: http://www.richardmajor.com/teaching/Karoli/BAN3381/readings/2.doc _______________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Jacopo Mazzoni Discourse in Defense o f the Comedy

o f the Divine Poet Dante (1572)

Mazzoni had a quiet life: he was simply an academic, a professor in Pisa, a friend of Galileo’s. But he was an interesting literary theorist: if it should happen that two things should appear before the poet, one of them false but credible and the other true but incredible or at least not very credible, then the poet must leave the true and follow the credible. Mazzoni goes beyond

Aristotle’s idea of poetic imitation (mimesis) as the recreation of an actual object; he says it is rather the recreation of an ideal, the “idol”: a concept constructed by human artifice to which poetic imitations are compared in order to determine their believability. Believability matters, not truth; poetry as a sophistic activity, not attempting to recreate truth, but rather to mimic that which will have the proper effect on the audience. It is, therefore, a form of rhetor i c . Poetry’s effect on the audience determines whether it is good, and indeed whether it is a poem at all. Art occurs in and of the audience, and is not independent of it.

Poetry is essentially a recreation, but there is a “civil faculty” – we return to business with renewed enthusiasm – and often a concealed lesson.

Dosso Dossi, Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue (1515-18) now in Wawel Royal Castle, Cracow


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Sir Philip Sidney Apology for Poetry ( c . 1579)

Sidney was one of those impossibly gifted aristocratic young Englishmen – well-born, brilliant, brave, practical, poetic, charming – who come along every so often. They never reach middle-age. Sidney fell heroically in battle at 31.

But he had already been on an important diplomatic mission to France, Austria and (September 1573) Hungary; he had written, soon after his return, aged about 24, his Apology for (which simply means defence of) Poetry; and he had composed some of the greatest poetry of the Elizabethan age.

Here, by the way, is a remarkable sketch about Sir Philip Sidney from the classic days of Monty Python.

RJCM

He begins with the example of myself, who, I know not by what mischance, in these my not old years and idlest times, having slipped into the title of a poet, am provoked to say something unto you in the defense of that my unelected vocation ….

Now then go we to the most important imputations laid to the poor poets; for aught I can yet learn they are these. I. Literature is a waste of time First, that there being many other more fruitful knowledges, a man might better spend his time in them than in this. Sidney argues that, on the contrary, it is the most powerful of arts: Infinite proofs of the strange effects of this poetical invention might be alleged; only two shall serve, which are so often remembered as I think all men know them. The one of Menenius Agrippa, who, when the whole people of Rome had resolutely divided themselves from the senate, with apparent show of utter ruin, though he were, for that time, an excellent orator, came not among them upon trust either of figurative speeches or cunning insinuations, and much less with far-fetched maxims of philosophy, … but, forsooth, he behaves himself


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like a homely and familiar poet. He telleth them a tale, that there was a time when all parts of the body made a mutinous conspiracy against the belly, which they thought devoured the fruits of each other’s labor; they concluded they would let so unprofitable a spender starve….

The other is of Nathan the prophet, who, when the holy David had so far forsaken God as to confirm adultery with murder, when he was to do the tenderest office of a friend, in laying his own shame before his eyes,—sent by God to call again so chosen a servant, how doth he it but by telling of a man whose beloved lamb was ungratefully taken from his bosom? The application most divinely true, but the discourse itself feigned; which made David … as in a glass to see his own filthiness ….

By these, therefore, examples and reasons, I think it may be manifest that the poet, with that same hand of delight, doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth. II. It’s untrue Secondly, that it is the mother of lies. Sidney answers: But now let us see how the Greeks named it and how they deemed of it. The Greeks called him poet, which name hath, as the most excellent, gone through other languages. It cometh of this word poiein, which is “to make”; wherein I know not whether by luck or wisdom we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him a maker. Which name how high and incomparable a title it is, I had rather were known by marking the scope of other sciences than by any partial allegation. There is no art delivered unto mankind that hath not the works of nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend as they become actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth. So doth the astronomer look upon the stars, and, by that he seeth, set down what order nature hath taken therein. So do the geometrician and arithmetician in their divers sorts of quantities. So doth the musician in times tell you which by nature agree, which not. The natural philosopher thereon hath his name, and the moral philosopher standeth upon the natural virtues, vices, and passions of man; and “follow nature,” saith he, “therein, and thou shalt not err.” The lawyer saith what men have determined, the historian what men have done. The grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech, and the rhetorician and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter.


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The physician weigheth the nature of man’s body, and the nature of things helpful or hurtful unto it. And the metaphysic, though it be in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth he, indeed, build upon the depth of nature.

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. III. It’s unmanly and pacifist Thirdly, that it is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires, with a siren’s sweetness drawing the mind to the serpent’s tail of sinful fancies,—and herein especially comedies give the largest field to ear, as Chaucer saith; how, both in other nations and in ours, before poets did soften us, we were full of courage, given to martial exercises, the pillars of manlike liberty, and not lulled asleep in shady idleness with poets’ pastimes. Sidney answers: I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the

dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar? In Hungary I have seen it the manner of all feasts, and other such meetings, to have songs of their ancestors’ valor, which that right soldierlike nation think the chiefest kindlers of brave courage. The incomparable Lacedæmonians did not only carry that kind of music ever with them to the field, but even at home, as such songs were made, so were they all content to be singers of them; when the lusty men were to tell what they did, the old men what they had done, and the young men what they would do.


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IV. Plato disapproves And, lastly and chiefly, they cry out with an open mouth, as if they had overshot Robin Hood, that Plato banished them out of his Commonwealth. Truly this is much, if there be much truth in it. Sidney argues, among other things: • a man might maliciously object that Plato, being a philosopher, was a natural enemy of poets. • I … should requite the objections made against poets with like cavillations against philosophers; as likewise one should do that should bid one read Phædrus or Symposium in Plato, or the Discourse of Love in Plutarch, and see whether any poet do authorize abominable filthiness, as they do. • Again, a man might ask out of what commonwealth Plato doth banish them. In sooth, thence where he himself alloweth community of women…. I honour philosophical instructions, and bless the wits which bred them, so as they be not abused….

Torquato Tasso Discourses on the Heroic Poem (1594)

Tasso had a noisy life: he was half-mad and quarrelsome, in and out of palaces and madhouses, in favour with monarchs and then out again. He died just before the Pope was to crown him poet laureate if the world. Tasso’s great work was a long poem called La Gerusalemme liberata, Jerusalem Delivered, full of magical and narrative extravagance. It was fantastically influential for two centuries; no one has read it since. While he was producing it he published an account of his poetics or literary theory, which the epic poem is an imitation of a noble action, great and perfect, narrated in the loftiest verse, with the purpose of moving the mind to wonder, and thus being useful. Going beyond Aristotle, Tasso says mimesis means “an imitation of human and div ine action”. Aristotle says poetry replicates not just the external actions, but the subjective springs of action; Tasso insists it is the subjective processes that matter. This justifies motifs of passionate love and fantastic adventure. We are always aware of these wild fictions as fictions, yet we take them seriously.


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Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban The Advancement o f Learning (1605)

Bacon is, as it were, the anti-Sidney: a cold fish always. He invented science as we know it – he was ‘the father of empiricism‘, and the Baconian method of induction is simply what we now call the scientific method – and attempted to create an enormous systematic philosophy. One of his most important books was The Advancement of Learning, which a planned procedure for investigating everything. Literature (which he calls poetry or poesie) was included in this project – although Bacon was of course no poet himself, and patronises it.

Bacon was a lawyer and a politician, Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England, but he was dragged down by the suffocating evil of James I’s court and was deposed for corruption. He retired to his estate and famously died from investigating the effect of snow in halting the putrefaction of flesh – he caught a chill after stuffing a dead chicken with snow.

RJCM Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words, for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things…. It is — as hath been said — one of the principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which may be styled as well in prose as in verse.


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Literature is morally improved history: human deeds are rewarded The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; …. because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed Providence. Poetry is good for primitive man: joined also with the agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.

It naturally flourishes In this third part of learning, which is poesy, I can report no deficience; for being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth, without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind. But to ascribe unto it that which is due, for the expressing of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are beholding to poets more than to the philosophers’ works; and for wit and eloquence, not much less than to orators’ harangues. But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre. Let us now pass on to the judicial place or palace of the mind, which we are to approach and view with more reverence and attention.

How curious, in Shakespeare’s day, to think so little of the theatre! RJCM

Renaissance literary theory Readings for Lecture III ...

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