‘Which lines are Pleasure's and which not?’ Germaine Warkentin

University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 4, Summer 1991, pp.508-514 (Review)

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508 KENNETH BORRIS

authority and prestige from classical pastoral onward, and thus enabled some detachment or independence from conventional orders of dominance within the socio-political hierarchy. Surveying Spenser's career, Bernard claims that Spenser himself increasingly turns from the publicly oriented pastoral of power in his early Shepheardes Calendar to locate value less with national authorities and potential than with the inner resources of the self. Spenserian texts become sweepingly tinged by the contemplative pastoral mode. In a graceful, witty, clear-headed manner, Bernard learnedly analyses the historical and literary contexts of contemplative pastoralism, then chronologically explores its influence on Spenser's oeuvre. His sensitive and revealing discussions will prove stimulating for study of Renaissanc.e pastoralists generally, and he . commendably ensures that his argument engages some leading related theoretical issues.

Some cavils remain. Bernard's approach is generic, yet, aside from studies of pastoral itself, it regrettably ignores genre theory. For example, Alastair Fowler's Kinds of Literature provides terminology that would have enabled subtler discrimi­nations in dealing with generic mixtures. Without such linguistic and conceprual resources, Bernard's interpretations tend to miss or misrepresent generic nuances by absorbing them into his focal concern with pastoral. The Edenic festivities in book I of The Faerie Queene become simply a 'pastoral of erotic fulfillment' though apocalyptically influenced and located atan urban court. The 'erotic woods and sea' become simply 'pastoral settings/ though more obviously germane to the mise en scene of romantic epic. The language of Bernard's analyses often insufficiently reflects his actual recognition that The Faerie Queene is generically complex. And some readers will wish that more had been done with the contemplative subject. The beatus ille tradition, explored by Maren-Sofie R.0stvig's The Happy Man, is un­mentioned though relevant. The feminine symbolic cynosures of Spenser's pastorals, such as Rosalind, Pastorella, and the Fourth Grace, receive quite cursory analysis, even though they are the contemplative foci. Further exploration of Christian Platonism would have been revealing, along with more thorough cover­age of precedents for such· figures in European pastoral. And Bernard probably underestimates the contemplative affinities of The Shepheardes Calendar, which celebrates Gabriel Harvey's scholarly retirement in one phase, and treats love and religion in ways exploring their spiritual implications. Though the general trajectory seems apt and widely accepted, Bernard's career outline of an early, public yet, naive stance yielding to an experienced private inwardness is rather unequal to the complex intellecruallife of a poet as protean and challenging as Spenser.

'Which lines are Pleasure's and which not?' GERMAINE WARKENTIN

Thomas P. Roche, Jr. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences AMS Press 1989. xviii + 604 pp. us $57.50

Thomas P. Roche's long-pending study of Petrarch's influence on the English sonnet

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sequences is no easy book to review. It is angry and scornful, and as such will suffer easy dismissal by those whose own scorn prevents them from digging insights out of Roche's voluminous and undisciplined argument. In eight chapters, an epilogue, and sixteen appendices, he pursues a single theme: Petrarchan sonnet sequences are organized according to elaborate numerological schemas, and their design expresses a Christian harmonics which explicitly condemns the 'enslavement of the senses' suffered by the poet-lover who inscribes the poems. English readers, he argues, have been the victims of four fallacies: narrative (the sequence tells a story), biographical (the speaker of the poems is writing about himself), formal (sonnet sequences are all sonnets), and sequential (sonnet sequences progress from one psychological mood to another). Though he ascribes these fallacies to the New Criticism (if anything they are hangovers from the Victorian era), he quite rightly condemns the twentieth-century weakness for reading sequences psychologically, as if they had been written by some Renaissance version of Goethe's young Werther. Roche thinks the poet-lover of a sonnet sequence should not be under­stood psychologically but morally; totally selfish, he turns 'his passion into an idol, a goddess, whom he blames for enslaving him, a Medusa, a Gorgon, who is destroying him.'

Roche's reading, he early makes clear, is 'unremittingly Christian in its outlook.' The book itself is dedicated to D.W. Robertson, Jr, the American academy's leading proponent of the view that the literature of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance is entirely conformable to Christian notions of the contrast between heavenly caritas and earthly cupiditas. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences is thus a messianic book. It castigates readers of the old dispensation (for whom Roche, charitably implicating himself, uses the pronoun 'we') and promulgates the vision of a new way of reading. 'No one in the sixteenth century was writing secular literature,' he insists, and urges us to recognize in the sonnet sequence (as Alastair Fowler and John Carey have done for other kinds of works) a prevailing organization of parts sanctioned by the Book of Wisdom's statement that God has 'ordered all things in measure and number and weight.' This approach he characterizes by the sweeping tenn 'numerology.'

Professor Roche and I have long been concerned with the same problem, the· organization of sonnet sequences, and with many of the same poets: Petrarch, Sidney, and Spenser. We have the same resistance to the fallacies of late-Victorian and New Critical readers. I too deplore the characterization of the multitudinous Astrophils of the Renaissance as young Werthers. And I have committed numero­logical readings of my own, and will do so in the future. But there remain substantial disagreements between us, caused by the different ways we see the poets responding to the possibilities of 'harmonia mundi,' and by the different kinds of evidence we take into account. What these disagreements add up to is a contrast between interpretation as belief and interpretation as exploration. Roche's position is far more a product of New Critical procedures than he would wish. He takes formalist certitudes and displaces them to create a vision of anterior culture in which only a single voice is in play. But the historical and cultural experience of

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Petrarch in making his Canzoniere, and the parallel engagement of his later avatars, if it concerns Christianity at all, concerns as well what happens when their projects have to be carried out in the muddled arena of human experience. It is this muddle that needs exploration.

Most writing about numerology arouses deep suspicion in its readers. Though, as Christopher Butler sagely points out, 'this kind of thinking was very far from being confined to mystagogues and cranks,' the post-Renaissance mind, as Roche complains, does indeed valorize empirical data and syntagmatic connections, and treats with contempt sacralized notions of the cosmos. With an obsessive rational­ism which itself amounts to superstition, it even tends to repudiate study of the 'harmonia mundi' as a cultural motif. But then practitioners of numerological analysis have done little to encourage even unprejudiced analysis; with few exceptions they write as if admitted to possession of a privileged body of knowledge, and what they write is often credulous about evidence and anxiously over-argued. Numerological study badly needs to go through a phase of careful historical work: on the precise knowledge of Pythagoras possessed by particular antique poets (not much, the classicists tell me), on the rhetorical strategies which have to be taken into account in any study of the disposition of parts, on the presence of what James Winn calls 'constructive form' in all those arts to which balance and proportion are important, on the mise en page of allegedly numero­logical works, on the suggestive differences between the conflicting symbolic meanings assigned to specific numbers, and on the question of which number theorists were in fact available to the poets we are diSCUSSing. Such questions cross the boundaries of several disciplines: not only art and music, as might be expected, but also classical studies, where Renaissance scholars will be surprised to discover a lively, indeed acrimonious, debate over numerical construction in Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and Virgil. Once confronted with a problem of such range - not to say interest - belief alone is not enough.

Roche's book begins with Petrarch, but his procedure is not strictly chronological. After a close study of the mythography and number-system he sees underpinning the Canzoniere, he turns immediately to its interpretation by the important sixteenth­century commentators, by spiritualizers like Malipiero, and by the anti-Petrarchlst Giordano Bruno. A third chapter discusses writers of English religious sequences from Locke to Constable. There follow long chapters on Sidney, Sidney's 'progeny' (Barnes, Craig, Greville, and otherst Constable's three versions of Diana, Daniel, Shakespeare, and a Jonsonian epilogue treating A Celebration of Charis. The numerous appendices chiefly set out the complex structural schemas he detects in these works. Appendix A, however, is a handlist of English 'sequences' which undiscriminatingly includes some obvious non-sequences, such as Scoloker's 'Diaphantus or the passions of love (1604), simply because some earlier critic once called them sequences, while excluding better candidates from among mid-Tudor collections, such as Gascoigne's and Turbervile's. Here alone we can see the need for a definition of the word 'sequence' that is carefully argued.

The shape of Roche's discussion reveals what is for me its central problem: the

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reader moves directly from Petrarch, on the cusp between late medieval and early modern concepts of the cosmos, to sixteenth-century commentators and poets for whom that vision requires anxious defence, without any attention to factors - such

. as the powerful fifteenth-century influence of Roman elegy' and the court function of the making of canzonieri - which mediated that transition. Roche insists that he is treating the Canzoniere as a cultural document which attracted very different

. responses over several centuries, but his own selection of those responses is determined by his extreme moralization of culture; he begins chapter 2 by stating, 'My purpose in bringing in these religious sequences at this point is to make those spiritualizers of the previous chapter less the philistine vandals than they might otherwise appear and also to offset that hideous dichotomy of sacred ·vs. secular that hounds our reading of Medieval and Renaissance literature: The language here - philistine vandals, hideous dichotomy, hounds - makes Roche's moral stance plain, but its vehemence is troubling. Points have 'not a shred of evidence' to back them, Professor Fowler is 'brilliant' or 'masterfuL' and I can take mischievous delight in the fact that myoId friend has awarded me the demure adjective 'interesting.' I suspect that critics of the sort implicitly repudiated by such language have not practised for some time. What is more, in so far as the Canzoniere itself meditates upon the very dichotomy between secular and sacred, and its own 'progeny' continued to do so throughout the quattrocento, the degree of concern manifested in his language often disempowers Roche from fully exploiting what he has in fact uncovered.

Roche argues that the numerological schema of a work organizes a substructure of myth, which in Petrarch's case is that of Apollo and Daphne. JPetrarch and Boccaccio,' he writes, 'are at one in their insistence that the meaning of the laurel and the Daphne myth grows out of a pre-ordained nature and custom that is part of God's providential plan and that this meaning has a share in ultimate truth, if read correctly.' As testimony he cites the practice of Petrarch' s friend the allegorizer Pierre Bersuire. But Jean Seznec long ago pointed out how different were the attitudes to myth held by the two authors, the greater already proto-humanist in his reluctance to allegorize the gods, the lesser still representative of the late Middle Ages. Rache's position is further undermined not only by Petrarch's successive transformations of the story of Apono and Daphne in 'Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade' (C.23) to confirm his status as a secular poet but by Bersuire himself, who obligingly provides us multiple readings of the myth, one of which features Apollo as Christ, another as Satan. This reluctance to recognize the medievals' own delight in multivalent readings, and the real rhetorical opportunities they offer, leads to foreclosed interpretations of a number of poems here and in later chapters. 'Benedetto sia '} giorno' (C.61) for instance is 'a blasphemous litany of all that ties him to his love,' a verdict that obscures the poem's complex play with particular and general, which, it could be argued, actually produces at a local level precisely the model of stability Roche argues Petrarch is attempting in the Canzoniere as a whole. I do not think that Petrarch was lacking either in spiritual depth or commitment, but there is excellent historical evidence both for his boredom with the

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limits of allegory and for his fascinated staging of his own evolution from the youthful poet of the 'stile verde' to the , aged supplicant of his final canzone, 'Vergine bella.'

Roche's tendency to foreclose interpretation emerges most clearly in the numerological readings which he offers of particular sequences. I set aside here the lesser poets for whom reliable number-patterns are a handy compositional device, as well as Spenser, for whom the case has been proved, and Shakespeare, where Roche admits he has not convinced even D.W. Robertson, Jr, to focus on Petrarch, Sidney, and Jonson, Roche's genuine sensitivity to balance and proportion in the arrangement of specific groups of poems responds beautifully to the tendency of late antique culture to disperse parts in an ordered hierarchy, and there is much that he detects in the relationships between groups of poems which has not been noticed before and must be taken into account. But to what extent are such groupings isomorphic, that is, how do they mirror or replicate the symbolic meanings claimed to underpin them? Isomorphism;,which can certainly be proved in many works, is in any case part of a larger fabric of discourse, Not all isomorphisms are divinized, for example; some of them are straightforwardly architectural, others respond to the historical evolution of stanzaic patterns or (like the missing foot that differentiates elegaic metre from epic) to evolving socio-literary forms of symbolic action. And no schema that ignores the rhetorical element in pre-modern composition can be entirely convincing; Roche's view of sonnet sequences as entirely ruled by number­schemes might have been different if he had admitted a wider range of Italians, and struggled with the many collections in which the heading 'another of the same' is sufficient excuse for a sonnet. Petrarch in-a letter not cited here insisted that the 'variety' of his poems (a key rhetorical term which the modern eye skims over without noting) is a representation of the confusion of love-malady, which pulls the suffering poet-lover in contradictory directions. This formulation, one or another version of which was repeated in the prefaces and dedicatory letters of many later sonneteers, is itself profoundly isomorphic, and it is not numerological.

Roche's argument everywhere insists the contrary: the Canzoniere's 366 poems constitute a poetic calendar, and as such it comprises a fundamentally closed structure for which the model, he appears to believe, remained consistent throughout the work's evolution. Roche is not the only scholar to propose a numerological design. Wilhelm Potters's elaborate Chi era Laura? Strutture linguistiche e matematichenel'Canzoniere' di Francesco Petrarca (Bologna 1987) offers a different and very complex scheme based on the geometry of the circle. But for both Potters and Roche the lack of methodology becomes a trap. In neither case is there a protocol operating to govern the stages of the argument, so that we can patiently establish, one by one, the contextual and formal possibilities which are at work. As a result, to argue the specific details of a schema is to enter into a labyrinth composed, paradoxically, not of innumerable possibilities, but of innumerable answers. No matter what question is raised, the ardent numerologist produces yet one more refinement of the schema that definitively proves his pOint. I think it very likely that Roche is right and Potters is wrong; at one point in the making of the

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Canzoniere a calendrical schema was foremost in Petrarch's mind. But other kinds of information - the evolving manuscript tradition of the work, the poet's inveterate joy in revision, and what Alfredo Schiaffini calls the 'lavorio della forma' - qualify that conviction, and these qualifications lead to rich possibilities.

Building on his notable article of 1974 on calendrical structure in the Canzoniere, and to some extent repudiating it, Roche proposes no less than four different years for which the collection might provide such a calendar, but in no case does he assemble his information clearly enough to demonstrate either that Petrarch had a specific year in mind OT, alternatively, that he was actually working with a 'composite year' as Roche originally contended. A sceptical reader (whether 'philistine vandal' or honest enquirer) is at a loss to conclude not only which piece of evidence is, in fact, the most important, but also which conclusion Roche wants us to draw. Choices need to be made here, and they can be made, for the net result of the possibilities he assembles is to point unerringly to 1341 as the year Petrarch's calendar was designed to honour. A fundamental question remains, of course: having conceived his schema, did Petrarch care in the long run to complete its execution? One reading of the manuscript evidence would suggest otherwise.

In English poetry it is Spenser's practice which has established the terms of the discussion. The Amoretti and Epithalamion are profoundly and creatively numerolog­ical; they fit Roche' 5 vision Of poetry as closely as any poems ever wilL Unfortunate­ly, a number of critics have generalized the method of these poems to cover works it does not suit, often ignoring secularized principles of balance and proportion which are well worth our attention. A primary stage in that 'patient argument' I spoke of ought to be the establishment of a convincing link between the theme, the author, or the addressee of a work and its purported schema. Roche knows this, and he rightly points to the calendrical features of Amoretti and Epithalamion, or to the 108 'Penelope stones' commemorated in Astrophil and Stella to validate further numerological analysis. However, his attempt to find such key allusions for Daniel and Shakespeare breaks down hopelessly in the demonstration; the hostile reader will put the book down impatiently, and the sympathetic one will conclude that some rites or other have been neglected.

The possibilities of the method are most richly suggested by Roche's treatment of Sidney, where both he and Fowler have noticed demonstrable schemas, though I have to admit that their attempts to convince the sceptical by producing ever more implausible numerological refinements have made it difficult for those of us who got the point in the first place to follow very far. Sidney is a test case for the broadening and stiffening of numerological discussion. No allegorizer, he resists the kind of closed schema into which Spenser can, despite the closure, nevertheless weave such irony. Rather, his compositional methods seem to be architectural, and thus when he schematizes we need to invoke the fine arts and music to cast light on his practice. Sidney'S schemas are textualized versions of the rhetoric of courtly performance, firmly rooted in the Ciceronian view of the functioning of the emotions: the man capable of responsibility is one who has set aside the fluctuating and contrarious passions of youth. Building on Fowler (who in his turn was

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rescuing never-published work by Adrian Benjamin), Roche assembles as much information as we are ever likely to need about the groupings of poems in Astrophil and Stella. But his attempt to moralize the sequence on the Spenserian model becomes less and less convincing the farther it departs from Sidney's very different reality. This is a problem of interpretation, however; Roche's confirmation of the schematic skeleton of Astrophil and Stella may be as important a contribution as Kent Hieatt's work on the Epithalamion, though it will sadly attract less support because of its failure to discriminate between the possibilities of different kinds of evidence. Thus he regrettably passes over as 'of little importance' the very detail that forges a link between the schema he proposes and the actual bibliography of the work itself: the reversal of sonnets 55 and 56 at a late stage in the evolution of the text. One may quarrel with Roche's view of Astrophil as a lover whose 'callousness is enough to stagger the mind,' but the reversal of those sonnets and all it implies will still require explanation.

Of all Roche's chapters the most provoking is on Shakespeare, but this is in the grand tradition of writing on the Sonnets, and I would rather conclude by noticing the wit which has led him to recognize jonson's parody of the sonnet sequence in A Celebration of Charis, and to layout its schema, in which (though we would certainly quarrel over the details), as he observes, 'symmetry abounds.' Daedalus's song in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue suggests how willing Jonson was to exploit the architectural significance of what I prefer to call constructive form, and indeed to point the moral significance of 'which lines are Pleasure's and which not.' His little sequence, Roche points out, is composed of ten poems, in which he finds thematic parallels between the first and the last, as between 2 and 9,3 and 8 (dicey, that one), 4 and 7,5 and 6. 'Jonson,' writes Roche, 'understood all those unspoken rules and conventions of the sonnet sequence, which passed from poet to poet, from language to language, for over two hundred years. Jonson's highly sophisticated descant on this tradition is its ultimate praise and clarification.' But there is more to the story than that. What we may have here is not just some neat symmetry, but a classical 'ring-composition' like that employed by Horace in the three-book version of his Odes, where the five poems beginning book I are mirrored in reverse order in the last five poems of book III. Jonson's 'descant' is produced in part by his choice of a specifically classical design, a choice which deliberately sharpens and ironizes the separation between the divinizing modes of Petrarchist poetry and the secular perspective of Jonsonian 'strong lines.' I cannot think of a better example to lead us towards a comprehensive understanding of constructive form in Renaissance poetry, a comprehensiveness which in its own way this study can help us envision, but does not itself achieve.