British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft) (v. 92)

British Romanticism and Italian Literature

92

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien) herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

British Romanticism and Italian Literature Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting

Edited by

Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

Cover illustration: frontispiece of Antonio Panizzi, Extracts from Italian Prose Writers (1828). Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 90-420-1857-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia Introduction: ‘Home of the Arts! Land of the Lyre!’: Scholarly Approaches and Fictional Myths of Italian Culture in British Romanticism

7

SETTING THE SCENE: LITERARY AND CULTURAL INTERSECTIONS William Spaggiari The Canon of the Classics: Italian Writers and Romantic-Period Anthologies of Italian Literature in Britain

27

Gian Mario Anselmi Shelley and the Italian Lyrical Tradition

41

BUILDING THE PAST: RE-APPROACHING THE ITALIAN LITERARY HERITAGE Carla Maria Gnappi The Sunflower and the Rose: Notes Towards a Reassessment of Blake’s Illustrations of Dante

55

Maria Cristina Cignatta William Hazlitt and Dante as the Embodiment of ‘Power, Passion, Self-Will’

69

Silvia Bordoni ‘The Sonnet’s Claim’: Petrarch and the Romantic Sonnet

81

Luca Manini Charlotte Smith and the Voice of Petrarch

97

Edoardo Zuccato Writing Petrarch’s Biography: From Susanna Dobson (1775) to Alexander Fraser Tytler (1810)

109

Laura Bandiera Wordsworth’s Ariosto: Translation as Metatext and Misreading

121

6 LOOKING AT CONTEMPORARY ITALY: MAPPING THE PRESENT Lilla Maria Crisafulli Theatre and Theatricality in British Romantic Constructions of Italy

149

Gioia Angeletti ‘I Feel the Improvisatore’: Byron, Improvisation, and Romantic Poetics

165

Serena Baiesi The Influence of the Italian Improvvisatrici on British Romantic Women Writers: Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Response

181

Mauro Pala Facets of the Risorgimento: The Debate on the Classical Heritage from Byron’s Childe Harold to Leopardi’s Canzone ad Angelo Mai

193

Cecilia Pietropoli The Tale of the Two Foscaris from the Chronicles to the Historical Drama: Mary Mitford’s Foscari and Lord Byron’s The Two Foscari

209

Lia Guerra Mary Shelley’s Contributions to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia: Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy

221

Diego Saglia ‘Freedom alone is wanting’: British Views of Contemporary Italian Drama, 1820-1830

237

Caroline Franklin Cosmopolitanism and Catholic Culture: Byron, Italian Poetry, and The Liberal

255

Index

269

Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia (Università di Parma)

Introduction: ‘Home of the Arts! Land of the Lyre!’: Scholarly Approaches and Fictional Myths of Italian Culture in British Romanticism

As with Philhellenism, Hispanophilia or the widespread fascination with German literature and philosophy, interest in Italy and its culture has long been recognized as a major phenomenon among the many cross-cultural exchanges and intersections typical of the Romantic period. Most obviously, the theme of Italy is unavoidable when dealing with secondgeneration Romantic poets – ‘Italy’, of course, intended as a suitably vague metonym for a complex accumulation of ideas on Italian language, literature, history, and landscape, as well as first-hand experiences. Hailing Italy in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), Byron defined it as ‘the home / Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree’.1 Presenting it as a natural and cultural-historical palimpsest and a femininely fertile country, he subscribed to the myth of Italy as an archive of unique natural phenomena, aesthetic manifestations, and cultural narratives. A year later, in his Venetian satire Beppo, he expressed another distinctive trait of the Italian myth, its pleasurable and easy lifestyle, declaring that ‘With all its sinful doings, I must say, / That Italy’s a pleasant place to me’,2 and then providing a detailed evocation of the sensual pleasures of life in ‘the land which still is Paradise’.3 If, as Maura O’Connor remarks, ‘No place on the European continent has captivated the English imagination so completely and for so long as the Italian peninsula’, this fascination became more intense during the Romantic period; and, in his still invaluable Italy and the English Romantics (1957), Charles Peter Brand notes that ‘Early nineteenth-century England was […] smitten with an Italo-mania, or Italianate fashion, which has since quite disappeared’.4 His view might be corrected by referring to the equally intense ‘Italo-mania’ which affected British culture in Victorian times re-examined, for instance, in Alison Chapman’s and Jane Stabler’s recent edited volume Unfolding the South: NineteenthCentury British Women Writers as Artists in Italy (2003). Yet the centrality of Romanticperiod approaches to, and constructions of, Italy cannot be denied. Felicia Hemans made the foundational role of Italy as the birthplace of culture clear when, in The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816), she apostrophized it as the ‘Home of the Arts!’ and the 1 2 3 4

IV. 26. 3-4, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-93), II, p. 133. ll. 321-22, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, IV, p. 141. l. 361, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, IV, p. 143. Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Imagination (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 13, and C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. ix.

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‘Land of the Lyre!’.5 But when we shift our focus from the broader picture to specific cases, at closer scrutiny the Romantics’ emotional, cultural, and ideological investments in Italy become visible as a multifaceted and unstable mosaic, a complexity compounded by the difficulty of assessing these investments against the period’s direct knowledge of, and access to, Italian culture. The familiarity of British Romantic writers with Italian literature is too well known to require any further illustration, although, in spite of the many important scholarly contributions, this is hardly an exhausted subject of investigation.6 More importantly, perhaps, we should highlight the strictly chronological character of the phenomenon, its discontinuities both in relation to the Augustan age, when France held the role of leading culture in Europe, and the Victorian age, when the cultural interests of the British literati veered towards Germany. Far from being a continuum – as Arturo Graf suggested in his pioneering and highly informative study of 19117 – the Romantic interest in Italy and Italian culture was a chronologically circumscribed phenomenon. Indeed, it was not the natural development of Elizabethan attitudes or, still more remotely, the interest in Italy dating back to Chaucer. By contrast, the works of those mid-eighteenth-century critics who promoted the literary revival climaxing with Romanticism testify that interest in Italy and Italian literature is an integral part of a wider revisionist movement that progressively dismantled neoclassical aesthetics through the rediscovery and reappropriation of the national past, thus effectively paving the way for new poetic principles and forms of writing. Mostly on the strength of two remarkable essays published in 1753 and 1757, Giuseppe Baretti (1719-89) is usually held responsible for the increased attention devoted to Italian letters in Britain in the second half of the eigheenth century.8 But it is doubtful whether, despite his literary merits and important British connections, Baretti’s claims would have gained much attention, if the cultural interests of a group of English scholars – Joseph and Thomas Warton and Richard Hurd, in particular – had not already converged with his views, at least with respect to the foundational value of Italian poetry as a source of influence on the ‘native’ poetic tradition. At a time when the notion of an English literary canon was coming into being, and source-hunting and textual research were placing Shakespeare and Spenser at its core, the unprecedented need for contextualization brought about – among scholars and, later, readers – a renovated and meticulous attention for the classics of Italian literature. ‘Italy was the School to our own poets, and indeed writers of all sorts, at the times when they were the best’,9 Richard Hurd stated in a letter of 1755 where his enthusiasm for Italian literature significantly merges with admiration for ‘our own poets’, 5 6

7 8

9

ll. 5, 87, in Felicia Hemans, Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. by Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 19, 21. On the wealth of scholarly contributions in this field, see the introduction to the volume recently edited by Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Immaginando l’Italia: Itinerari letterari del Romanticismo inglese/Imagining Italy: Literary Itineraries in British Romanticism (Bologna: Clueb, 2002), pp. 12-13. See Arturo Graf, L’anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Turin: Loescher, 1911), pp. 52-79. Giuseppe Baretti, ‘A Dissertation upon the Italian Poetry in which are interspersed some Remarks on Mr. Voltaire’s Essay on the Epic Poetry’ (1753) and ‘A History of the Italian Tongue’ (1757), in Prefazioni e polemiche, ed. by Luigi Piccioni (Bari: Laterza, 1933), pp. 89-113, 115-41. Quoted in Edwine Montague Martz, Bishop Hurd as Critic (unpublished doctoral thesis, Yale University, 1939), pp. 106-07.

Introduction

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namely Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer. It was not, then, a purely erudite impulse, but rather the desire to stimulate unreserved appreciation for ‘our own poets’ by placing them in their own context which led mid-century literati to immerse themselves in works previously familiar to writers and readers alike: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, for instance, which Thomas Warton closely compared to Spenser’s Faerie Queene in chapter VI of his Observations (1754, expanded ed. 1762), or Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata to which Richard Hurd devoted the entire Letter IX of his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). Their aim was to stimulate a national taste for older native literature and a re-evaluation of those texts that had been too long neglected or underestimated. In the process, this project generated new sympathetic attitudes towards the Italian authors whom Spenser, Milton or Chaucer had admired, carefully studied, and adopted as models. As the latest editor of Warton’s and Hurd’s seminal works perceptively indicates, these historically specific critical writings were also meant to have contemporary significance.10 In disclosing the richly imaginative resources of the literary past, they sought to connect modern poetry to its genuine roots, strongly suggesting that an engagement with those materials would help modern writers to rediscover something of value which could then be injected into present-day poetry. The critics involved in this mid-century process of canonformation – Thomas Warton and Hurd, in particular – were the same figures who, after Baretti’s defence, began to take account of Italian writers and bring them to the notice of British readers.11 As a result, the earlier classicist belief in progressive refinement mutated dramatically, or rather strategically, into a narrative of decline. And the poets of ‘great imagination’, those who had dealt in sublime fictions such as Spenser, Shakesperare, and Milton, were safely ensconced at the core of the national poetic pantheon. As is well known, Joseph Warton judged Pope’s pre-eminence to be that of a second-rank poet, ‘next to Milton, and just above Dryden’, as his poetry was primarily ‘of the didactic, moral, and satyrical kind; and consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry’.12 In Warton’s view, only sublime and pathetic geniuses deserved to be termed ‘pure’ poets. It is a fact that the marked increase in translations and English editions of Italian authors which filled the publishing market well before the influx of Italian exiles in the early nineteenth century was accompanied by an aggressive campaign against neoclassical tenets and, more specifically, French criticism.13 This, we believe, was no coincidence. True poetry was to be distinguished from mere ‘wit’ and ‘sense’ in view of a realignment with a literary tradition which poet-critics such as Thomas Gray and the Wartons saw as both ‘native’ and ‘universal’. By this token, the norms and practices imported from France – ‘that philosophical, that geometrical, and systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from

See David Fairer’s Introduction to Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Warton’s Observations and Hurd’s Letters, 3 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), I, pp. iv-lvii. 11 See C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, p. 49. For a more extended account, see Roderick Marshall, Italy in English Literature 1755-1815 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). 12 Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols (London: printed for M. Cooper, 1756), p. xii. 13 See A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (1660-1830) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1978 [1925]), especially ch. IV. 4, ‘The Anti-Italian Tendency in the XVIII Century’. 10

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the sciences even into polite literature’14 – were to be utterly rejected. Far from seeing the national literary tradition as a progressively unfolding lineage where one writer followed another in a steadily flourishing series of achievements, mid-century pro-Italian critics shrank from notions of modern refinement and codes of politeness, detecting in the line of Dryden and Pope an infusion of foreign, specifically French, standards that had marred, and ultimately cramped, the English genius. Under the spell of Boileau and his school, English poetry had lost its way over the previous hundred years, having fallen prey to rules that had enforced France’s cultural choices and ensured its intellectual hegemony. Writing to Thomas Warton about the latter’s anxiously anticipated history of English poetry, Gray gave much more prominence, in his suggested outline, to earlier non-classicist poets such as Chaucer and Spenser than to the later ‘School of France, introduced after the Restoration […] which has continued to our own times’.15 Even in terms of sheer bulk, Gray’s ideal history of poetry and Warton’s actual (and soon to be published) one would conjure up the picture of an imposingly rich past in contrast with an impoverished and diminished present. Historicist and cultural-materialist approaches have highlighted the link between canon formation and the rise of British nationalism. Critics have pointed out that, in the crucial mid-century decades, narratives of the history of English literature were also motivated by the need for a definition and a celebration of the superiority of the national character and genius. In The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England, Lawrence Lipking observes that ‘Warton and Johnson responded to a national desire for an evaluation of what English poets had achieved’, adding that ‘England expected a glorious poetic pantheon’.16 Moreover, under the rubric of ‘the scholarly revolution’, Gerald Newman has connected ‘the immense transformation’ in the literary field between the 1740s and the 1790s to the construction of a national identity that defined itself in direct opposition to French models, manners, aesthetic values, and taste.17 In point of fact, contemporary critical debates were so often charged with political implications that they appear almost indistinguishable from patriotic diatribes. ‘It does not in the least abate my Veneration for this Poet [Shakespeare]’, Peter Whalley declared in 1748, ‘that the French Connoisseurs have fixed on him the imputation of Ignorance and Barbarism. It would agree, I believe, as little with their Tempers to be freed from a Sovereign Authority in the Empire of Wit and Letters as in their civil Government’.18 For Whalley, as for many other critics, Shakespeare’s unfettered, irregular art exemplifies British freedom both in the political and the literary field, and what French scholarship maliciously indicates as faults are no less than his virtues. Not merely regarded as emanations of French submission to unquestionable authority, neoclassical rules are often seen also as manifestations of the despotic spirit and arrogance typical of the French. More precisely, they are interpreted as the apparently legitimate

Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, p. 204. Letter of 15 April 1770, in Thomas Gray, Correspondence, ed. by Duncan C. Tovey, 3 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1912), III, pp. 276-79. 16 Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 328. 17 See Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, 1740-1830, rev. edn (London: Macmillan, 1997), particularly ch. V, ‘The Literary Revolution, 1740-89’. 18 Peter Whalley, An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare (London: T. Waller, 1748), pp. 16-17. 14 15

Introduction

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means through which Boileau’s country has surreptitiously imposed its own self-serving literary agenda on other European traditions, Britain included. Thus, if eighteenth-century critics always felt obliged to invoke the three unities of time, place, and action when judging their own incurably defective older writers, these norms were generally perceived as manifestations of the French national character and cultural tradition. In addition they were seen to have been promulgated by French critics as universally binding rules with the tacit intent to establish their own country’s literary supremacy. It is alongside these skirmishes, underpinned by national antagonisms and jealousies, that new notions of the national heritage came into being and that, at the same time, the tide of criticism turned in favour of Italian literature. In his highly strategic and influential letter on the ‘Gerusalemme Liberata and the History of Italian Poetry’, Richard Hurd very ably defended Tasso’s poem from French critiques typical of the domineering spirit and unfairness of that tradition. Although for a time placed far above Ariosto’s Furioso – ‘and principally for this reason, that Tasso was more classical in his fable, and more sparing in the wonders of gothic fiction than his Predecessor’19 – Tasso’s poem is now well on the way to ‘follow the fate of Ariosto’20 and, Hurd insinuates politely but perfidiously, very much for the same reason: I will not say that a little national envy did not perhaps mix itself with their other reasons for undervaluing this great poet. They aspired to a sort of supremacy in Letters; and finding the Italian language and its best writers 21 standing in their way, they have spared no pains to lower the estimation of both.

What is here suggested through understatements and negations will be re-echoed with increasing frequency, and in much plainer terms, in the following years. French ‘violent jealousy’ – in other words, ‘the fastidious pedantry of those […] who having little taste for the works of imagination of other nations, and no examples of such in their own, were continually declaiming against the false style, extravagant conceits, and absurd fictions’22 – has instigated an anti-Italian tendency in the English which, unhappily, has also brought about a devaluation of the greatest achievements of English literature. Even if, as far as we know, the parallel was never explicity drawn, the underlying assumption was that both the English and the Italian literary heritages and reputations had been severely damaged by the dogmatic strictures of French neoclassical critics and their English followers – the latter, by now, scornfully downgraded to the level of mere imitators of foreign fashions. By this token, a campaign in favour of neglected and disparaged Italian poets – Tasso and Ariosto in primis – would contribute to overthrow beliefs which readers were encouraged to consider uncongenial to the national taste and contrary to their nation’s interests. In short, unbiased approval of Italian poetical works would simultaneously promote unreserved appreciation of past English authors.

Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Warton’s Observations and Hurd’s Letters, III, p. 78. 20 Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, III, p. 80. 21 Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, III, p. 80. 22 John Hoole, ‘Preface’, in Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso: translated from the Italian of Lodovico Ariosto; with notes: by John Hoole, 5 vols (London: George Nicol, 1785), pp. i-liv. 19

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As emerges from the aptly chosen case of Tasso, victim of Boileau’s assaults and, in England, of Addison’s excessively servile and zealous support for the verdicts of the législateur du Parnasse, the defence and re-evaluation of the Italian poetical tradition did serve more than one purpose. On the one hand, by exposing the malevolence of Boileau and the subserviency of Addison, it aimed at delegitimizing the authority of the major, and still highly influential, arbiters of taste of the previous age, thus ridding the cultural field of all fastidious and insensitive prescriptions. On the other hand, Tasso’s status as the most famous and celebrated among the Italian poets in seventeenth-century Europe could be easily, if tacitly, converted into a legitimating device. Assimilating, as Hurd does, the Gerusalemme Liberata to Spenser’s Faerie Queene was meant to enhance the prestige of the latter thanks to the undisputed authority of Italian literary achievements from the Renaissance up to the seventeenth century. Implicitily or explicitly, practices of assimilation and affiliation loom large over much of the critical and editorial work that created the eighteenth-century interest in Italian letters and actually made possible the Romantics’ extensive readings. Either Italian works are indicated as analogues of English works through constant comparisons and parallels between Dante and Milton, Ariosto and Spenser, or Boccaccio and Chaucer; or, more frequently, they are represented as the actual sources of the English poets, as their illustrious predecessors. In this context, returning Italian literature to its former splendour may seem more of a starting-point than an end in itself for the cultural politics which promoted the Italian revival. Thus, in general terms, it may be safely asserted that the revival itself partook of, and benefited from, the shift in cultural values that occurred around the middle of the eighteenth century. As writers in Britain began to reconstruct their own cultural past investing it with unprecendented positive values, Italian literature was simultaneously rediscovered as a source of imaginative power and strength, and as evidence of achievements which, like the major works of Spenser and the Elizabethans, had been made impossible in later times by the deadening weight of rules and prescriptions. Moreover, since it was suggested that new life might be breathed into contemporary British culture by re-establishing relations with its forgotten and undervalued past, the names of Italian writers started to appear in conjunction with those of ‘native’ poets. ‘The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries’, Hurd writes, ‘such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers, were even charmed by the Gothic romances’.23 Though Hurd is here expressly evoking medieval – and, in his work, mostly unidentified – chilvaric romances, his Letters deal much more directly with, and place real value upon, the works of the Italian ‘romancers’, Ariosto and Tasso, and English poets such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, the geniuses whose imaginative freedom, sublimities, and structural irregularities, readers and writers alike are invited to consider as the virtues and qualities much needed by contemporary literature. The Romantics’ approach to Italian literature and culture was shaped by the historical or alleged similarities of taste and imagination between the English and the Italian traditions, which the battle for the emancipation of poetry from classicist norms had brought to light. 23

Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), III, p. 4.

Introduction

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Accordingly, Romantic-period Italian investments did not entail extensive imitations of, or direct borrowings from, model authors – a Renaissance practice of transmission by now, in any case, obsolete – but rather involved subtler and more indirect approaches. Vast, pervasive, and significant as we think it was, the influence of Italian literature on British Romanticism is then far from easily assessed and, even less, mapped through quotations and allusions alone. Obviously, it spread to include a confrontation with the contemporary cultural situation of Italy, and not merely its classical past. And if it is a fact that Romantic-period authors read, reworked, appropriated, refuted or discarded Italian writers and texts, it is equally true that their interest in Italian letters did not concentrate exclusively on individual figures or works. Their interaction with Italian literary culture involved the examination and discussion of aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological issues, and thus amounted to a dialogue, almost a dynamic conjunction of two different contexts, each modifying the other. A first way of addressing this intercultural dialogue might be through an assessment the direct knowledge of, and access to, Italian culture available to writers in the Romanticperiod and, in particular, their level of knowledge of the Italian language. In effect, between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British learners of Italian could avail themselves of a sizeable number of grammars, readers, and dictionaries. Brand suggests that the quantities of such language-learning instruments published in Britain between 1800 and 1840 could be roughly estimated as follows: 12 (1805-15), 50 (1815-30), and 15 (183040).24 In addition, readers could have access to works of Italian literature published in London in the original language. One of the most obvious instances of the latter phenomenon was the publication of the works of dissident (and often exiled) writers such as Vittorio Alfieri, a collection of whose tragedies was published in the original language in Edinburgh in 1806 with the title of Quindici tragedie di V. Alfieri. In addition, publication of Italianlanguage works in Britain also extended to the classics of medieval and Renaissance literature, as well as more recent, eighteenth-century authors such as Giovan Battista Casti, Carlo Goldoni, and Pietro Metastasio. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British Italianists were legion, and provided their readers with studies of Italian history, language, and culture that, together with the Italian-language publications available in Britain, contributed to the accumulation of increasingly accurate information about the country and its culture, as well as to the elaboration of fictional images of Italy. The presence and impact of Italian books and related scholarly works may be gauged by briefly considering Byron’s personal library as detailed in the sales catalogues of 1816 and 1827. These extensive lists include several grammar books and ‘Baretti’s Italian Dictionary’, the works of Ariosto and Bandello, ‘Dante, Divina Commedia, illustrate di Note dal Zotti, Lond. 1808’ [sic], the 1806 edition of ‘Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo de Medici’ and Roscoe’s ‘Life of Leo 10th, 4 vol., 1805’, ‘Tasso’s Jerusalem, by Hoole […] 1803’, and at least another five different editions of the Gerusalemme Liberata in Italian and English, ‘Goldoni’s Memoirs’, ‘Petrarca, con le Osservazioni di Muratori, Modena, 1811’, ‘Baldi, Vita di Guidobaldo Duca d’Urbino, 2 vol., Mil., 1821’, ‘Diedo, Storia di Venezia […] Ven. 1792’, the six volumes of Firenzuola’s Opere (Pisa, 1816), Foscolo’s Ricciarda, ‘Ginguené, Histoire litteraire d’Italie, 9 vol. Par. 1811’, ‘Levati, Viaggi di Petrarca in Francia, Germa24

C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, p. 264, note 24.

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nia ed in Italia, 5 vol. Milan, 1820’, ‘Mosca, Geografia Moderna, 2 vol. Bol. 1819’, T. J. Mathias’s Poesie liriche toscane (1818), ‘Baruffaldi, Vita di Ariosto, Ferrar [sic], 1807’, ‘Sanazarii Poemata, ap. Cominum, 1731’, and countless other titles.25 Most of the literary figures we now associate with late eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature were learners, readers, and speakers of Italian. Some were proficient Italianists – among them, Thomas James Mathias and John Herman Merivale, both of whom composed poems in Italian; Byron himself, of course, who was reported as capable of speaking Italian ‘like a native’ and who, soon after his arrival in Venice in late 1816, wrote to John Murray that he was ‘studying out of curiosity the Venetian dialect – which is very naïve – soft & peculiar – though not at all classical’;26 Percy and Mary Shelley, who came to dominate the written and spoken language through their residence in Italy from 1818 until Percy’s death; Walter Savage Landor, who wrote a political pamphlet in favour of the Neapolitan insurrection of 1820-21 entitled Poche osservazioni sullo stato attuale di que’ popoli, che vogliono governarsi per mezzo delle rappresentanze, printed in 1821 for distribution in Naples; or Barbarina Brand, Lady Dacre, translator of Petrarch and friend of Ugo Foscolo, who dedicated his 1821 Essays on Petrarch to her.27 Other writers had an extensive, although more bookish knowledge of the language, and among these were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Samuel Rogers, William Sotheby, Felicia Hemans, John Hookham Frere, Bryan Waller Procter, and John Hamilton Reynolds – good readers of Italian and all variously acquainted with its literary tradition, yet not as fluent in their use of the language as some of their contemporaries. Finally, still others were apparently not very proficient in Italian, such as Thomas de Quincey and John Keats who, nonetheless, had expressed the wish that ‘the Italian would supersede french in every school throughout the Country for that is full of real Poetry and Romance of a kind more fitted for the Pleasure of Ladies than perhaps our own’.28 This picture of fairly linguistically competent British intellectuals and writers changes if we examine judgments about the diffusion of Italian language and culture in the 1820s. What emerges is, perhaps unexpectedly, the denunciation of a general ignorance masked by an appearance of consummate proficiency. Even more surprising is that such censure was still being voiced at the end of the decade when, it would be safe to assume, knowledge of Italian language and literature was both widespread and solid among the middling and higher ranks of British society. In a piece on modern Italian comedy in The Foreign Review for 1829, the author despairingly asks: See Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. by Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 231-54. 26 His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. by Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 343, and the letter of 25 November 1816 to John Murray, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973-94), V, p. 133. 27 On Byron and Italy, see Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1984). On Percy Shelley, see Alan M. Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 13-14. For Landor see R. H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1954), pp. 153-54. On Lady Dacre and Foscolo, see E. R. Vincent, Ugo Foscolo: An Italian in Regency England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). 28 Letter to Fanny Keats of 10 September 1817, in The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, p. 155. 25

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Where is the man of good education, in this country, who does not pretend to know Italian thoroughly, and to judge of Italian literature? You will hear, a thousand times, the same common-place kind of judgment passed on Italian authors with the greatest solemnity, by persons hardly able to understand the very works of which 29 they speak, and who, we are certain, never read any of them with due attention.

Similar concerns about the accuracy and efficacy of British knowledge of Italian culture were voiced by Antonio Panizzi, the first professor of Italian Language and Literature at the newly founded King’s College of the University of London, in the preface to his Extracts from Italian Prose Writers for the Use of the Students in the London University (1828). Here, the future principal librarian of the British Museum established a connection between ignorance of the language and the inconsistencies and factual mistakes plaguing British interpretations of the country and its culture, present and past: The works daily published upon the customs, laws, and institutions of Italy, and the unjust reflections with which they abound, evince so imperfect an acquaintance with these subjects, that it seems impossible not to believe but that, independently of other causes, ignorance of the language of the country has contributed in a high degree to produce that general incorrectness of facts upon which so many superficial observations are 30 founded.

Panizzi’s gloomy picture is rather unexpected, if we consider that, so the usual account goes, the British public were deeply familiar with things Italian thanks to the countless studies, accounts, and translations published in increasing numbers, though not uninterruptedly, at least since the Renaissance.31 In fact, Panizzi’s remarks were also prompted by a form of professionally-induced scepticism or dismissiveness. His aim was to attract students for his courses, promising them the achievement of a higher level of competence than was generally available through the low-quality instruments then in circulation. Unfortunately, Panizzi’s university courses were not attended by students seeking advanced instruction in Italian, and he had to be contented with reduced numbers of beginner or amateur learners, for whom his anthology proved too ambitious an instrument.32 Panizzi’s dissatisfaction thus concerned the actual degree of knowledge in a field in which the British public, and not just well-travelled, widely read or university educated intellectuals, were considered to be especially well versed. As with other modern languages, Italian was regularly taught to young ladies, and they, at least, could be trusted to have some knowledge of it, if perhaps a slightly bookish one. Their Italian instruction, however, was subject to the same prescriptions regulating the acquisition and employment of other female accomplishments. This was explicitly laid out in Thomas Gisborne’s An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), where it is said that competence in Italian and French must not be achieved for mere ‘display’ of a young woman’s skills, but rather in order ‘to supply her hours of leisure with innocent and Review on ‘Modern Italian Comedy’, The Foreign Review, and Continental Miscellany, 4 (1829), p. 409. Extracts from Italian Prose Writers for the Use of the Students in the London University (London: John Taylor, 1828), p. ix. 31 For the Romantic period alone, Brand lists a remarkably rich bibliography of studies on all aspects of Italian culture published between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. See Italy and the English Romantics, pp. 235-37, 246-53. 32 See C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, pp. 29-31: 29 30

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amusing occupations; occupations which may prevent the languor and the snares of idleness, render home attractive, refresh the wearied faculties, and contribute to preserve the mind in that state of placid cheerfulness, which is the most favourable to sentiments of benevolence to mankind and of gratitude to God’.33 Such pious injunctions notwithstanding, the mandates of conduct literature regularly came up against the obstacles posed by social intercourse. Thus, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) the protagonist Anne Elliot, who is proficient in the language, translates the Italian arias sung at a concert in Bath for the benefit of her suitor and cousin Walter Elliot, who not only ignores the language but uses this situation to worm himself even further into her graces. The importance of linguistic proficiency as a necessary accomplishment for young women – in her 1799 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, Hannah More conceded that ‘A young lady may excel in speaking French and Italian’34 – here doubles as a kind of knowledge that exposes the heroine to the villain’s strategies of seduction. Linguistic competence and social and sexual dangers are intriguingly enmeshed in Austen’s tableau of Regency life, even as ignorance and knowledge of the Italian language define an important distinction between virtuous heroine and scheming anti-hero. Young women’s knowledge of Italian was discussed by Ugo Foscolo in an essay entitled ‘Learned Ladies’ and published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1821. In it, the exiled writer observes that ‘the study of the Italian language […] is now indispensably necessary for all young ladies, who ought to vie in accomplishments, with their equals and their superiors, in rank and fortune’.35 Foscolo thus registers a universal, socially conditioned, necessity for the knowledge of Italian among women competing for a husband, and a perception of the language as a powerful weapon in a society where class boundaries are (seemingly) transgressed thanks to the knowledge of foreign languages. And yet, even though competence in Italian is supposed to be a common accomplishment among young women, its acquisition in Britain is made difficult by the less than adequate preparation of native language teachers, since ‘those, who come from Italy to pursue this profession in London, are, with very few exceptions, people of no education’.36 Even more worrying is the fact that ‘There are Italian masters in England, who are not satisfied with merely making great havoc with the language, but they do the same with the authors out of which they give instruction without themselves understanding them’.37 In view of this general dearth of capable tutors, the author records the difficulties besetting a proper acquisition of this important skill: ‘People in England labour hard to acquire a competent knowledge of Italian literature. Their first step should be to unlearn all that they have learned, with so much trouble, from their

33 34

35 36 37

Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, eleventh edn (London: Cadell and Davies, 1816), p. 84. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, introd. by Jeffrey Stern, 2 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), I, p. 96. In particular, More recommends the learning of foreign languages in order to improve accuracy and precision in conversation and vocabulary: ‘since many English words take their derivation from foreign languages, they cannot be so accurately understood without some knowledge of those languages’ (I, p. 198). ‘Learned Ladies’, New Monthly Magazine, 1 (1821), p. 223. ‘Learned Ladies’, p. 224. ‘Learned Ladies’, p. 224.

Introduction

17

teachers. Yet these men are necessary evils’.38 Thus, as knowledge of Italian and Italy cannot be dispensed with, these unreliable teachers must be tolerated. Nevertheless, what Foscolo, himself a learner of Italian as a second language, forgets to mention in his discussion of the inadequacies of native speakers as teachers of Italian, is how dubious and uncertain the ‘Italian language’ was at the time.39 Unlike what happened in most European countries, a lingua communis – a standard language to be used in all social circumstances, by all social classes, and throughout the whole peninsula – did not exist in early nineteenth-century Italy. Italian existed, of course, as a literary language with its roots in the Florentine used and brought to near perfection by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and later enriched and improved by Tasso and, even more radically, Ariosto. Nonetheless, Italian did not exist as a lingua d’uso, the language normally employed for communicative purposes in the formal and informal situations of everyday life. It is a well-known and amply documented fact that eighteenth-century literati – Algarotti, Albergati, Bettinelli, Spallanzani, Galiani, and Cesarotti, for instance – corresponded among them in French, a language which they found ‘agile, aggiustato e leggiadro’ (‘supple, appropriate, and graceful’), and which also Alfieri or Manzoni employed in their respective correspondences.40 In effect, among other things, French was a pliant instrument lacking the pedantic features of literary Italian which, by contrast, was a highly formalized written language and therefore a rigid code fatally unresponsive to contemporary communicative needs. The other linguistic option at the time was dialect. From Milan, Jacopo Ortis – the eponymous hero of Foscolo’s novel – testifies that ‘La gente civile parla elegantemente in francese, e appena intende lo schietto toscano’ (‘Polite people speak French elegantly and barely understand plain Tuscan’).41 Nonetheless, it is also well known that, in Lombardy as elsewhere in Italy, both educated and uneducated people habitually resorted to the local dialect for the purposes of everyday social intercourse. Of course, the reasons for this linguistic situation lay in the politically fragmented state of the country, as well as in the high levels of illiteracy that were a consequence of Italy’s socio-economic backwardness. As Manzoni explained (in French) to Claude Flauriel, at the time when he was beginning to write I promessi sposi – the role of which in developing, renewing, and codifying Italian as a written language cannot be overestimated – ‘Imaginez-vous […] un italien qui écrit, s’il n’est pas toscan, dans une langue qu’il n’a presque jamais parlée […]. Il manque complètement à ce pauvre écrivain ce sentiment pour ainsi dire de communion avec son lecteur, cette certitude de manier un instrument également connu de tous les deux’.42 The more or ‘Learned Ladies’, p. 226. Born on the Greek island of Zante (Zakynthos) of a Greek mother, Foscolo (1778-1827) did not know Italian well when he settled down in Venice in 1789, where, through hard and diligent studies, he quickly developed a remarkable breadth of knowledge both of the classics and contemporary literature. 40 For Cesarotti’s quotation, and more generally on the subject, see Arturo Graf, L’Anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII, p. 10. 41 Foscolo published an early (partial) version of the novel in Bologna in 1798, and a completed revised one in 1802. With further revisions, the novel reached its final form with the Zurich and London editions of 1816 and 1817, respectively. The quotation is from the letter dated 11 November [1798], in Ugo Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Milan: Rizzoli, 1949), p. 109 (our translation). 42 Letter of 9 November 1821, in Alessandro Manzoni, Lettere, ed. by Cesare Arieti, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1970), I, pp. 245-46. (‘Just imagine […] an Italian writing, if he is not a Tuscan, in a language he has hardly 38 39

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less humorous and accurate perceptions of the status of Italian teaching in Britain cannot be dissociated from the fact that Italian was, until the Unification and well beyond it, almost totally divorced from any speaking community and, thus, an extremely uncertain linguistic code for Italians, too. On the one hand, Romantic-period commentators rightly felt unsure about the quality of the linguistic and cultural tuition they received at the hands of Italians, not all of whom were men of outstanding literary abilities such as Foscolo, Panizzi, Giovanni Berchet or Gabriele Rossetti. And yet, on the other, they felt completely uninhibited when it came to depicting, judging, and evaluating the country and its civilization. Thus, when the focus shifts from these descriptions of the status of the Italian language in Romantic-period Britain to the general image of the country and its culture (its ‘geo-cultural’ construct), what immediately emerges is an inexhaustible archive of judgments about it.43 Indeed, British culture of the Romantic-period depicted, examined, and constructed Italy repeatedly and with increasing gusto. Marilyn Butler has argued for the pivotal importance of Italy in the development of an unconventional, overtly sensual, and politically disaffected ‘counterculture’ in the works produced by Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, Leigh Hunt, and Byron between the summer of 1817, when the former three met regularly at Marlow on Thames and began to develop literary projects centred on notions of Mediterranean-inspired dissidence, until Byron’s death in Greece in 1824. Byron and Hunt’s short-lived periodical The Liberal (1822-24) must be seen as a further manifestation of this transgressive ‘cult of the South’, while, albeit from a slightly ‘ex-centric’ position, Keats completes this secondgeneration panorama of Italophile writers. The ‘literature of the South’ produced by secondgeneration British Romantic writers is, in Butler’s interpretation, ‘liberal, Mediterranean, extrovert, comic’.44 At the same time, though usually overlooked, the post-Waterloo period saw the emergence of an important number of historical plays set in Italy (both present and past) that employ Italian stories to reflect on present political and ideological issues – from Henry Hart Milman’s Fazio (1815) and Richard Lalor Sheil’s Evadne (1819), to Barry Cornwall’s Mirandola (1821) and Hemans’s The Vespers of Palermo (1823), the abundant production of Roman plays, in particular James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius (1820), and Mary Russell Mitford’s Julian (1823) and Rienzi (1828). Italy was also the theme of poetic travelogues published by William Sotheby (A Farewell to Italy, 1818) and Samuel Rogers (Italy, 1822) who reinvented the successful combination of first-hand observation, personal introspection, and cultural-historical reflections inaugurated by Byron in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Additionally, images of Italy abounded in the Annuals of the 1820s and 30s, with their distinctive intersections of verbal and visual representations. Among the most prolific contributors to this type of publication were women writers, who developed the theme of Italy in ways that transformed it into an arena for the re-location of topical issues. Italy became for them an ‘enaever spoken […] This poor writer completely lacks that feeling of communion, we might say, with his reader, the certainty of handling an instrument that is equally familiar to both’, our translation). 43 On Romantic geo-cultural constructs, see the issue on ‘Romanticism and Cultural Geography’, ed. by Diego Saglia, European Journal of English Studies, 6 (2002), and the issue on ‘Placing Romanticism – Sites, Borders, Forms’, ed. by Michael Macovski and Sarah Zimmerman, European Romantic Review, 15.2 (June 2004). 44 Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 137.

Introduction

19

bling’ geography that helped them bring into focus specific, gender-related priorities, discuss alternative forms of identity, or depict unconventional instances of female agency in history, as may be seen from the poetry of Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Felicia Hemans in the 1820s and the fiction of Mary Shelley, notably her 1823 novel Valperga. As Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler observe in their introduction to Unfolding the South, Romantic women writers’ investments lay the foundations for a prolonged interest in Italy, its culture, and history that characterized the entire development of nineteenth-century women’s literature. It was the Romantics’ figurations, starting from Madame de Staël’s foundational Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), which developed an Italian imaginary available to women authors for whom ‘Italian sensuality and fluidity becomes transformed into a new aesthetic’, yet also an imaginary fraught with ‘complex and painful anxieties about professional identity and vocation’, ideological allegiance and political intervention – approaches and constructions which importantly ‘frustrate any sense of a static and monolithic “Italy”’.45 Drawing on a long-standing tradition of fictional reinventions, Romantic-period constructions of Italy posited it as a land naturally inviting inscription and description, a cultural geography so heavily overwritten with discourse that it became the natural recipient of further fictional transfigurations. This abundance of inscriptions and descriptions explains the uninterrupted interest in Romantic images of Italy on the part of contemporary scholars, critics, and other commentators. Numerous studies are available on the Romantics’ fascination with Italy, structured according to traditional biographical approaches, or more recent ideologically inflected notions of geo-cultural construction.46 Nevertheless, what seems to have been left relatively unexplored is the fact that these fictional investments were paralleled and sustained by an intense scholarly activity. The latter is what this volume addresses and investigates under the interconnected rubrics of ‘translating’, ‘reviewing’, and ‘rewriting’. Arising from the conference ‘Romanticismo inglese e letteratura italiana’ held at the University of Parma on 23-24 October 2003, the essays collected here seek to assess the extent of Romantic-period scholarship about Italy in order to redraw its contours and reconsider its connections with the fictional images of Italy with which literary critics tend to be more directly conversant. As illustrated in the opening section of the volume ‘Setting the Scene: Literary and Cultural Intersections’, the reception of Italian literature in Romantic-period Britain was by no means a mere response to established views about the Italian literary heritage, nor was it entirely dependent on Italian scholarship. Rather, as William Spaggiari explains, it was obviously affected by the changing ways in which Italian scholars – especially the expatriates – chose to organize their tradition and present its landmarks to the readers of their adoptive country. If Leigh Hunt’s Stories from the Italian Poets (1846) is partly a homage to Antonio ‘Introduction’ to Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers as Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 8, 11. 46 For a good overview of both classic and recent titles, in Italian and English, on the relations between Italy and British culture in the Romantic period, see Lilla Maria Crisafulli’s introduction to Immaginando l’Italia, pp. 12-13, and, more generally, Alfonso Sammut, Bibliography of Anglo-Italian Comparative Literary Criticism 1800-1990, ed. by Peter Vassallo and Franco Lanza, foreword by John Woodhouse (Malta: University of Malta, 1997). 45

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Panizzi’s revisionary critical and editorial methods, Percy Shelley’s approach to Italian authors, and the Humanist tradition in particular, provides the best example of how the Romantics re-read, assimilated, and reformulated the Italian Renaissance as a period of ‘integral complexity’, of chaos rather than order, contrasts and contradictions rather than ‘harmony’. As Gian Mario Anselmi explains, in stressing and amplifying the ambiguities of the Rinascimento, Shelley and the British Romantics employed the literary voices of the past to rechannel their own ideas and artistic programmes, while at the same time opening up new critical perspectives that still appear relevant and up-to-date. Through close examinations of individual artistic outputs, the second section of this volume, ‘Building the Past: Re-Approaching the Italian Literary Heritage’, explores how the British Romantics engaged with Italian canonical authors, selectively appropriating their texts, bringing out their latent implications, adapting them to their own needs, and thus acknowledging their vitality and relevance for contemporary culture, as well as injecting new life into them. Neither ‘faithful’ pictures nor mere ‘self-quotations’ according to traditional interpretations, Blake’s illustrations of Dante’s Divina Commedia recontextualize the Dantean vision within Blake’s own system, amplifying incidents and details that are in keeping with the poet-painter’s own myth-making. Carla Maria Gnappi’s essay specifically argues that Blake was attracted by the forms and colours of Dante’s vision and converted Dante’s powerful images of afterlife into representations of the actual spiritual state of man. By contrast, the radical, sanguine, and altogether more ‘earthly’ William Hazlitt hailed Dante as ‘the first poet of the modern age’. Maria Cristina Cignatta’s essay examines Hazlitt’s view of Dante as an expressive poet whose ‘mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them’. As his characters are ‘instinct with life and sentiment, but it is with the life and sentiment of the poet’, Hazlitt indicates the essential quality of Dante’s verse in the trasformation or irradiation of the poet’s materials by his own intellectual powers. Thus, the Romantic-period critic keys the Commedia into recognizably Romantic aesthetic principles and, by this token, defines it as ‘the first lasting monument of modern genius’. The Romantics’ rediscovery of Italian literature was also marked by the revival of the sonnet, a poetic form intimately connected with Petrarch’s poetry and the Petrarchan tradition. A considerable literary phenomenon covering almost a century of poetic production, the revival of the sonnet was fostered by an interest in Petrarch’s life and his mysterious love-story, the nature of which biographers sought to unravel by trying to discover Laura’s identity. In the process, Edoardo Zuccato argues, Petrarch’s life was employed to gloss his poems, even as his poems were used to illustrate his own life. The conflation of man and poet encouraged biographical readings which are only one aspect of the multiple responses elicited by the Canzoniere. As Luca Manini suggests, in the first sonnet sequence of the Romantic period, Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784), a feeling of reciprocated love on Laura’s part subtly humanizes Petrarch’s love-story. This narrative, however, is deprived of the consolation that Petrarch derives from his hope of a reunion with Laura in the afterlife, and is thus transformed into the bitter tale of an aimless longing. Smith assumes the Petrarchan persona to give voice to the modern experience of life as purposeless wandering and hopeless exile, yet distances herself further from Petrarch – whose poetry she nonethe-

Introduction

21

less keeps in sight and even partly incorporates into her own sequence – by opting for the English, not the Italian, sonnet form. Charlotte Smith was not the only woman poet to enter the Petrarchan tradition and adapt it to modern sensibility. In fact the encounter proved extremely fruitful, as demonstrated by Anna Seward’s and Mary Robinson’s sonnets. In her essay, Silvia Bordoni explains how, on the one hand, Petrarch’s language of love allowed women to experiment with the language of passion and eroticism well beyond conventions on female propriety. On the other, the extactness of the form itself enabled them to assert – tacitly or overtly – their artistic worth and affinity with male authors. A different type of Romantic response to an equally important generic tradition – the romance – comes from Wordsworth’s surprisingly inadequate translation from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Although Wordsworth hardly played any part in the revival of the romance, as Laura Bandiera’s essay suggests, his poetry, critical writings, and translation from Ariosto indicate that he relied on the conventions of the romance in order to declare his own independence from it and thus define his identity as a ‘prosaic’ poet committed to the everyday. The approach to contemporary Italian literary and cultural manifestations – explored in the third section, ‘Looking at Contemporary Italy: Mapping the Present’ – was for the most part conditioned by the actual experience that British men and women had of the country itself. An experience evidently preconditioned by what travellers, even sympathetic ones, expected to see, and thus at best mediated by codified images and clichés. In this context, Lilla Maria Crisafulli’s contribution illustrates how this attitude risked transforming the whole land and its cultural life into an enormous theatre, a massive spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed with condescendence. At the same time, though, this ‘visual entertainment’ did not fail to inspire contemporary British writers. With their extempore performances, Italian improvvisatori and improvvisatrici struck and fascinated both travellers and their audiences at home as living instances of spontaneous creativity and artistic freedom. Many Romanticperiod works are dedicated to this intriguing character, or bear traces of its impact on Romantic poetics. In particular, Gioia Angeletti focuses on the fact that, despite his ambiguous judgments on the Italian improvvisatori, Byron can somehow be identified as one, especially when he adopts – in Beppo and, especially, Don Juan – a digressive style and a desultory, informal mode of narration. If the audience-oriented attitude of the improvvisatore and his histrionic pose may be linked to Byron’s art and life, by contrast, what seems to have influenced Romantic women writers was not so much the poetry, but rather the image of the historic Italian improvvisatrici. This is nowhere more evident than in Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s verse where, as Serena Baiesi explains, the improvvisatrice is one of the outstanding personae she loved to endorse and identify with, an almost legendary character whose art enables her to cast a powerful spell over enraptured audiences. Another ‘spectacle’ that Italy presented both to foreign visitors and the Italians was the dramatic contrast between its past grandeur and present decay. Mauro Pala’s essay examines how, in Childe Harold IV, Byron pays homage to the former glories of Italy and, standing by the Coliseum and the broken pillars of the Forum, mourns over ‘the wrecks of another world’, representing himself as ‘a ruin amidst ruins’. Meditating among scenes of decay, Byron transforms a landscape of relics into the stage of his own struggle for glory, transmuting ‘skeleton[s]’ and ‘ashes’ into the living monument of his poem. In stark con-

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trast, Ugo Foscolo’s contemporary poem Dei Sepolcri and Giacomo Leopardi’s canzoni employ the same places or topoi to inauguate a modern school of political poetry and revive the ruined landscape of Italy by representing its monuments and tombs as a stony ‘archive’ capable of stimulating the national consciousness and political activism. Yet Italian history, and medieval history in particular, were a matter of serious concern for the Romantics, who repeatedly explored, commented, dramatized, and fictionalized the Italian past in order to make its lessons immediately relevant to the urgencies of contemporary life. Thus Byron, who was fascinated by the past of the Republic of the Doges, reconstructed the story of the younger Foscari as a patriotic act of rebellion against the ruthless tyranny of the Venetian oligarchy. As Cecilia Pietropoli illustrates, his tragedy The Two Foscari, composed in Ravenna after the failure of the 1821 Carbonari uprising, reads as an implied invitation to Italy not to submit to the foreign yoke. By contrast, dealing with the same event, but emphasizing its domestic and private dimension, Mary Mitford’s tragedy Foscari expatiates on the relationship between the public (male) domain and the domestic (female) sphere, and is thus more directly concerned with contemporary British issues. Historical reflections also permeate Mary Shelley’s biographies of contemporary Italian writers. Far from being conventional portraits, these complex profiles reconstruct domestic and social relationships, and connect private history to the political dimension. In her essay Lia Guerra specifically discusses how, like other early ninenteenth-century women writers, Mary Shelley’s engagement with history concentrates not so much on grand designs but on individuals and the specific, quotidian contexts of their lives. These she conceived of as shaped by external circumstances, yet also as a primary point of access to the broader features and concerns of their respective ages. Fully sympathetic with the cause of Italian patriotism, Mary Shelley detects in modern Italian poetical achievements evidence that the Italian genius has survived ‘the blighting influence of misrule and oppression’. Similarly, though not necessarily sharing Shelley’s pro-Italian views, the British theatre reviewers of the post-Napoleonic era inflected their critical assessments of contemporary Italian drama with strong political overtones. As Diego Saglia’s contribution illustrates, the Italian revolutionary activity of the 1820s was directly related to the increased attention paid by literary reviews (with different ideological inclinations) to contemporary Italian drama as a cultural form capable of revealing the state of the country and its people. Seeing the theatre as a historically, socially, and politically conditioned dimension, British commentators turned to the plays of Vittorio Alfieri and Vincenzo Monti, Silvio Pellico, and Ippolito Pindemonte, Alessandro Manzoni, and Giambattista Niccolini to gauge the Italians’ reflection on their current historical situation. Thus, commentaries on Italian drama in the later Romantic period opened up a space for discussions of the cultural and political identity of Italy, whilst also providing a virtual forum for assessments of domestic (British) politics where the emergence of liberal discourses contends with conservative positions. With its endless variety and scope, Italy is a constant presence in British Romanticism, almost an index to the expansion and development of Romantic-period culture itself. And in the works of the second-generation Romantics, Italy – the ‘Paradise of exiles’ of Byron and the Shelleys – emerges not merely as the place where they chose to live, but in all its multiple intimations and associations. Byron and Percy Shelley genuinely sympathized with the ideas of Leigh Hunt who believed, as Joseph Warton and Richard Hurd well before him,

Introduction

23

that ‘We are much more likely to get a real poetical taste through the Italian than through the French school, – through Spenser, Milton, and Ariosto, than Pope, Boileau, and their followers’.47 But the younger Romantics who, before leaving England, gathered round Hunt and became associated with the Italianate fashion flourishing there in the immediate postWaterloo years, had little to do with the cultural nationalism which had prompted the Italian revival more than half a century before. They were modern libertarians, as is evident from Byron’s observation to Hunt in 1814: ‘I have always thought the Italians the only poetical moderns, – our Milton & Spenser & Shakespeare are very Tuscan and surely it is far superior to the French School’,48 or Shelley’s eulogy of Florence as a second Athens and celebration of Dante as the progenitor of ‘the father of our own literature, Chaucer’.49 Specifically, Caroline Franklin’s essay discusses the fact that second-generation authors placed themselves within a genealogy including such august precursors as Dante, Boccaccio, Spenser, Shakespeare, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and above all Milton, in order to trace an alternative line and create a rival tradition to that supported by the British cultural establishment and encoded in its nationalist canon of patriotic great works. Although the Liberal announced that ‘Italian Literature, in particular, will be a favourite subject with us’, in actual fact it published several of Byron’s later works: the Vision of Judgment, a burlesque in the style of Luigi Pulci throwing into dark relief Robert Southey’s conformist pro-establishment positions; the mystery play Heaven and Earth, developing what, in Byron’s opinion, Dante had unconsciously achieved in his treatment of eternal damnation, that is, an ironic disjunction between a literal representation of the biblical text and his own humanitarian perspective; and, finally, Byron’s translation of the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, specifically undertaken to legitimize, through the authority of the Italian burlesque tradition, what the literary advisers of the poet of Don Juan saw as an unacceptably immoral poem. Therefore, rather than dealing directly with Italian literature, the Liberal published and promoted texts which displayed a creative usage or reinvention of the Italian literary heritage by the author of Don Juan, the poem in ottava rima where Byron also adopted ‘the way of looking at life’ of Ariosto, the real master of this form, an outlook that is aristocratic and ironic, sensual and adventurous, amoral and, at the same time, idealized. Invoked since the mid-eighteenth century to support the dignity and value of an irregular, imaginative, sublime, anti-classical tradition, by the later Romantic period Italian literature and its masters were appropriated to structure and sustain the emotional and intellectual commitment to freedom that the second Romantic generation considered, and mythologized, as ‘classical’. For Byron, Shelley, and Hunt, classicism was an ideal, as well as an aesthetic and ideological category exempt from the literary codifications, generic prescriptions, and hierarchical and repressive functions that had connoted it in the eyes of the eighteenth-century promoters of the Italian revival. In Byron’s mature works, what has been called ‘la straordinaria saggezza dell’Ariosto’ (‘Ariosto’s extraordinary wisdom’)50 substanLeigh Hunt, The Feast of the Poets (1814) (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), p. 56. Byron’s Letters and Journals, IV, p. 50. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (1819), in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck, 10 vols (London: E. Benn, 1965), VII, pp. 5-6. 50 Lanfranco Caretti, Ariosto e Tasso (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), p. 30. 47 48 49

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tiates an anti-authoritarian position which was both a reaction to current trends in British and Continental politics and a cry for tolerance and dialogism. If Romantic-period attitudes to Italy oscillated between unbounded enthusiasm and utter dismissals, scholarly investigations and factual accounts varied between accuracy and unreliability, and conflicting desires to support received knowledge or unseat conventional opinions and images. What is beyond dispute, however, is that interest in this country and its culture, as well as cultural-geographical constructions of it, went on undeterred, thus ensuring the uninterrupted presence of scholarship and fiction about Italy throughout the nineteenth century. In the end, it seems that even the level of Italian-language teaching, that was such a major preoccupation for 1820s commentators, improved to very acceptable standards. In his 1835 review of G. Guazzaroni’s Grammaire Italienne recently published in London, Leigh Hunt assessed the level of diffusion and reliability of Italian tuition in contemporary Britain, evoking an altogether more cheerful prospect: The discontents, troubles, and revolutions manquées in the Peninsula, which have driven educated Italians by hundreds to our shores, have had the effect of providing even all our provincial towns with good masters and teachers, whose terms have been reduced in proportion to the abundance of the supply. We believe at this moment there is scarcely a town of any consequence in our island in which there are not one or two Italian exiles living by teaching their language; and, be it said to their credit, and to our own credit (for the fact shows how widely diffused is the love of knowledge and improvement), living, in the large majority of cases, respectably and honourably, in comfort, if not in affluence. In consequence of this, we have met young persons of the middling ranks of life, who have never crossed the Alps, or even the channel, - who have never been to London, and who yet speak the rich and beautiful Italian language with correctness, both of idiom and ac51 cent.

As Romantic-period culture gradually gave way to Victorian cultural manifestations, Italian partly began to lose its pre-eminent position as a prestigious foreign language, and, by the same token, its literature and culture also lost ground. Nonetheless, as Hunt seems to suggest, the study and knowledge of Italy and Italian improved, a clear indication that the scholarly activities of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century had been successful. It is precisely the sustaining potential of this scholarly work that the essays in this volume set out to recover and evaluate, in order to map the increasingly more extensive and deeper knowledge of Italy and its intersections with the endless re-elaborations of this cultural geography in British literature of the Romantic period.

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London Journal, no. 80 (Saturday, 10 October 1835), p. 344.

SETTING THE SCENE: LITERARY AND CULTURAL INTERSECTIONS

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William Spaggiari (Università di Parma)

The Canon of the Classics: Italian Writers and Romantic-Period Anthologies of Italian Literature in Britain

During the Romantic period, the experience of exile in England decisively influenced the flourishing of anthologies of Italian literature that could represent both a link with the homeland and a form of consolation for the difficulties of cultural and linguistic isolation. The first modern instance of a chrestomathy of Italian literature published in England dated back to Giuseppe Baretti’s Italian Library (1757), a selection based on such discriminating factors as the correctness of the Tuscan language, the preponderance of poetry, a limited selection of texts from the early ages, and reservations about seventeenth-century literature. These criteria inspired and directed most eighteenth-century and Romantic-period selections of Italian literature until, in 1828, Antonio Panizzi, professor of Italian at London University, published an anthology of Italian prose writers. After 70 years, the supremacy of verse decreed by Baretti was overthrown. And, against the emphatic pronouncements of other exiles, Panizzi’s choices reveal an unmistakably and concretely useful way of understanding tradition and presenting its landmarks to the readers of his adoptive country.

The conspicuous presence in Britain of Italian political exiles, from such areas as Lombardy, the Veneto and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was one of the decisive influences on the burgeoning of collections of Italian literary texts in the Romantic period. Indeed, such anthologies could represent a link with the abandoned homeland and, simultaneously, a form of spiritual support that would help the exile face the difficulties of a precarious life in an environment which was often seen as hostile, as well as of conditions of isolation not infrequently caused by language, as in Ugo Foscolo’s exemplary case. As is well known, British society generally welcomed exiles, but also showed diffidence towards those groups which, often in conflict with each other, resisted the idea of leading unhappy and ineffectual lives armed with courage and common sense. As a result, many political exiles in the early years of the post-Napoleonic period experienced existential difficulties rooted in their inability to become used to British customs, the related tendency to limit their acquaintances to their own fellow countrymen, and the habit of deploring their unhappy situations while conjuring up consolatory images of a lost Italy through poetry and letter-writing.1 1

On these issues, see L’esilio romantico: forme di un conflitto, ed. by Joseph Cheyne e Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones (Bari: Adriatica, 1990); L’exil et l’exclusion dans la culture italienne. Actes du colloque franco-italien, Aix-en-Provence, 19-20-21 octobre 1989, réunis par Georges Ulysse (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1991); Expériences limites de l'épistolaire: lettres d'exil, d'enfermement, de folie. Actes du Colloque de Caen, 16-18 juin 1991, textes réunis et présentés par André Magnan (Paris: Champion, 1993); the special issue on ‘Exile Literature’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 20 (2002). For England, in particular, see Margaret Wicks, The Italian Exiles in London, 1816-1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1937), and my own ‘La lettera dall’esilio’, in Scrivere lettere: Tipologie epistolari nell’Ottocento italiano, ed. by Gino Tellini (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002), pp. 41-81. For specifically literary aspects, see Remo Ceserani and Donata

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This desire to defend the national literary tradition and, at the same time, to find comfort in its poets explains the anthological vocation of at least two generations of exiles after 1815. Nonetheless, it is also true that the first modern instance of an Italian chrestomathy published in England dated back to half a century before, when London was visited, for the most different reasons, by a large number of Italian polygraphs such as Filippo Mazzei, Paolo Rolli, Lorenzo Da Ponte, and Giuseppe Baretti. And it was Baretti who, during his two long periods in England (1751-60 and, with various interruptions, 1766-89), published an Italian Library (1757) intended as an introduction to his complex strategy for the promotion of Italy and organized according to the decisive discriminating factor of the ‘buona favella toscana’, the proper Tuscan language. Indeed, language was a crucial feature for someone like the Turinese Baretti, who wished to distance himself from a linguistically hybrid education such as the one he had received in a Piedmont ruled by the House of Savoy.2 It is thus significant that the volume opens with a ‘History of the Italian Tongue’ which is also a literary anthology full of untranslated excerpts, already deploying some fundamental criteria for the selection and definition of a literary canon of outstanding authors. What is immediately evident is that Baretti’s ‘anthology’ comprises almost exclusively poetic texts – a practice common in Italy, too, at least until Girolamo Tiraboschi’s systematization in his Storia della letteratura italiana (1772-93). With two excerpts, Marco Polo is the only prose-writer in Baretti’s collection which, conversely, gathers a few poets from the Duecento and Trecento; three brief passages from the Divina Commedia, a choice limited to twenty-six terzine in keeping with Dante’s not altogether unanimous popularity in eighteenth-century Italy; a sample of Petrarch’s lyrical poetry, so ‘tender’ that he seems ‘effeminate in many places’, a judgment expressed also in the 1764-67 Petrarchan Mémoires of Jean-François de Sade (by contrast, the visionary Petrarch of the Trionfi presents a very different pattern of diffusion in the early nineteenth century); and a wealth of chivalric poets and, above all, comic ones, who had been widely imitated by Baretti in the years of his literary apprentissage. The section on epic poetry opens with a few octaves by Luigi Pulci, followed by Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (although not in the original, but in the Tuscan rifacimento by Francesco Berni, ‘the modern Catullus of Italy’), the episode of Orlando’s madness from the Orlando furioso (Ludovico Ariosto being ‘the greatest poet that my poetical country ever produced’), and eventually Torquato Tasso with a passage, Alete’s speech to the Christian army, from the second canto of the Gerusalemme liberata. Some of these choices appear to have been dictated by ‘personal opinion’, a criterion that is constantly highlighted by Baretti, for instance in the case of the four hundred lines from the Quadriregio by the Umbrian bishop Federico Frezzi, a cumbersome early fifteenth-century allegorical poem, here generously defined as ‘little inferior to Dante himself’, which had become available again after an edition was published in Foligno in 1725. However Baretti also devotes a large portion of his anthology to the modern age and living

2

Meneghelli’s survey ‘La letteratura inglese e americana e l’Italia’, in Storia della letteratura italiana, gen.ed. Enrico Malato, vol. XII: La letteratura italiana fuori d’Italia (Rome: Salerno, 2002), pp. 681-741 (especially the first three chapters, pp. 681-95). The Italian Library: Containing an Account of the Lives and Works of the Most Valuable Authors of Italy. With a Preface, Exhibiting the Changes of the Tuscan Language, from the Barbarous Ages to the Present Time (London: Millar, 1757).

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authors: among these, his ‘honest friend’ (and, like him, a member of the Milanese Accademia dei Trasformati) Gian Carlo Passeroni, with twenty-two octaves from his vast and still incomplete descriptive poem Cicerone, and Metastasio, with an epithalamion (1722) and his famous song ‘La libertà’ (1733) often set to music and translated throughout Europe (one of the French versions has been attributed to Rousseau).3 Baretti’s method was based on the absolute primacy of poetry, a limited selection from the earliest ages of literature, a preference for long poems, a cautious attitude towards the seventeenth century, and eclectic choices for the modern age. Yet these premises are only partially validated by the extensive information organized in the approximately one thousand bibliographic profiles placed in an appendix which, reaching the age of Baroque, also comprises prose writers, although they are still in a secondary position in comparison with the poets. In addition, Baretti’s anthology included a chapter about ‘poetry by Ladies’, which is interesting especially in the light of later developments in Italian women’s writings, and presenting about ten women poets especially from the Cinquecento.4 Baretti had close contacts with English society, and was a personal friend of Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Joshua Reynolds who, in 1769, witnessed in his favour during a trial for the murder of a pimp. He was the author, among other things, of a Dictionary of the English and Italian Language (1760), a parallel grammar of the two languages (1762), a controversial Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768) written in reply to foreign travellers’ ‘mistakes’ and malevolent judgments and mainly aimed at counterattacking Samuel Sharp’s Letters from Italy (1767). Thus Baretti played a major role in the revision of ideas about Italy and Italian culture in mid- to late eighteenthcentury England.5 His protracted propaganda activity had begun in 1755 with his Introduction to the Italian Language, containing literary passages in literal translation complete with grammatical annotations ‘for the use of those who, being already acquainted with grammar, attempt to learn without a master’. The twenty-seven authors (twenty-eight if we include John Milton, one of whose ‘Italian sonnets’ was added on the advice of Dr Johnson) are fairly distributed between poets and prose writers, although, in keeping with the didactic nature of the book, there is a great prevalence of instances of ‘proper style’, principally derived from sixteenth-century authors and with very few glimpses of the other centuries. Besides Petrarch and Boccaccio, however, Baretti also includes Galileo and a few seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets, the Tuscan Francesco Redi with his dithyramb in

3

4 5

‘A History of the Italian Tongue’, in The Italian Library, pp. xxi (Petrarch, with the song ‘Che debb’io far? che mi consigli, Amore?’, Canzoniere CCLXVIII), xxxix (Berni), liii (Ariosto), lxxxv (Passeroni); the mention of the Quadriregio is contained in the bibliographic repertoire (p. 58) which also features a positive assessment of Boiardo as ‘the greatest inventor’ among Italian poets. The Italian Library, pp. 83-84. An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy; with Observations on the Mistakes of Some Travellers, with Regard to that Country, 2 vols (London: Davies, 1768), now in Giuseppe Baretti, Dei modi e costumi d’Italia, pref. by Michele Mari, trans. and commentary by Matteo Ubezio (Turin: Aragno, 2003). For Baretti’s other works see Luigi Piccioni, Bibliografia analitica di Giuseppe Baretti (Turin: Società Subalpina Editrice, 1942), pp. 13-15.

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praise of wine, some figures from the Bolognese Arcadia (Eustachio Manfredi and Giampietro Zanotti), and the inevitable Metastasio.6 In view of such premises, there was not much difference between these important antecedents and the overall structure of the English collection of Italian verse published anonymously in London in 1798 (nine years after Baretti’s death) and offering translations by ‘admired English authors’. This volume opens with one of the most widely admired passages in Dante’s Commedia, that of Paolo and Francesca from canto V of the Inferno, which provides further concrete evidence of the poem’s popularity in Protestant nations, in some respects more precocious and widespread than in Italy where, for a long time, it was the object of resistance, prejudice and political, aesthetic and religious misunderstandings.7 As different political and institutional regimes succeeded one another in Italy between the ancien régime and the post-Napoleonic Restaurazione, educational authorities felt the need to modify the instruments with which students – and not exclusively in a school environment – read, studied and enjoyed the literary heritage. Thus, one of the most popular eighteenth-century anthologies was edited by Baretti’s mentor, the Modenese Girolamo Tagliazucchi, and was employed in the Kingdom of Piedmont for at least a century since 1734. This was followed, or accompanied, by the textbooks published in the Napoleonic age and based on new and revised principles: the Raccolta di lirici italiani (1808) by Robustiano Gironi of the Milanese Accademia di Brera; the Antologia italiana (1810), in two versions for the ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ schools of Humanities of the Kingdom of Italy; and, later, the textbooks published after the Congress of Vienna, with specific didactic structures and frontispieces bearing the government’s seal of approval, or organized according to principles such as loftiness of diction and purity of style. In some cases, these works were principally aimed to provide ‘sollievo degli adulti’ (‘adults’ enjoyment’), as Francesco Brancia stated in the introduction to his Antologia italiana published in Paris in 1823, and still dominated by Baretti’s rhetorical distinction, which would also soon re-emerge in Giacomo Leopardi’s much more significant Crestomazia of prose writings (Milan, 1827).8

6 7

8

An Introduction to the Italian Language, Containing Specimens both of Prose and Verse […], with a Literal Translation and Grammatical Notes (London: Millar, 1755). Extracts from the Works of the Most Celebrated Italian Poets with Translations by Admired English Authors (London: F. and C. Rivington and J. Hatchard, 1798). Some brief remarks on Dante as a ‘modello della cultura romantica’ in Europe are in Gustavo Costa, ‘Il risveglio dell’attenzione alla cultura italiana’, in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. XII, pp. 567-71 (see note 1 above); for the presence of Dante in British Romantic literature, see Diego Saglia, ‘Translation and Cultural Appropriation: Dante, Paolo and Francesca in British Romanticism’, Quaderns: Revista de traducció, 7 (2002), 95-119, especially pp. 101-08. Girolamo Tagliazucchi, Raccolta di prose, e poesie a uso delle Regie Scuole divisa in due tomi (Turin: Mairesse, 1734; to my knowledge, the last reprint of this textbook was by Fiaccadori, Parma, 1834); Raccolta di lirici italiani dall’origine della lingua sino al secolo XVIII, compilata da Robustiano Gironi (Milan: dalla Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1808); Antologia italiana ad uso dell’umanità maggiore [minore] nelle scuole del Regno d’Italia (Milan: dalla Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1810; fourth edition 1822); Antologia italiana del cav. F. Brancia (Paris: dai Torchi di Didot Maggiore, 1823; the quotation is taken from the ‘Avvertimento preliminare’ (pp. v-xv), p. xiv; Brancia also published a Tesoro della poesia italiana antica e moderna (Paris: Baudry, 1840); Crestomazia italiana cioè scelta di luoghi insigni o per sentimento o per locuzione raccolti dagli scritti italiani in prosa di autori eccellenti d’ogni secolo per cura del conte Giacomo Leopardi (Milan: Stella, 1827), followed by his Crestomazia italiana poetica cioè scelta di luoghi in verso italiano insigni o per sentimento o per locuzione, raccolti, e distribuiti secondo i tempi

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As a consequence of this publishing activity, the period between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries saw the increasing consolidation of a national literary canon: Dante’s limited reception, at least before the revival sparked off by Vincenzo Monti; the reduced selection of texts from the Trecento and Quattrocento, a period that even Leopardi saw as the barren age of literature (Gironi’s Raccolta, for instance, only features Lorenzo de’ Medici);9 the attention devoted to sixteenth-century grammarians and authors of treatises (Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo, seen as a fundamental instrument to learn Italian, is sometimes printed in its entirety), the re-awakening of interest in Baroque poetry with a moralizing tone (Giambattista Marino and his followers are generally condemned for their excessive use of rhetorical artifices); and a limited interest in modern authors, as collections in general only reach as far as the earliest poets of the Arcadia and, specifically, Alessandro Guidi or Giambattista and Faustina Zappi (only Leopardi, in 1828, devoted the largest part of his anthology to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets).10 These criteria are reflected in the exiles’ anthologies, which were often pocket-sized so as to be easily carried around. For instance, the pro-Napoleonic Venetian Antonio Buttura, exiled in Paris since the Treaty of Campoformio (1799), published two selections of lyrical poetry in Italian including some fourteenth-century women poets (apart from Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna).11 Similarly, in London the Piedmontese lawyer Carlo Beolchi, sentenced to death after the 1821 revolution, issued a series of Italian-themed anthologies with the publishing house of his fellow countryman Pietro Rolandi, such as a collection of Fiori poetici which ran to three editions by 1839.12 It is evident that, also in Britain, Italian lyrical poetry continued to be seen not just as a mine of beautiful or elegant verse, but also as a useful repertoire of moral reflections and precepts providing effective support for the exiles’ troubled souls. This is confirmed by two volumes edited by Pietro Luigi Costantini – a small collection of maxims and sententiae degli autori, dal conte Giacomo Leopardi (1828). Both Leopardi’s works have appeared in modern editions by Giulio Bollati and Giuseppe Savoca, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1968). A further series of collections was published under the collective title of Antologia italiana, and with different subtitles specifying their variable targets, in Verona (Mainardi, 1815, for ‘classi di grammatica’), Turin (Stamperia Reale, 1828, for ‘scuole inferiori’), Cremona (Fezzi, 1859, for the ‘prima classe ginnasiale’). Among the textbooks that closely followed governmental instructions, see the Antologia italiana approvata dall’eccellentissimo Magistrato della Riforma per le scuole superiori (Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1829). For further information on the ‘genre’ of the anthology and Italian nineteenth-century collections (principally on the very popular Letture italiane by Giosuè Carducci and Ugo Brilli, 1883), see Lorenzo Cantatore, ‘Scelta, ordinata e annotata’: l’antologia scolastica nel secondo Ottocento e il laboratorio Carducci-Brilli (Modena: Mucchi, 1999). 9 This judgment was expressed by Leopardi in 1817, at the beginning of Zibaldone; see Giuseppe Pacella’s edition, 3 vols (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), I, p. 4 (and the Raccolta di lirici italiani by Gironi, pp. 21-31). 10 Crestomazia italiana poetica, pp. 199-510. 11 Scelta di poesie italiane d’autori antichi (Paris: Baudry, 1840). The editor had died in 1832. See pp. 212-13 for a madrigal by Ricciarda de’ Selvaggi (or Selvaggia dei Vergiolesi, who was Cino da Pistoia’s beloved) and a sonnet by Ortensia di Guglielmo. In the same year, and with the same publisher, see Scelta di poesie italiane d’autori dell’età media (dal 1500 al 1700), containing three sonnets by Colonna and one by Gambara (pp. 48-50 and 80). By contrast, it features only two sonnets by Marino (pp. 242-43). The two volumes, accompanied by some brief closing remarks, are in 16°. 12 Fiori poetici scelti e illustrati da Carlo Beolchi (1839). See also his Saggio della poesia italiana (1825). Further information is offered in his autobiography Reminescenze dall’esilio (1830; later, Turin: Biancardi, 1852).

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gathered in the exiles’ environment and published in the fateful year 1821 and, slightly later, a selection of poems by ‘celebri autori antichi e moderni’ (‘famous ancient and modern authors’) with strong pedagogic motivations.13 At the turn of the century, a peculiar case is represented by the English author most active in popularizing Italian poetry, Thomas James Mathias, a member of the Roman Arcadia with the name of ‘Lariso Salaminio’, and a member and correspondent of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca and the Accademia Pontaniana of Naples. Among various other titles, he also published the three-volume Componimenti lirici de’ più illustri poeti d’Italia in London in 1802 (and again, with a substantial ‘Aggiunta’, in 1808), reissued in Naples, where Mathias died in 1835, in four volumes of over a thousand pages. He also composed a sizeable number of original prose and poetical works in Italian, as well as translating Edmund Spenser, James Thomson, and William Mason into Italian, and works by living Italian writers into English, such as Monti’s Bassvilliana translated in 1793, the same year of its publication in the original language. Just as crucial was Mathias’s English edition of Giovan Mario Crescimbeni’s century-old attempt at a systematization of Italian literature with his Comentarj intorno all’istoria della poesia italiana (1698).14 These different and, indeed, highly unusual contributions earned Mathias the praise of the Italian Romantics and, specifically, that of Pietro Borsieri who, in the heated climate of the anti-Classicist querelle of 1816, presented the Milanese public with a fragment of a song by Mathias in praise of Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and Alessandro Guidi (the ‘pavese alto e gagliardo’ of the late Seicento, in the English poet’s definition) and expressing the wish that British universities would create chairs of Italian literature so that the ‘italiana favella’ might acquire ‘uno stabile e permanente domicilio’ also beyond the national boundaries.15 Nonetheless, methods for promoting the ‘toscana favella’ in England had to follow other, not exclusively poetic, paths in the more restless, post-Napoleonic climate of conspiracies and political struggles. Thus in 1828, the same year as Leopardi’s poetic Crestomazia, the thirty-year-old Antonio Panizzi – exiled in Liverpool and then in London from 1823, and Professor of Italian at the new London University – published a six-hundred-page collection of Italian writers entirely dedicated to prose writers. Innovatively, Panizzi’s Extracts from Italian Prose Writers reversed the primacy of poetry sanctioned by Baretti and

Morale poetica italiana: scelta di massime e sentenze tratte da’ più classici poeti italiani (London: Treuttel and Wurtz, 1821); Nuova scelta di poesie italiane, tratte da’ più celebri autori antichi e moderni con brevi notizie sopra la vita e gli scritti di ciascheduno, 2 vols (Paris, London: Bossange, 1823). 14 Componimenti lirici de’ più illustri poeti d’Italia, 3 vols (London: Becket, 1802). The Italian edition was published in Naples by Nobile in 1819 (4 vols); and Aggiunta ai componimenti lirici de’ più illustri poeti d’Italia, 3 vols (London: Becket, 1808). Mathias’s Poesie liriche toscane were published in Florence by Piatti in 1817. There were numerous reprints in Naples, by the publisher Aniello Nobile, between 1818 and 1824, until the ‘new edition’ of Poesie liriche e varie of 1825, by the same publisher, in three volumes: the first containing ‘poesie originali’, the other two comprising ‘poemi di scrittori illustri inglesi recati in verso italiano’. The three volumes of Crescimbeni’s Comentarj were published by Becket in London (1803). 15 See my edition of Pietro Borsieri’s Avventure letterarie di un giorno o consigli di un galantuomo a vari scrittori (Modena: Mucchi, 1986), pp. 76-77. See also Mathias’s letter Agli eruditi e culti inglesi amatori della lingua della letteratura e della poesia italiana, and his song to William Lort Mansel, ‘dottore di sacra teologia’ at Cambridge, in Aggiunta ai componimenti lirici de’ più illustri poeti d’Italia, II, pp. 4 and 52, later in Poesie liriche italiane, inglesi e latine (Naples: Nobile, 1822), pp. 12 and 37. 13

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strengthened by dozens of anthologies. Without any apparent preferences for poetical works, Panizzi had the clear, and all but celebratory, aim of offering a useful instrument that might facilitate the (not very numerous) London University students who, contrary to traditional practice, did not have to tackle the works of ‘poetical writers’ but rather the ‘prose compositions’ of a tradition which Panizzi sought to highlight in its closest links with British culture. The exiled intellectual was still embittered by a political persecution that he considered unjust, as demonstrated by the letters, pamphlets and essays he wrote in those years in almost flawless English. At the same time, he tried to distance himself from his fellow exiles in order to conform entirely to English society (he became a British subject in 1832). In his Extracts, therefore, Panizzi did not make any reference to contemporary events, and limited himself to listing, in a mere two-page preface, the English authors that had been inspired by Italy, from Shakespeare and Spenser to Milton, up to Edward Gibbon, Lord Byron (‘that noble Bard’), and the historian William Roscoe who, being still alive, is merely mentioned through the titles of his works. The scanty annotations in the anthology, reduced to English translations of titles and brief remarks, are completely functional to the excerpts. In addition, the collection features a homage to Parini, defined ‘a generous patriot’ in a note to the well-known passage in Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Milan, 4 December 1798). Unlike Baretti’s anthology of 1757, this book does not follow any scheme of rhetorical organization, nor any distinction based on literary merit or chronological precedence. The thirty-one authors are presented in alphabetical order from Alfieri to Vasari, although Galileo Galilei’s twenty-five pages are placed outside the alphabetical list and represent an undeniably significant recovery of his work. Just as important are the sections reproducing Algarotti’s travels in Germany; Metastasio’s letters, the literary value of which is precociously acknowledged by Panizzi; the novelle of the abate Michele Colombo, one of Panizzi’s tutors; and the legal prose of Gaetano Filangieri that must have been deeply familiar to Panizzi, who had taken a degree in law at the University of Parma in 1818. His 1828 anthology is thus underscored by a rigorous selection based on a few significant names which may usefully convey a new idea of Italy: from Machiavelli, at eighty pages the most abundantly excerpted author, up to Manzoni. The latter’s presence in the book is surprising, if nothing else for chronological reasons, as the writer had only recently chosen to prefer the modern instrument of prose to poetry. Panizzi devotes twenty pages to the recently published Promessi sposi (1825-27), excerpting the portraits of Fra Cristoforo and Cardinal Federigo.16 Such features confirm that Panizzi’s anthology is an unusual product, and not just in the context of the English

16

Antonio Panizzi, Extracts from Italian Prose Writers for the Use of Students in the London University (London: Taylor, 1828), pp. ix-xi (Preface), 1-23 (Alfieri), 24-32 (Algarotti, with the second part of letter VIII from his Viaggi di Russia), 157-62 (Colombo), 182-95 (Filangieri), 213-27 (Foscolo), 532-58 (Galileo), 30887 (Machiavelli; see also, in the appendix, his epistolary exchange with Guicciardini of May 1521, pp. 38794), 404-27 (Manzoni), 427-58 (Metastasio, with about ten letters), 518-32 (Vasari). The importance of this anthology was highlighted by Carlo Dionisotti in Un professore a Londra: studi su Antonio Panizzi, ed. Giuseppe Anceschi (Novara: Interlinea, 2002), pp. 95-119 (the piece on ‘Panizzi professore’ dates back to 1980), pp. 109-13.

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literary market. For, apart from a handful of basic grammatical textbooks, also in Italy prose collections were extremely rare in the first half of the nineteenth century.17 Whereas Panizzi had only selected three living authors (Manzoni, Michele Colombo, and Ippolito Pindemonte, whose death occurred in the same year, 1828), his successor to the chair of Italian at London University, the ‘Deputy Professor’ Carlo Arrivabene, was much better disposed towards contemporary writers. In 1855, nearly thirty years after Panizzi’s anthology, Arrivabene published a collection based on the unfaltering faith in the superiority of poetry over prose. By that date, Panizzi had chosen the much more gratifying profession of librarian, and a few months later was to be nominated ‘Principal Librarian’ of the British Museum. Imbued with patriotism and conceived as a ‘historical survey’ of the glorious evolution of national poetry, Count Arrivabene’s Poeti italiani (1855) gathered an imposing crowd of authors (eighty-two names, with particular attention, among modern ones, for those who had preferred ‘to rend the strings of their lyres rather than submit them to the senseless scissors of Austrian censorship’). The collection thus aimed to prove the excellence of an Italian Parnassus revitalized by a large group of still active writers (Cantù, Dall’Ongaro, Guerrazzi, Andrea Maffei, Mamiani, Manzoni, Niccolini, Aurelio Saffi, Carlo Pepoli, Tommaseo), and significantly featuring also Goffredo Mameli and his ‘Canto nazionale’. Arrivabene’s approach is justified by the new political conditions of Italy and is clearly expressed in the thirty-odd introductory pages and voluminous annotations, especially those referring to the last of the nine period sections of the book, which, taking up over a third of it, comprises the ‘most illustrious authors of our own age’. Thus it is not surprising that the ‘innocent’ Leopardi was here unexpectedly enlisted among the bards of the new Italy, for, as with the rest of the Risorgimento-era poets, he is said to have had Italy’s tormented plight ‘in cima d’ogni suo pensiero’.18 Before the Unification in 1860, exiles had generally produced collections of Italian literature aimed at British readers with the intention (often animated by a form of excessive

One of the most famous collections of prose – published, however, after Panizzi’s Extracts – was edited by Giuseppe Monterossi: Scelta di prose italiane tratte da celebri scrittori antichi e moderni (Imola: Galeati, 1830; and later: Forlì: Bordandini, 1843). 18 I poeti italiani: Selections from the Italians Poets, Forming an Historical View of the Development of Italian Poetry from the Earliest Times to the Present, with Biographical Notices by Charles Arrivabene, Deputy Professor of the Italian Language and Literature in the London University College (London: Rolandi-Dulau, 1855), pp. 517 (the volume was printed by the Florentine Gaspero Barbèra, about whom see the 1883 Memorie di un editore [Florence: Barbèra, 19543], p. 120). Quotations are from the Introduction (dated April 1855), pp. 6 and 28; the section about the nineteenth century is at pp. 341-507 (Mameli’s ‘Canto’ is at pp. 425-26, whereas Leopardi’s works are at pp. 399-407, with his canzone ‘All’Italia’ and the second and third stanzas of ‘La ginestra’, ll. 52-157). More than in the contemporary anthologies by Niccolò Tommaseo (Letture italiane, con prefazione e note letterarie e morali, Milan: Reina, 1854) and the young Carducci (L’arpa del popolo: scelta di poesie religiose, morali e patriottiche cavate dai nostri autori e accomodate all'intelligenza del popolo, Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1855), Arrivabene’s collection finds its Italian correlative (albeit published after the Unification) in Ferdinando Bosio’s Poesie di illustri italiani contemporanei, 2 vols (Milan: Guigoni, 1865). This collection presents a comparable number of poets (sixty-one) and numerous duplications (as, for instance, Leopardi who is present with his early songs, the ‘Consalvo’ and the ‘Palinodia’ dedicated to Gino Capponi, I, pp. 257-90). A facsimile reprint of Bosio’s anthology was published in Trento (La Finestra, 2002), and edited by Luana Salvarani, who discusses Leopardi’s case in the introduction, pp. xxvi-xxviii. 17

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critical subjectivism) of making the national literary heritage relevant to the present. By contrast, Panizzi was perhaps the only one among them to have clearly realized that the cause of Italian culture was not exclusively furthered through patriotic feelings or an exasperated nationalism. In other words, for him the literary texts were never the loci for an expression of personal affliction, polemical resentment or unappeased rancour. This attitude is confirmed by his choice, on this and later occasions, to employ English publishers (Taylor, Pickering, Boone, Whittingham), whereas the other exiles usually turned to Italian printers in London in order to strengthen the patriotic connection, such as for instance Pietro Rolandi, who was also a friend of Panizzi’s.19 Further confirmation is provided by the latter’s aim to give pre-eminence, among the many poets that made Italy famous, only to those belonging to a period – Humanism and the Renaissance – which had been long appreciated by British readers. Thus, more than the tormented Tasso, his fellow countrymen Boiardo and Ariosto (both, like him, from Reggio Emilia) seemed more suited to promoting the image of a Northern Italian culture centred on the courts of the Po Valley, rooted in ancient traditions, and divorced from improvisations and declamations. In other words, a culture capable of eroding current evaluations of contemporary Italy. This vision is also the starting-point for the monumental nine-volume edition of the poetry of Ariosto and Boiardo, published by William Pickering in 1830-34 and marking the beginning of Panizzi’s protracted activity as a philologist and a scholar of incunabula and ancient prints.20 Then, at the end of these three decades of studies, in 1858, and soon after taking over the direction of the highest British cultural institution, Panizzi published his invaluable one-volume reproduction, funded by Lord Vernon, of the first four editions of Dante’s Commedia, accompanied by a mere sixteen-page preface and carried out according to the strictest historical and bibliographical erudition.21 That memorable quarto, dedicated to the members of the Accademia della Crusca and printed in just a hundred copies, was his indirect reply to a whole series of apologetic studies, published in England, on Dante as the first poet of exile. These studies approached Dante with passionate dedication, yet also often produced uneven results and spawned long-winded commentaries in allegorical and sectarian forms. Such are, for instance, the commentaries by Gabriele Rossetti and Foscolo who, nevertheless, had initiated Panizzi into Dantean research with the collation of codices from the Bodleian Library

See Eric Reginald Vincent, ‘Pietro Rolandi’, Italian Studies, 16 (1961), 84-95, and Mario Nagari, Pietro Rolandi da Quarona Valsesia (1801-1863), libraio ed editore in 20, Berner’s Street a Londra (Novara: Tipografia La Moderna, 1959; facsimile reprint by Comune di Quarona, 2001). 20 Orlando Innamorato di Bojardo: Orlando Furioso di Ariosto, with an Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians. Memoirs and notes by Antonio Panizzi, 9 vols (London: Pickering, 1830-34). In particular, after three centuries, Panizzi’s edition returned Boiardo’s poem to its original lectio against Francesco Berni’s Tuscan rifacimento. 21 Le prime quattro edizioni della Divina Commedia letteralmente ristampate per cura di G. G. Warren lord Vernon (London: presso Tommaso e Guglielmo Boone, 1858). The introductory note, bearing the date ‘Museo Britannico, il 31 Luglio, 1858’, is at pp. v-xx, and is followed by five facsimile illustrations from the editions of Foligno (1472), Mantua, Jesi (or, more likely, Venice) and Francesco Del Tuppo’s Neapolitan edition that Panizzi thought had been issued before April 1477. 19

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and Holkham Hall library in 1825-26. Then, still a young exile, Panizzi followed his mentor’s example and significantly saw in Dante ‘il miglior conforto dell’esilio’.22 Whereas in Italy the importance of Panizzi’s studies on epic and narrative poetry was acknowledged only at the end of the century, in England the reaction was prompter, although not devoid of polemical aspects linked to the scholar’s nationality and doubtful origins. Indeed Panizzi was still an exile, with the added aggravation of being Italian and, above all, a ‘delinquente di Stato’, a state criminal on whose head hung the infamy of a death sentence. Traces of an early British appreciation of Panizzi’s work are found in Stories from the Italian Poets (1846) by the eclectic James Henry Leigh Hunt, one of the most unusual anthologies of Italian poets published in the early nineteenth century. Dedicated to Shelley’s son, it opens with a celebration of the genius of Dante and a generous prose summary of the Commedia. This summary constitutes a quasi-novelistic narrative in the style of Leigh Hunt’s re-elaboration of the tale of Paolo and Francesca in The Story of Rimini (1816) and connected to Dante’s poem by a few stanzas reproduced in the annotations. Through his narrative of the Commedia and an appendix of texts which are only partly translated, Hunt offers the conciliating vision of a liberal and Romantic Dante, an unhappy though undaunted exile, in whom the reformer of the Church coexists with invocations to Christian charity and Giuseppe Mazzini’s universalistic yearnings. Nevertheless, what matters particularly is Leigh Hunt’s repeated praise for Panizzi, the author of the ‘admirable edition of the combined poems of Boiardo and Ariosto’ capable of writing ‘an English almost as correct as it is elegant’. Thus a hundred pages in Stories from the Italian Poets are dedicated to the two Emilian authors (as many as those for Pulci and Tasso), although with a few moralistic provisos. Indeed Hunt omits, because unsuitable to an age ‘unaccustomed to the old romances’, the octaves in the twenty-fourth canto of the Furioso on the terrible effects of Orlando’s madness who, ‘squarciati i panni’, destroys herds, disembowels bears and wild boars, and slaughters shepherds and peasants.23 Twenty years later Edmondo Cavalleri situated his own series of ‘readings’ from the major poets by confirming Dante’s and Petrarch’s absolute supremacy24 and the importance of Letter to Foscolo, 25 February 1826, in Ugo Foscolo, Epistolario, raccolto e ordinato da Francesco Saverio Orlandini e da Enrico Mayer, 3 vols (Florence: Le Monnier, 1852-54), III, pp. 460-61. 23 Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1846). The collection is dedicated to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s son, Percy Shelley, who is said to combine ‘a love of the most romantic fiction with the coolest good sense’, and to be capable of moving ‘from the driest metaphysical questions to the heartiest enjoyment of humour’ (p. v). The ‘Critical Notice’ on Dante and the plot-summary of the Commedia are at pp. 1-95; a portion of it is reprinted in Italian Poets and English Critics, 1755-1859: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. with an introd. by Beatrice Corrigan (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 208-24. Boiardo and Ariosto are discussed at pp. 135-230 (on Panizzi, see pp. 135 and 141-42; and, for a remark on his omissions in the Furioso, see p. 210). The Appendix is at pp. 295-334. The parallel London edition in 2 volumes (Chapman and Hall, 1846) bears the same title. See also Stories from the Italian Poets: Being a Summary in Prose of the Poems of Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso; Occasional Passages Versified, and Critical Notices of the Lives and Genius of the Authors (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846). 24 Foscolo, Rossetti and other refugees devoted themselves to the commentary of Dante’s and Petrarch’s works, yet almost always from a conspicuously subjective standpoint. On Romualdo Zotti’s (London, 1808-09 and 1811) and Niccolò Giosafatte Biagioli’s (Paris, 1818-19 and 1821) editions of Dante and Petrarch, see Roberto Tissoni, Il commento ai classici italiani nel Sette e nell’Ottocento (Dante e Petrarca) (revised edi22

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the chivalric tradition, although, at the same time, he introduced a gap in Leigh Hunt’s ‘epic’ sequence through the exclusion of Boiardo. This is hardly surprising, as it is evident that the author of the Innamorato, writing in a Northern Italian koiné, had not yet been sufficiently reinstated by Panizzi’s complex critical operation in the eyes of an Italian who was faithful to Tuscan standards.25 Moreover, besides the variations indicated here, the definition of the primacy of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, destined to take over also in England, had already been codified at the end of the eighteenth century. In his Vita (1783) Alfieri discusses them as ‘i quattro nostri poeti’, creating a formula that would re-emerge in his sonnet ‘Quattro gran vati’ three years later.26 Later, in the Romantic period, different Italian publishers issued a sequence of anthologies that presented the works of the ‘four great bards’ under the title of Parnaso classico italiano: one appeared in Florence in 1821 (Poliziano is added), another in Padua in 1827, and finally another in Venice in 1836.27 A similar development emerged in France where Antonio Buttura published the major works of the four canonical Italian poets. Later collected in one volume, Buttura’s edition enjoyed widespread diffusion even after his death, as did an anonymous Parnaso published in Lyon in 1842.28 Panizzi’s philological choice seemed to be ahead of its time not just for the tradition of chivalric poetry, but also within the field of Dantean exegesis. In effect, it was soon countered, and not just in England, by a critical approach that mixed sentimental issues, patriotic motivations, a certain amount of mysticism and old-fashioned rhetorical attitudes. The most significant example, almost a reply to Panizzi’s slim edition of the Commedia three years before, was published in London in 1861 within the busy cultural circle of the Rossetti family, the symbol of the Italian exiles in Britain. The patriarch, Gabriele, died in 1854, and was thus spared the professional triumph of his worst enemy, Panizzi, on whom he had for a long time poured a pathological form of hatred which had induced him to see Panizzi as a ‘negromante’ or an incarnation of the devil.29 Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s voluminous selection from the ‘early Italian poets’ is still worthy of attention as one of the most copious collections of early Italian poetry and the stil novo: fifty-eight authors ranging from major (Dante is represented by the entire Vita nuova, entitled The New Life) to minor and marginal, for a

25

26

27 28

29

tion, Padua: Antenore, 1993), pp. 98-104. The already mentioned Antonio Buttura also published a threevolume edition of Petrarch’s Rime (Paris: Lefevre, 1820). Italian Readings from the four poets Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, Ariosto, with English Translations and Notes by Various Hands, Collected and Arranged by Edmondo Cavalleri (Turin: Stamperia di compositoritipografi, 1865), pp. 77. Vita, IV, 10, and Rime, CXLI. See also Arnaldo Di Benedetto, ‘I quattro poeti’, in Vittorio Alfieri aristocratico ribelle (1749-1803), catalogo della Mostra di Torino, Archivio di Stato, 5 ottobre 2003-11 gennaio 2004 (Milan: Electa, 2003), pp. 41-42. Parnaso classico italiano (Florence: All’insegna di Pallade, 1821; later Padua: Tipografia della Minerva, 1827, and Venice: Antonelli, 1836). I quattro poeti italiani: con una scelta di poesie italiane dal 1200 sino a’ nostri tempi (Paris: LefevreBaudry, 1833), a collection which also comprises Tasso’s Aminta (reprinted 1836); Parnaso classico italiano: contenente Dante, Petrarca, Ariosto e Tasso, 4 vols (Lyon: Cormon and Blanc, 1842). See Tobia R. Toscano, ‘Introduzione’ to Gabriele Rossetti, Carteggi, edizione progettata e diretta da Pompeo Giannantonio, ed. by T. R. Toscano, Philip R. Horne, Alfonso Caprio, John R. Woodhouse, 4 vols (Naples: Loffredo, 1984-95), II, p. xv (among Rossetti’s many letters against Panizzi, see those addressed to Charles Lyell on 24 July 1835 and 14 September 1840, III, p. 527 and IV, pp. 419-20).

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grand total of nearly two hundred poems.30 Each of these poems is translated ‘in the original metres’ and presented with a typographic clarity that brought the editor to dispense with footnote indices and that cumbersome apparatus of ‘verbal analysis’ which, in his opinion, was an unnecessary burden in other anthologies. This work exemplifies Rossetti’s staunch commitment to family traditions and, simultaneously, constitutes a training ground for his own later Pre-Raphaelite poetic and pictorial activities. A very successful volume, it was reprinted in 1874 with a different title, and was republished in 1892 by William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s younger brother, who, in his lifetime, was the keeper and popularizer of the writings of his father and siblings.31 With its ample selection from the early poets, Rossetti’s anthology clearly deviated from the publishers’ established practice and their tendency to publish already popular texts, as well as from the readers’ presumable expectations, as the latter could not necessarily be expected to favour such difficult and remote materials. Nonetheless, with his aristocratic erudition, Rossetti also countered the confirmed canon of the four major Italian poets. The rigorous Panizzi had treated two of these auctores, Dante and Ariosto (the latter translated by William Stewart Rose in 1823) with the strictest philological accuracy, whilst linking them (and that was his greatest merit) with his fellow countryman Boiardo, of whom he had not only published the chivalric poem, but also the lyrics (unpublished since 1501) in 1835.32 As Panizzi wrote to a friend in 1845: ‘Vivo del resto nella miglior società di Londra. […] Non mi occupo più che di cose Inglesi e in tutto e per tutto fo come un Inglese’.33 Encoded in these words is a polemical reaction against the coldness with which, Panizzi felt, his countrymen treated him and his own commitment to the national cause. This contrast with his country of origin was destined to deteriorate further, and would not be improved even by the Milanese reprint of his collection of Boiardo’s lyrics in the same year.34 30 31

32 33

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The Early Italian Poets, from Ciullo d’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100-1200-1300), in the Original Metres together with Dante’s Vita nuova Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1861). William Michael Rossetti published Dante Gabriel’s Family Letters in 1895, the English version of his father’s autobiography in 1901, his sister Christina Georgina’s New Poems and Poetical Works in 1896 and 1904. See also William Michael Rossetti’s Some Reminiscences, 2 vols (London: Breron Langham, 1906). His edition of Early Italian Poets is entitled Dante and his Circle: With the Italian Poets Preceding him (1100-1200-1300). A Collection of Lyrics Translated in the Original Metres by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Part I. Dante’s Vita nuova, etc. Poets of Dante’s Circle. Part II. Poets Chiefly before Dante. A New Edition with Preface by William M. Rossetti (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1892). The editor’s introduction is at pp. 1-29; the section on Dante, with a selection of his lyrics, is at pp. 30-115. A modern edition of Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets was edited by Sally Purcell (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981). See also The New Life, Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, introd. by Michael Palmer (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002). On the links between poetry and painting in Rossetti, and especially his interpretation of Dante’s medieval world, see Giovanna Silvani, ‘La religione dell’eros nella pittura verbale di Dante Gabriele Rossetti’, La questione romantica, 9 (2000), 41-60. Sonetti e canzone del poeta clarissimo Matteo Maria Boiardo conte di Scandiano (London: Whittingham, 1835). The edition, issued in fifty copies, was dedicated to Thomas Grenville. Letter to Giuseppe Levi Minzi, 1 May 1845, in Antonio Panizzi, La catena di seta: lettere a Giuseppe Levi Minzi (1822-1873), ed. by William Spaggiari (Rome: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano-Archivio Guido Izzi, 1998), p. 50. Sonetti e canzone del poeta clarissimo Matteo Maria Boiardo conte di Scandiano (Milan: dalla Società Tip. dei Classici italiani, 1845). The volume was printed in two hundred and fifty copies, and in fifty copies ‘in carta grande’.

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Panizzi’s inflexible choices in the case of Dante, Boiardo, and Ariosto were an affectionate tribute to the culture of his own country in its most glorious phase between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet, these choices also unequivocally indicate that, in contrast with the other exiles’ loud and emphatic attempts, Panizzi supported a concretely useful approach to the Italian literary tradition as a means of furthering the introduction of its masterpieces to the audiences of his adoptive country.35

35

The chronological limits of this essay exclude any examination of the variations in the canon of Italian writers in later anthologies. However, an interesting comparison can be drawn between the two most relevant collections published in the early twentieth century: Selections from the Italian Poets, with critical introductions by Ernesto Grillo (London, Glasgow, Bombay: Blackie and Son, 1917), and the more famous Oxford Book of Italian Verse. In the case of the latter anthology, the first edition, published in 1910 and edited by St. John Lucas, contained 345 poems by about a hundred authors; whereas the second edition, ‘revised with twentiethcentury supplement’ and edited by Carlo Dionisotti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) contains 23 new poems, but the number of authors is practically the same. Indeed Dionisotti excluded, among others, Cielo d’Alcamo (‘hardly comprehensible without a full commentary, even to experienced Italian readers’, p. vi), Annibal Caro, Alessandro Tassoni, Angelo Mazza, Luigi Carrer, Francesco Dall’Ongaro and a few more minor poets; yet, at the same time, compensated these absences by including Leon Battista Alberti, Tommaso Campanella, Giovanni Fantoni and, among modern poets, Giacomo Zanella, Sergio Corazzini, Carlo Michelstaedter, Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj, D’Annunzio, Gozzano and Pascoli, the latter represented by a dozen excerpts. The dominant figures are still those of Dante (22 excerpts), Petrarch (33) and Tasso (20), together with Leopardi (14). The significant presence of 8 samples of Boiardo’s lyrical output could then be seen as a positive influence of Antonio Panizzi’s early nineteenth-century re-evaluation. Ernesto Grillo’s 1917 anthology presents similar dimensions and a similar list of authors as the Oxford Book of Italian Verse. Nonetheless a few relevant figures are visibly absent from it (Francesco Redi, Galeazzo di Tarsia and Ottavio Rinuccini); Risorgimento and post-Unification poets (Antonio Fogazzaro, Olindo Guerrini, Mario Rapisardi, Giovanni Marradi, as well as Ada Negri and Arturo Graf, besides the already mentioned Carrer and Dall’Ongaro) are more numerous than those from earlier periods (notable absences are those of Cecco Angiolieri, Guittone d’Arezzo, Iacopone da Todi, Antonio Pucci, Giacomino Pugliese and Rustico di Filippo). Even so, it must be observed that the editor later corrected these omissions with the publication of Pre-Dante Poetical Schools, ‘with critical introductions’ (London: Blackie and Son, 1920). Further observations may be made by comparing the summaries and indices of the Oxford Book of Italian Verse (pp. v-vi and 605-16) and Grillo’s Selections (pp. vii-xvii and 607-18).

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Gian Mario Anselmi (Università di Bologna)

Shelley and the Italian Lyrical Tradition

This essay examines the roots of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetical formation in the light of his familiarity with the Italian literary tradition. It is a well-known fact that he was deeply interested in Italian culture and letters, and was a careful reader and interpreter of many Italian authors who contributed, through a multifaceted intertextual patterning, to define some of the fundamental paths of his lyrical compositions and poetics. This is especially evident if we focus on his relations with stil novo traditions, with the models of Guido Cavalcanti and, especially, Dante. And yet, equally important, and perhaps deserving an entirely new approach, is Shelley’s link with Petrarch, and not just the familiar poet of the Canzoniere, but also the meditative and anguished Petrarch of his Latin works, and the visionary Petrarch of the Trionfi; as well as Shelley’s knowledge of the poetry of the Italian Humanists (in particular, their Latin poetry) and of their reinterpretations of some of the classics. The essay stresses the crucial link between this secular Humanist tradition and some of the essential ideas of Romantic poetics, especially Shelley’s important discussion of the poet’s central role within processes of the formation of knowledge and the imaginative elaboration of reality.

If we approach literature as a pilgrimage towards wisdom, as the essential sign of a reflection caught in mid-stream between tradition and modernity, or as a mythopoeic quest after possible truth – the quintessence, indeed, of Italian Humanist and Renaissance culture – we will eventually, though not unexpectedly, come into contact with British literature and, in particular, the work of Percy Shelley. If we accept that the Humanist heritage spread rapidly to become a shared European tradition, then we need to focus on those authors and poetic itineraries, located at the climax of a decisive epochal shift, and whose themes and implications produced especially conspicuous and durable effects. This would certainly imply a study of such pivotal Romantic-period figures as Goethe, Chateaubriand or Stendhal. Here, however, we propose to concentrate on English literature, because it was possibly this tradition that, thanks to Edmund Spenser as early as the second half of the sixteenth century, had been most constantly attracted to the Italian classics and the great Humanist and Renaissance models, encompassing also such exponents of neo-Latin literature as Lorenzo Valla, Angelo Poliziano, Jacopo Sannazaro or Giovan Battista Spagnoli. This cultural interaction produced outstanding results, visible in Shelley’s works, which are not only a conscious reelaboration of these models, but almost a sort of emblematic end-product of this literary development. A similar role can be ascribed, in Italian literature, to Ugo Foscolo – a genuine watershed in this tradition, a modern and ‘European’ author who, at the same time, subtly re-elaborated the myths of the Renaissance. It is more than a mere coincidence that, during his unhappy existence, Foscolo ended up in England, where he penned some extremely lu-

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cid and illuminating pages on the Italian literary tradition, and particularly on the heritage of Dante, Petrarch, and the Renaissance.1 Let us suppose the existence of an ‘Island of the Blest and the Heroes’ where Siegfried and Achilles, Ophelia and Iphigenia, King Lear and Oedipus, Helena and Iseult hold an imaginary conversation. This island was imagined by Giosuè Carducci in ‘Presso l’urna di Percy Bysshe Shelley’, one of his most famous Odi barbare (1884) and a poem interspersed with echoes and suggestions ranging from Hesiod and Pindar, to Virgil and Dante’s limbo.2 In this celebration of Shelley, Carducci displays acute poetical and hermeneutic insight in his accentuation of the complex interconnections linking the lofty protagonists of classical culture with those of the great Northern cultural traditions (especially those of England and Germany, from Shakespeare to Wagner) – a veritable melting-pot that the ‘classicist’ Carducci, arguably one of the true great readers and interpreters of European Romanticisms, without hesitation connects with the ‘Titanic’, yet also ‘virginal’, figure of Shelley and his own age. And, indeed, it is not easy to provide a suitable definition for the period between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries in all its European manifestations. It could be defined as a phase in which Neoclassicism and nascent Romanticism were interwoven. Nonetheless, despite their glorious histories, these categories now seem threadbare and inappropriate in the face of the grandiose explosion of creativity of that period and its protagonists in every artistic field. This complexity makes it extremely difficult, in an age of geniuses and masterpieces that signalled the birth of modernity, to discern the boundary between a highly original re-reading of the classics and the illustrious Italian Humanist tradition, on the one hand, and a new and vigorous Romantic subjectivism, on the other. Thus, in terms of M. H. Abrams’ well-known metaphors, in those few decades at the turn of the century, ‘mirror’ and ‘lamp’ together conjured up such fascinating effects that it becomes virtually impossible to establish what was ‘reflected’ and what effectively radiated its own light.3 Carducci gave his own response to this intricate cultural connection, a response that was in keeping with the liveliest elements of the Humanist tradition in Italian literature. If, as many critics have amply demonstrated, Humanist culture was not merely tantamount to harmony, decorum or a cold repetition of established models, but above all complexity, dynamism, dialogue and tolerance dominated by an ideal of the nobility of wisdom, then it is in the great tradition of Humanist and Renaissance culture (and subsequently in its European, and especially English, developments) that we must seek the most appropriate keys to access the melting-pot of eighteenth and nineteenth century European Romanticisms, the contours of which seem so elusive.4

1 2 3 4

For bibliographic references on Foscolo, see my La saggezza della letteratura (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1998). On Shelley’s reception in Italy see Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones, Interpretazioni: P.B. Shelley fra Ottocento e Novecento (Bologna: Clueb, 1990). M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), and Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971). Among the numerous scholars who have contributed to a redefinition of the concept of the Renaissance, see the work of Eugenio Garin, Carlo Dionisotti, Ezio Raimondi, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Leonid M. Batkin.

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Furthermore, up to its climax in the works of Torquato Tasso, the Renaissance was uniformly characterized by its ability to reconcile conflicting opposites, and thus to subvert the consolidated hierarchies of knowledge and assert the primacy of literature, poetry, and the arts. Literary discourse and mythopoeia – those essential vehicles of truth and wisdom, in opposition to such ‘strong’ and academically relevant forms of knowledge as philosophy, law, medicine, and theology – are a central preoccupation in reflections by Petrarch, Valla, Leon Battista Alberti, the Northern Italian Humanists, and Tasso. The scholar is the noble human being, and literature is the locus where what is usually divided by the ‘strong’ disciplines can coexist. It is the only place where the ‘sacred’ Aristotelian principle of ‘non contradiction’ may be systematically violated – in other words, a place of possible dialogues, of Utopia, the complex, and the multiple. It is also the place where the truly wise learn that authentic form of knowledge that may ‘order’ the world. From this perspective, this tradition clearly anticipates many of Shelley’s crucial concerns and some of the central passages in his Defence of Poetry (1821).5 And yet, the grandiose scope of this context obliges us to dispense with those short-term literary periodizations that are customary in established literary-historical compendia. If we accept the validity of the ‘long duration’ model for medieval literature vigorously propounded by Ernst Robert Curtius, then we will also concede that more inclusive periodizations are even more necessary for the succeeding epochs.6 In fact, Dante had already formulated the principle of the cognitive primacy of literature in a scholar’s education, in complete form and with overwhelming epistemic and ideological novelty. Shelley perfectly understood Dante’s importance in this respect because, rather than getting entangled in diatribes over the degree of ‘medievalism’ of the Italian poet, in his Defence he uncompromisingly defined Dante as an actual ‘bridge’ towards modernity and his (Shelley’s) own age (‘The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and antient world’). Here Dante becomes a link in a cultural chain which also connects Shakespeare and Milton to the Romantic avant-garde. In Italy, Foscolo is the culminating and most original interpreter of this long tradition, and an emblematic and vital embodiment of the best features of Italian humanism.7 Shelley, in particular, interprets and appropriates the Italian poetical tradition through a tripartite nexus rooted in Humanist and Renaissance culture. The first step is Shelley’s return to Petrarch, although not to the ‘lyrical’ Petrarch of the Canzoniere, who was emerging as a fundamental influence on the latest poetic trends in Britain. By contrast – and totally in keeping with his usual unconventional approaches – Shelley assimilates the Latin Petrarch and the author of the Trionfi. In effect, Shelley’s visionary mode is profoundly pervaded by the Trionfi: with great hermeneutic efficacy and lucid critical insight, he combines his own passion for Dante (and for a terza rima that he ‘rediscovered’ at a time when it had been 5 6 7

See my Il tempo ritrovato: Padania e Umanesimo tra erudizione e storiografia (Modena: Mucchi, 1992). See Ernst Robert Curtius, English Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953). See Vincenzo di Benedetto, Lo scrittoio di Ugo Foscolo (Turin: Einaudi, 1990). Another useful source, with its introductions and extensive annotations, is the edition of Foscolo’s Opere in two volumes by F. Gavazzeni (Turin: Einaudi, 1992-95), as well as the essays on the Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis and Dei Sepolcri by G. Nicoletti in Letteratura Italiana Einaudi, Le Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), vol. III.

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abandoned everywhere in Europe) with a rewriting of Petrarch’s ‘dream-vision’ mode. Thus his carefully explorations of Petrarch’s Latin Secretum and epistolary provide him with a wide-ranging lexicon on the painful contradictions and angst of a generation which saw Petrarch and Tasso as the fundamental precursors of the figure of the philosopherwriter typical of modern European culture and central to Shelley’s literary theory and practice. Shelley was undoubtedly acquainted with the vast lyrical production enshrined in the numerous Italian sixteenth-century canzonieri by male and female poets that were generously excerpted in the anthologies of Italian literature circulating in Britain between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After all, his poetical apprentissage bore traces of the wisdom of another important learning process based on a lay ethic, that had left a crucial mark on European culture, and England in particular: the works of Baldassarre Castiglione, Giovanni Della Casa and Stefano Guazzo, and their model of the gentiluomo, whose education was primarily based on literary competence and its attendant form of discipline. This had a lasting influence on English (and then British) culture, as exemplified by Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (published in 1774), a development of which Shelley was fully aware. Finally, if Shelley owed an important debt to classical culture, his favourite Greek and Latin authors were figures whose work had been decisively mediated by Italian Humanism, such as Pindar, Virgil, Lucretius and, above all, Ovid – both the mythopoeic author of the Metamorphoses and the elegiac composer of the Heroides, who also provided a possible model for British women Romantic poets. Besides Shelley, traces of Humanistic culture were also conspicuous in John Keats’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mythopoeic practice, as well as in Lord Byron’s seminal use of the word conversazione, so crucial in the literary tradition of Italian Humanism with its distinctive insistence on the liberating potential of dialogism. These references indicate that British culture revalued and revivified the Italian Renaissance – taken as a whole and with all its extremes – perhaps more extensively than any other European tradition, and not in any casual way. It was English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that gave Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron and Keats the key to access the Rinascimento. In effect, Tudor and early Stuart England had produced the most brilliant re-elaboration of Italian literature and its origins ever seen in Europe. To such an extent that one of the focal points in contemporary debates on modernity inevitably proceeds from an appropriate reflection on the development of Humanism between Italy and England up to the revolutionary developments of the early nineteenth century. But, first, we need to dispel one specific misunderstanding or, better, a series of commonplaces that are not so easily rectified, notwithstanding the fact that they are now ossified in hackneyed formulas: for instance, the cliché that the greatness of such authors as Shakespeare and Milton lies in their successful combination of the decorum and harmony of the Italian Renaissance with the ‘fiery’, ‘undisciplined’, and tragic character of the Northern nations.8 Yet, if

8

Authoritative and well-argued versions of these views may be found in essays by such established critics as Benedetto Croce, Emilio Cecchi, and Mario Praz. However, for the relations between Italian and English literature, the fundamental studies are still: Emilio Cecchi, I grandi romantici inglesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1961) and Mario Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (Torino: Einaudi, 1942). On the

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scholars nowadays generally concur that the Rinascimento was a restless and complex period of extremes, then we can confidently assert that, precociously and well in advance of other traditions, English literature read and reinterpreted the Italian literary tradition in its entirety – its harmonious and ‘satanic’ facets, the bucolic aspect as opposed to its contradictory and tormented features, the Petrarchan versus the Dantean-infernal traditions, the Latin intuitions of Poliziano, Michele Marullo Tarcaniota or Giovan Battista Spagnoli, alongside Luigi Pulci’s carnivalesque and irreverent octaves, some of which were successfully (and predictably) translated by Byron. Boccaccio’s widespread and long-lasting fame in Britain provides further evidence of this intercultural dialogue, especially because this appreciation invested his entire output, and not just the Decameron. His popularity is already patently visible in the fifteenthcentury translations of the Corbaccio which provided an archetype for so much subsequent misogynous literature (also in the field of drama), as well as in the diffusion of a scholarly Humanistic summa such as the Genealogia deorum gentilium. The latter work enjoyed an uninterrupted popularity until the early nineteenth century, providing a source for Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), and particularly for the portrait of Demogorgon (Act II, scene IV). Later, in 1828, it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was responsible for a renewal of interest in Boccaccio.9 Moreover, in the case of the Decameron, we should bear in mind that the ‘tragically’ and ‘satanically’ inclined among the British Romantics were not merely familiar with the most popular erotic tales, but also with other novelle, such as that of Ser Ciappelletto. The protagonist of the first novella, Ser Ciappelletto is the brilliant, though usually overlooked, archetypical embodiment of subversive and mocking ante litteram Satanism. In addition, the gloomy and memorable fourth giornata of the collection features an entire gallery of portentously Titanic and bloodthirsty figures of fathers, husbands, and brothers, juxtaposed with sweet, courageous, and unfortunate heroines, which seem to provide the blueprint for later tragic figures from Shakespeare’s ill-fated female protagonists to Beatrice in Shelley’s Cenci (1819, 1821). Boccaccio is thus a particularly meaningful instance of the pervasive Italian literary influence on the English tradition. And yet, just as pervasive and influential was Castiglione’s Cortegiano, the enduring and deep-seated fame of which turned it into a veritable archetype for later conduct books for gentlemen, advocating self-control as a balance between social elegance and military valour, political wisdom and the primacy of literature seen as the acquisition of knowledge. Nor can it be forgotten that Spenser’s Faerie Queene, one of Shelley’s and the Romantics’ most revered literary models, draws deeply on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian sources. It is especially significant that the central figure of King Arthur is a personification of magnanimità (‘magnificence’), the highest attribute of the wise hero, the able politician or the learned scholar. This pivotal concept also threads through the complex of Utopian, fantastic, and mythopoeic systems in Dante’s Paradiso with its ideal-

9

liveliness of the contemporary critical debate on Romanticism, see Modernità dei romantici, ed. by Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones, Alfredo de Paz, Vita Fortunati, and Giovanna Franci (Naples: Liguori, 1988). On the mythological figure of Demorgogon and its diffusion in Humanistic culture, see L. Cesarini Martinelli, ‘Sozomeno maestro e filologo’, Interpres, (1991), 7-92, especially pp. 66-92. And for Coleridge see Gian Mario Anselmi, La saggezza della letteratura.

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ized portrayal of humanity, the tenth giornata of the Decameron, Sannazaro’s Arcadia and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. In other words, ‘magnificence’ must be interpreted as a form of dedication, wisdom, and self-sacrifice that also implies an acceptance of the anguished human condition, as is found in certain Shakespearean heroes and, above all, in the fusion of Romanticism and Utopia proper to Shelley’s and Byron’s works. In addition, we should not underestimate the great influence exerted by Niccolò Machiavelli, often seen in a Satanic light, as well as that of Tasso’s production as a whole, not only the Gerusalemme Liberata. The latter work bears visibly on Milton’s epic, which reechoes both the ‘poetry of the cosmos’ of the Liberata and that of the Mondo Creato. Further points of contact include the endless examples of interfusion between the Italian and English traditions operated by Shakespeare and particularly Milton, whose re-elaborations of Italian literature from Dante onwards find a Romantic counterpart in William Blake’s sublime Dantean visionarism. Finally, the Italian reminiscences in Shelley’s poetry also stem from the influence of the vast literary production of British women Romantic poets.10 To all intents and purposes, between the 1770s and the 1830s and through varying literary mediations from Milton to Pope, women’s poetry reflects deep traces of the inexhaustible vital forces of the Italian tradition – from the widely admired Petrarch to reminiscences of the Italian women poets of the Cinquecento and, as observed above, the rediscovery of the elegiac model offered by Ovid’s Heroides.11 The great tradition of English literature is irresistibly invaded by the Italian Renaissance in its integral complexity. And it was through this channel that Shelley became familiar with the classics of Italian literature, which he later decoded and re-presented in their complexity, as illustrated by some fundamental passages in the Defence of Poetry, during his lifelong appropriation and adaptation of the intricate and multifarious literary heritage of Italy. By the same token, it is not by mere chance that Shelley eventually gained greater familiarity with those European authors who were especially indebted to the dynamic vitality of Italian letters. Indeed, Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s deceptive world of shadows and dreams, as represented in his play El mágico prodigioso, was especially attractive to Shelley for its typical Renaissance interplay of alchemical lore, religious tension, desire for knowledge, the crucial role of love, the emergence of the Faustian myth, and a demoniac desire to possess the world. Similarly, Shelley appreciated the ‘magnanimous’ and tolerant reflections of Michel de Montaigne, as well as Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Utopian, libertarian and radically Humanist philosophical position. In the light of this excursus, therefore, discussions of Shelley’s ‘Platonism’ and his relations with certain features of the classical tradition seem slightly reductive and ritualistically repetitive.12 The Platonic model is undeniably central in Shelley, but is always mediated by the Italian Neoplatonic tradition that, in many respects, is a Plotinian one (with all the provisos implicit in this necessary distinction). The key concepts marking the distance These works are now also available in Italian translation in a valuable anthology recently edited by Lilla Maria Crisafulli: Antologia delle poetesse romantiche inglesi, 2 vols (Rome: Carocci, 2003). 11 For women’s poetry in the Italian Renaissance, see Poetesse italiane del Cinquecento, ed. by S. Bianchi (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). 12 M. H. Abrams reads Shelley through a ‘Platonic’ approach, as does the vast majority of Shelleyan critics. See Shelley: Modern Judgements, ed. by R. B. Woodings (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1968). 10

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between Plato and Plotinus are the degrees of being, the One and the Many, the vertigo induced by the creative power of beauty, and the dignity of art. If Plotinian thought first left a deep trace in Italian literature, later, through Milton’s mediation, its influence extended to late eighteenth-century British culture. Nonetheless, a careful examination of Shelley’s Letters and Journal reveals that his knowledge of classical letters was extremely wide-ranging, including both Greek and Latin authors, from Plato to other significant figures such as Lucretius, Apuleius, and Lucian. These important influences were intertwined with his familiarity with pre-eminent Italian writers such as Guido Cavalcanti, Franco Sacchetti, Battista Guarini, Giambattista Manso, Cesare Beccaria, and Vittorio Alfieri. This vast gallery of authors was eventually completed by his deep knowledge of the great English literary tradition, the German Romantics and, as seen above, such pivotal figures as Montaigne, Calderón, and Rousseau.13 If we connect this panorama with the many sources, suggestions, and allusions interspersed in Shelley’s literary production, we can identify the crucial role of the Italian Humanist tradition in it, and especially that of the Humanists’ reinterpretation of the classics. Thus the presence of Plotinian echoes in Shelley’s works (perhaps partly mediated by Tasso) is intertwined with an unflinching attention to reality perceived as flux, as an unseizable and Protean mutability, the constant flow of which is more akin to the imaginative force of the fabulae than to any rigid ontological postulate. Here, in other words, we see the re-elaboration of that line of Renaissance scepticism that drew on the most varied classical sources (from Ovid to Lucian) and emerged in the great Northern Italian cultural centres of Ferrara and Bologna (with Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Antonio Urceo Codro), in the reflections of such Humanists as Alberti or Giovanni Pontano, and in the lucidly disenchanted views of Machiavelli and, above all, Francesco Guicciardini.14 This return to Renaissance scepticism forcefully emerges in the final lines of Shelley’s poem ‘The Sensitive Plant’ (1820), climaxing in ll. 126-9: ‘It is a modest creed, and yet / Pleasant if one considers it, / To own that death itself must be, / Like all the rest, a mockery’.15 By turning everything, even death, into mere mockery, Shelley’s verse recalls the most paradoxical and irreverent formulations of such works as Alberti’s Momus, Erasmus’ Moriae encomium or some of Codro’s Sermones. But in ‘The Sensitive Plant’, as well as in certain passages of Julian and Maddalo (1824) or The Witch of Atlas (1824), we may perceive other echoes especially where Shelley appears to reconnect the nature of Love to suggestions that, far from being an expression of Platonic thought, are rather more akin to the concept of divine voluptas. This concept, elaborated in its loftiest and most complex sense by Lucretius and skilfully mediated by Italian Humanists such as Lorenzo Valla, left visible traces in Tasso’s Gerusalemme

See The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford, Clarendon, 1964). See Gian Mario Anselmi, Luisa Avellini, and Ezio Raimondi, ‘Il Rinascimento Padano’, in Letteratura italiana: Storia e Geografia, 2.1: L'età moderna, ed. by Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), pp. 521-618. Shelley’s contacts with the sceptical tradition of the Renaissance are usefully discussed in Christos E. Pulos, The Deep Truth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954). 15 [Percy B. Shelley], Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G. M. Matthews (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 596. 13 14

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Liberata, Aminta and Rime, later to re-emerge in eighteenth-century literary traditions throughout Europe.16 Nevertheless, my intention is not to plead in favour of a certain form of Shelleyan eclecticism. By contrast, I would like to stress how the extremely original Romantic roots of his poetics, as formulated in the Defence of Poetry, are intimately connate with the distinctive features of the Italian Renaissance, and especially its non-judgmental dialogic dynamics that do not aim at ‘resolving’ extremes, but rather at exhibiting them in suspension and enabling them to ‘co-exist’ through the essential support of art and its ‘imaginative’ potential, which is, indeed, the only point of connection between Plato and Lucretius.17 Thus, it is no random fact that, in his letters, Shelley openly avowed his preference for Raphael over Michelangelo: the former’s ‘La scuola di Atene’ is the actual manifesto of the idea of Rinascimento presented above. Again, it is no coincidence that, just like Stendhal, Shelley was fond of the great painters of the Bolognese school, such as the Carraccis or Guido Reni, who had just been rediscovered by the Romantics on the strength of their cultural affinities with the type of Renaissance culture discussed here.18 Can we thus define Shelley as a Platonist? It would perhaps be more appropriate to define him as a Renaissance figure, the great ‘re-interpreter’ of the poetic and philosophical sources of the Italian literary tradition in a direct line of descent from his beloved, and frequently quoted, sixteenth-century English authors. These ideas are expressed with impressive coherence in Shelley’s Defence. There, after clarifying the differences between poetry and philosophy, he eventually awards the primacy of true wisdom to the poet, a kind of knowledge that ‘unites’ instead of ‘separating’, and thus offers a fresh and ‘estranged’ insight into reality by removing the layer of commonplace, everyday empiricism. To such an extent that, for Shelley, philosophers are of excellence when they are also true poets (and here he quotes Plato), and poets achieve greatness when they are true men of wisdom and philosophers. In Shelley’s view, poets are akin to ‘prophets’, though not in the trite and erroneous sense of this term (that is, as some sort of oracles of the future); but in the most authentic biblical sense of ‘witnesses’ who, through the liberating potential of mythopoeia, can ‘break up’ history and reveal a unique access to human renovation (hence Shelley’s mention of Lucretius, Dante, Tasso, Shakespeare, and Milton). Thus, even though unacknowledged, poets are the real legislators of the world. And this statement is entirely coherent with Shelley’s re-elaboration of the joint Italian traThe importance of Lucretius in Italian culture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is testified by Foscolo, as is evidenced in his Letture di Lucrezio (ed. by F. Longoni, pref. by G. Barbarisi [Milan: Guerini, 1990]), that can also throw light on the context of Shelley’s approach to the Latin poet. On Shelley’s Classical sources, see Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). 17 On myth and mythopoeia in Shelley, and for a more general interpretation, see Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963 [1932]) and Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937). See also the rich annotations and updated bibliographical references in Opere di Shelley, ed. by F. Rognoni (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). 18 On the centrality of the interpretation of the ‘Scuola di Atene’ as a manifesto of a certain dialogic strand in the Rinascimento, see L. M. Batkin, Gli umanisti italiani: Stile di vita e di pensiero (Bari: Laterza, 1990), as well as L. M. Batkin’s L'idea di individualità nel Rinascimento italiano (Bari: Laterza, 1992), and Gian Mario Anselmi, Gli universi paralleli della letteratura (Rome: Carocci, 2003). 16

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dition of Humanism and Rinascimento, with its debates, from Dante and Petrarch onwards, about the primacy of poetry and notions of poetry as the central locus of knowledge and the starting-point of any possible renovatio.19 If the poet is also a prophet, the ‘visionary’ par excellence, then it also becomes clear why Shelley repeatedly employs the medieval and Humanist genre of the ‘dream-vision’, revitalizing its correlated complex allegorical apparatuses with peculiar metrical choices such as his effective reintroduction of Dante’s terza rima. This is visible in his political works – such as the ‘Ode to Liberty’, The Mask of Anarchy or the Triumph of Life – where the ‘dream-vision’ is enriched with a few brilliant Pindaric touches. The Triumph of Life, in particular, fuses Dantean allegorism with hints from Petrarch’s Trionfi. With its insistence on unsolved doubts, on questions that find no final and systematic answers (especially the conclusive and open-ended question on life), the entire structure of this ode seems to return to the paradigm of contradiction, complexity, and dialogism that had been inaugurated in Western culture by another Petrarch, the author of the Secretum, and later re-elaborated in several Italian literary developments.20 It is therefore essential to note the consummate skill with which Shelley – both in his political-Utopian odes and in other poems such as ‘The Sensitive Plant’ – deploys the ancient topos of enumeratio to conjure up galleries of figures, characters, and events drawn from a variety of sources, in order to intensify the sense of tragic pathos through a serial accumulation, and yet without offering any definitive or consolatory answer. Indeed, it was Alessandro Manzoni who stated that there can be no ‘rest for ethics’. The list of heroes in The Triumph of Life recalls similar forms of enumeratio in Plato, Virgil, Alberti, and Ariosto; the prosopopoeia of freedom in ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1820) echoes the grand tale of the ‘Eagle’ (the symbol of Rome) narrated by Justinian in canto VI of Dante’s Paradise; and, in a different context, in ‘The Sensitive Plant’ the list of plants that composes the eternally renovated locus amoenus harks back to the models of Poliziano, Boiardo, Ariosto and a host of Humanistic poets, writing both in Latin and in the vernacular, who inspired some of the most significant experiments in English bucolic poetry. But the poet-prophet is also the ‘traveller’ par excellence. As with Dante, Virgil, and St Paul, he can penetrate the depths of human hell on a quest for the path to human redemption – perhaps in the name, and in a dream, of universal Love.21 Shelley assimilated the archetype of the Dantean journey to such an extent that we can identify several powerful and ingenious traces of it in his verse. Julian and Maddalo is emblematically a sort of journey out The Defence of Poetry undoubtedly resonates with crucial echoes of the thought of Giambattista Vico, whose work constituted a significant (and unusual, for the eighteenth century) hermeneutics of the links between poetry and philosophy. 20 See Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones, ‘The Triumph of Life: il frammentario nell’ultimo Shelley’, in Letteratura e seduzione & discourse analysis, Atti del VI congresso nazionale dell’Associazione Italiana di Anglistica, Pavia, 22-23-24 ottobre 1983, ed. by Tomaso Kemeny, Lia Guerra e Anthony Baldry (Fasano: Schena, 1984), pp. 241-49. 21 See L’esilio romantico: Forme di un conflitto, ed. by Joseph Cheyne and Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones (Bari: Adriatica, 1990), especially Agostino Lombardo’s essay (pp. 25-32). Love, seen as a final point of arrival, is a constantly central idea in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, as is the connected theme of Beauty, the Humanistic echoes of which can be traced in several compositions, from ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ to ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci’, and The Witch of Atlas. 19

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of an angst-ridden personal hell towards the final mystery of the inexpressible nature of love. This short poem delineates a series of celebratory journeys towards Love (‘expressible’ only through poetry) by Dante, Boccaccio, and Castiglione (the memorable book IV of the Cortegiano), to mention only the most familiar examples. However, the text also features the painful meeting with the Maniac which, with its ‘infernal’ location and dialogues, is modelled on Dante’s repeated dialogues with the afflicted souls he encounters during his journey through Hell. In the poem the Dantean paradigm is intertwined (through some highly probable allusions to Tasso in the figure of the Maniac) with the elegiac, Lucretian, and Humanist paradigms of afflicted, painful, and troubled love. In particular, the latter category is displayed in its most elaborate form in Shelley’s Adonais (1821). Here the subtle mosaic of allusions to the elegiac tradition of Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, and Diogenes Laertius reveals Shelley’s complete mastery of the technique of mutatio, defining him as one of the most accomplished and brilliant re-elaborators of the forms and modes of Humanist poetry.22 Again, this is a paradigm pervaded by affliction and grief that seemingly ends on a note of hope resembling that of Dante’s Vita Nuova because of Shelley’s recourse to idealized narratives of the loving self as in the beautifully resonant lyricism of Epipsychidion (1821). This is a kind of Love that rescues humanity from the hell of The Cenci, where Shelley creates an ideal dialogue with Alfieri, Tasso, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare in order to stage the extreme fragmentation of the subject that preludes the final liberation offered by death: Beatrice’s temperament is that of Myrrha, Miranda, Cordelia or Erminia, and the other splendid female figures of the fourth giornata of the Decameron who are the authentic archetypes of a long list of tragic and elegiac characters.23 In Shelley, these female characters are the figurative vehicles for the pacifying power of Love, as they are capable of redeeming the ‘bestial’ Satanism of the male universe which, from Count Cenci, reaches back to Boccaccio’s Ser Ciappelletto and a long gallery of Dantean portraits. By re-elaborating this intricate array of classical and Humanist suggestions with thematic links to Love as Utopia, Shelley identifies one of his many approaches to Utopia per se: the dream of an ‘other’ world, of a possibile dimension, of which we can catch a glimpse through the ‘journey’ and ‘love’, and which love keeps alive even in the bleakest wasteland of everyday existence.24 These issues are particularly relevant to The Witch of Atlas, for here Shelley re-elaborates a substantial number of topoi and genres proper to the macro-system of literary Utopias: the journey, the ‘dream-vision’, restorative and prophetic sleep, and the vision of an ‘other’, possible world that is removed from the hypocrisy and harsh cruelty of contemporary reality. And if this poetical practice clearly echoes with a vaSee Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poemetti, introd. and notes by Raffaello Piccoli (Florence: Sansoni, 1925), especially p. xx of the introduction. On Shelley’s relations with the Italian literary tradition, see G. Caldana, ‘Giudizi di P. B. Shelley sui poeti italiani’, Nuova Antologia di Lettere, Scienze ed Arti, 5th series, 129 (MayJune 1907), pp. 660-72, and F. Rognoni’s Italian edition of the Opere di Shelley. 23 Shelley especially admired Boccaccio, and saw him not just as a prose writer or a poet, but also as a ‘philosopher’, thus importantly anticipating some of the most recent and detailed analyses of Boccaccio’s figure. See, in particular, Shelley’s letter of 27 September 1819 to Leigh Hunt (Letters, II, pp. 121-22). 24 Shelley’s notion of Utopia must be understood in this Renaissance and mythopoeic sense, rather than in a more strictly political and ideological one, which it would be difficult to define as a ‘systematic’ Utopia. See P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), as well as Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones’s several contributions on these issues. 22

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riety of eighteenth-century ideological orientations, equally important are its intimate connections with the cultures of Humanism and the Renaissance, their masterpieces, as well as their less well-known works. In this light, echoes of Erasmus, Dante’s Paradiso, the tenth giornata of the Decameron and book IV of the Cortegiano, Tasso or Sannazaro intermingle, as in a subtle mosaic, with details from Pulci (the comic champion of ‘upside-down’ worlds), Ariosto, Niccolò Forteguerri’s Ricciardetto (1738), and the tradition of Boccaccio’s Ninfale (1341-2) extending as far as Lorenzo de’ Medici and Poliziano. In effect, this is the ultimate source of that emblematic ‘new birth’ evoked by Shelley in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819),25 that essential ‘rebirth’ instilling anxiety, hope and an ancient form of pathos to the poem’s final couplet: ‘The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind’.26 Furthermore, it is once again the Italian literary tradition that enables us to envisage the fundamental itinerary underlying the grandiose Utopia of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. For this text’s Utopian vistas are based on the innovative myth of ‘rebirth’ as liberation, and the subsequent re-elaboration of the mythopoeic melting-pot of classical culture, typical of Humanist and Rinascimento literature. But this line of investigation would lead us down other paths taking us to entirely new fields of cultural interconnection, and thus a long way from our specific attempt to identify a precise vantagepoint that might offer us a renewed insight into Shelley’s works and the sources of British and European Romanticism.

‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth’ (ll. 63-64), in Percy B. Shelley, Shelley: Poetical Works, p. 579. 26 ll. 69-70, in Percy B. Shelley, Shelley: Poetical Works, p. 579. 25

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BUILDING THE PAST: RE-APPROACHING THE ITALIAN LITERARY HERITAGE

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Carla Maria Gnappi (Università di Parma)

The Sunflower and the Rose: Notes Towards a Reassessment of Blake’s Illustrations of Dante

As William Blake’s last work, his illustrations to Dante’s Divina Commedia represent the synthesis of his thought and achievements, and have been the object of an extended critical debate. This complex, unfinished series of images resists precise definitions, for it is unclear whether it is meant as an illustration to, for or from, Dante’s masterpiece. Thus, the wide range of critical responses has encompassed antithetical claims: on the one hand, Blake’s water-colours are read as a faithful illustration of Dante’s vision, while, on the other, they appear to have little in common with the text they purport to ‘illustrate’. Moreover, the dispute about the alleged fidelity to, or departure from, Dante’s poetry is linked to the broader question of Blake’s opinion of the Italian poet. This essay responds to established views that Blake’s images constitute a critique of Dante’s religious and spiritual principles through repeated references to the illustrator’s own beliefs, and suggests that the images and themes in the Commedia were particularly relevant to, indeed intimately interwoven with, the illustrator’s processes of visual mythmaking.

‘Come O thou Lamb of God and take away the remembrance of Sin’ (William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 50)

William Blake’s unfinished illustrations based on Dante’s Divine Comedy,1 a work in progress on his death-bed, are more than his last commissioned work: they represent the final synthesis of his thought and achievements – his spiritual and artistic last testament.2 Of 1

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Blake notably learnt Italian at the age of 67 to read La Divina Commedia in the original. However, his quotations and references to the text are based on the translation by Henry Francis Cary (1805-06, 1814), a translation widely used by the Romantic poets. An invaluable study on the English versions known to Blake is Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante in English Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989). The seminal source for the story and destiny of the illustrations is Albert S. Roe’s Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). The story is told again and again in the literature on the illustrations, which gives it a disturbing déja-vu quality. I will therefore refer the reader to Robin Hamlyn and Michael Phillips, William Blake (London: Tate Publishing, 2000), pp. 74-75, and William Blake, La Divina Commedia, ed. by David Bindman (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Image, 2000), pp. 4-19. A detailed account of the dispersal of the ‘Dante bid’ at Christie’s in London on 15 March 1918 is given in Krystof Z. Cieszkowski, ‘“The Murmuring Divide; While the Wind Sleeps Beneath, and the Numbers Are Counted in Silence”: The Dispersal of the Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy’, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 22/23 (1988, 1989-90), 166-71. As a result of the auction sale and subsequent transactions, the illustrations are now divided as follows: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (36 plates); Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. (23 plates); Tate Gallery, London (20 plates); British Museum, London (13 plates); City Museum and Art Gallery Birmingham (6 plates); Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (3 plates); Royal

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the 102 illustrations, only seven were engraved, thus achieving the form that for Blake signified the meeting-point of the human with the divine, as his (mystifying) account of its origin suggests.3 These are virtually the only fixed points in a critical debate as vast as it is inconclusive. In the first place, we are dealing with an object that resists a clear-cut definition: are we talking about illustrations to, for or from the Divine Comedy? The very choice of preposition implies a critical statement. The wide range of responses encompasses antithetical claims: on the one hand, Blake’s water-colours are a ‘faithful’ illustration of Dante’s vision, while, on the other, they seem to have little to do with what they purport to ‘illustrate’. And the dispute about the alleged fidelity to, or departure from, Dante’s lines is linked to the broader question of Blake’s view of the Italian poet. The unfinished tables, in their various stages of completion, are evidence of Blake’s procedure: the initial pencil sketches were often scribbled over with quotations or comments that were later to disappear under the coats of colour, especially bright and thick, of a more solid texture, for the illustrations to Dante’s Hell. The scribbling affords a glimpse into Blake’s ideas about Dante, his Comedy, and the characters in it. His furious annotations on Homer and the Greek poets (plate for Canto III) reaffirm Blake’s rejection of pagan art and Dante’s admiration for it: one of the notes reads that ‘Nature is his Inspirer & not the Holy Ghost’. Blake’s attitude towards Dante is complex and his remarks at times contradictory. His first encounter with the Italian poet may have occurred through Joshua Reynolds, a painter whose art was at the very opposite pole to Blake’s, and whose Ugolino was successfully displayed at the Royal Academy in 1773. Ugolino was a well-known figure at the time, also illustrated by Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, and there is general agreement on the role that Fuseli must have played in making Blake acquainted with Dante. Later on, Blake felt that his own contributions to Fuseli’s work on Dante had passed unacknowledged. Blake’s interest in Dante, however heterodox and fully in keeping with the artist’s idiosyncrasies, was a lifelong one, as manifested by the references scattered in his works and marginalia. Also, it is to be situated against the background of the revival of Dante at the turn of the eighteenth century that was parallel to, as well as intermingled with, the return of interest in Milton.4

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Institution of Cornwall, Truro (1 plate). See Milton Klonsky, Blake’s Dante: The Complete Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (New York: Harmony Books, 1980), p. 8. Morton Paley’s The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) appeared after this essay was written. Blake’s claim that he was constantly working under the assistance of ‘heavenly messengers’ is discussed in Ferruccio Ulivi, ‘William Blake tra i “messaggeri celesti” e Dante’, in Corrado Gizzi, Blake e Dante (Milan: G. Mazzotta, 1983), pp. 46-52. A first survey of Dante’s fortune in England for the Italian reader is Alice Galimberti, Dante nel pensiero inglese (Florence: Le Monnier, 1921). After a review of the few previous studies on the subject, Galimberti acknowledges the fruitful encounter between Dante and the Romantics. Since her work precedes the revival in Blakean studies, one can appreciate the reason why she ignores Blake in this connection. In Ralph Pite’s Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), Blake’s work is placed in the context of the illustrations from Dante in the late eighteenth century.

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What endeared the medieval scholastic poet to the Romantic Swedenborgean is an open question.5 A common ground has been identified in the ‘visionary line’, in Joseph A. Wittreich’s terms or, in Northrop Frye’s words, in their connection with the common aspiration of all Christian art: to celebrate the divine essence of man and the humanity of the divine. In his pioneering interpretations, Frye has pointed out the correspondence between Dante’s ‘superne cose dell’etternal gloria’6 as the object of the anagogical sense of poetry, and Blake’s belief in the divine nature of art. If the illustrations, even at their most literal, seem to shed more light on Blake’s beliefs than on Dante and his world, it is also because, as is generally recognized, Blake was not at all interested in the historical background of Dante’s work. Nor does Blake seem to focus on Dante’s political outlook, although we may read in the former’s illustrations a rejection of the temporal and material power of the Church akin to Dante’s, together with an opposite attitude towards the very idea of an earthly Empire. Blake the artist was attracted primarily to the forms and colours of Dante’s vision. The discussion of Blake’s rendering of Dante’s setting and characters is often refocused in terms of an evaluation of Albert Roe’s perspective, Roe being the first to carry out an extensive analysis of the illustrations, based on the analogies between certain details in the Dantean illustrations and Blake’s previous graphic work. Although Roe’s painstaking search for correspondences occasionally leads him to fall prey to ‘intentional fallacy’, his starting assumption is hardly debatable. As a matter of fact, when Blake undertook the monumental task of illustrating the Divine Comedy, he had already set up the ‘system’ that he had invoked: ‘I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s’. And this system reappears in the illustrations through the many quotations from the artist’s earlier works. My purpose here is not to support or challenge Roe’s conclusions, that Blake criticizes Dante’s beliefs through repeated references to his own. Rather, I am suggesting that images and themes in the Divine Comedy found a resonance in the illustrator’s own mythmaking. One of the first images in question is Hell’s door and its inscription ‘Per me si va ne la città dolente’.7 Here Dante and Virgil cross the threshold that separates the living from the dead (Canto III). In the illustration (Plate 4),8 the shape of the threshold evokes a repeated image in Blake’s art, that of ‘Death’s Door’, the door between the world of Innocence and the world of Experience marked by separation and pain – a limit to break through. The early drawing for The Gates of Paradise (1793) is re-employed by Blake in America, A Prophecy and in Jerusalem (Plates 1 and 70). In the illustration for Robert Blair’s Grave, it appears with a variant: the curved figure entering the grave is contrasted with the youthful figure of resurrection towering against the sun, and symbolizing the reunion of body and soul.

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Also popular, non-academic readings of the two poets have readily recognized their similarity. They have been marketed together in questionable ‘New Age’ collections and have been put face to face in a bizarre 1998 calendar. Dante Alighieri, Convivio, ed. by Franca Brambilla Ageno (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1995), ‘Trattato secondo’, I, 7, p. 66. Dante Alighieri, La Commedia, ed. by Giorgio Pedrocchi (Milan: Arnoldo Mondatori Editore,1966). All subsequent quotations are from this edition. I am using the identification numbers established by Milton Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, on the basis of the original list drawn by William Michael Rossetti for Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1862).

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The illustrations for The Grave were Blake’s first systematic attempt to visualize the afterworld. In retrospective, they turn out to have been preparatory for Blake’s last work. As early as in The Gates of Paradise Blake had drawn souls departing from the body, but it is in The Grave (1808) that he refines his distinctive images of souls wrapped in the typical floating drapery that conceals their feet and dissolves all contact with the ground (as in the first appearance of Virgil in the illustration to Canto I). Also in the illustrations for The Grave Blake produces one of his many scenes of the Last Judgement.9 If Fuseli inspired Blake with the form of the disembodied soul, it is to Fuseli’s master, Michelangelo, that Blake turns for the muscles and sinews of the bodies of the damned.10 The two models will coexist until the end. Finally, Jesus entering the grave with the keys of Paradise, will reappear in Dante’s Paradiso (Plate 94). In both cases the face of Christ is modelled on Blake’s own face: a visual statement of the Christ-like dimension of the poet, the foundation of Blake’s poetics. Far from being mere self-quotations, either unchanged or refined through a more mature technique, recognizable as Blake’s own, these topoi are evidence of the author’s return to themes dear to his imagination. But before expanding on self-quotation in Blake’s last work, I wish to introduce a question that has been overlooked in studies on ‘the Dante’, that is, the importance of the Italian edition(s) of the Commedia in shaping Blake’s visual response to it. It is commonly believed that Blake employed the Sessa edition of 1564: Dante con l’espositione di Christoforo Landino et di Alessandro Vellutello, Sopra la Sua Comedia dell’Inferno, del Purgatorio, & del Paradiso.11 As with many previous editions, it is richly illustrated, and the woodcuts may have provided the basis for Blake to work on, according to his own, by then well-defined, pictorial language. The ‘antiporta’ of the Sessa edition, representing Dante, Virgil, and the three beasts, seems to have suggested the compositional model for Blake’s first illustration (Plate 1). If we compare the two pictures, however, we realize that Blake superimposed his own symbols on to his model. The sun in the centre of the page recalls one of Blake’s topoi: the sun is linked to Los/Imagination,12 the source and essence of all arts. In addition, Virgil is lifted above the ground, thus indicating that the function of poetry is to lead mankind above the material world. It is worth remarking that Landino himself treats this concept in his introductory paragraphs – ‘Che chosa sia poesia et poeta et della origine sva divina et antichissima’ and ‘furore divino’ – where his Neoplatonic view of poetry is exposed with images strikingly akin to those recurrent in Blake’s work. While the other illustrations in the Sessa edition seem to have been ignored, the woodcuts of the incunabulum printed by Bonini (Brescia, 1487), loosely based on See Blake’s ‘Description of a Vision of the Last Judgement’, in The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 442-44. 10 See Fussli e Dante, ed. by Corrado Gizzi (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990). 11 This folio (Venice: Sessa, 1564; repr. 1578 and 1596) reproduces Vellutello’s commentary in La Comedia di Dante Aligieri con la nova espositione di Alessandro Vellutello (Venice: Marcolini, 1544), together with the introduction and comments of Landino, a well-established interpreter of Dante. Also the illustrations are those of the Marcolini edition, still regarded as the best sixteenth-century edition of the Commedia. Landino’s glosses, first printed in 1481, were variously reissued until the seventeenth century, when they were abandoned as outdated. 12 The notion that ‘Los’ is a pun on ‘ Sol’ is common among Blake’s scholars. 9

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Botticelli’s drawings13 and, in turn, the basis for the woodcuts of later editions such as the Stagnino (Venezia, 1512 and 1520), seem to have had a bearing on Blake’s ‘Dante’. In the first place, these early editions seem to have handed down to Blake the very subject for most of his illustrations; secondly, details of the vignettes, especially those in the Stagnino, are recontextualized in Blake’s own pictures. Ferruccio Ulivi has complained that Blake’s Dante and Virgil display the same ‘anodyne’ expression throughout, and that Dante, whose face has lost its distinctive traits, is never at the centre of the picture.14 This can be understood precisely if we connect Blake’s scenes to the vignettes that must have inspired him. My contention, then, is that Blake aligned himself with the early illustrators of Dante, and that he elaborated on and added to his masters according to his own distinctive ‘pictorial archetypes’.15 The early Renaissance illustrators, much closer in style to the illuminators of the medieval manuscripts than to later and more naturalistic engravers, appealed to Blake for more than one reason: not only did they represent the roots of his own art as an illustrator, but their language suited Blake’s rejection of mimetic images trapped in time and space. Walter Crane, an insightful interpreter of Blake’s work, was the first to recognize this kinship. In his history of book decoration he writes: When he came to embody his own thought and dreams, he recurred quite spontaneously to the methods of the makers of the manuscript books […] We seem to read in Blake something of the spirit of the medieval designer, through the sometimes mannered and semi-classical forms and treatment, according to the taste of his time; while he embodies its more daring aspiring thoughts, and the desire for simpler and more humane 16 conditions of life.

Crane’s last words may suggest that he read his own Pre-Raphaelite medievalism into Blake’s figures, but the medieval quality of Blake’s art has not passed unobserved among more recent commentators. W. J. T. Mitchell has seen an analogy between Blake’s art and medieval art in the common ‘primitivism and anti-illusionism’ and in the ‘glowing fixity’ of figures that are meant to represent mankind rather than individuals.17 In the medieval manuscript illustrators, imitated by the authors of the vignettes at the beginning of each canto in the aforesaid editions of the Commedia, Blake found kindred spirits. A typical technique of these illustrators consists in the simultaneous representation of different scenes, which in the text are narrated in a sequence, within a single frame. While conveying 13

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Botticelli’s illustrations were meant for a grand 1481 edition that was never completed. The drawings are reprinted in La Divine Comédie de Dante, présentation par André Chaste (Paris: Le livre club du libraire, 1958) and Botticelli e Dante, ed. by Corrado Gizzi (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1985). Although we lack clear evidence of the editions employed by Blake, it is a well-established fact that Botticelli’s illustrations, as well as those printed by Bonini, were known either directly or indirectly through subsequent editions and reelaborations by the printers and engravers of Blake’s time. See Ferruccio Ulivi, ‘William Blake tra i “messaggeri celesti” e Dante’. For a systematic view of Blake’s ‘pictorial archetypes’ see Janet A. Warner, ‘Blake’s Use of Gesture’, in Blake’s Visionary Form Dramatic, ed. by David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 174-95. Walter Crane, Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), p. 113. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Blake’s Composite Art’, in Blake’s Visionary Form Dramatic, pp. 52-81.

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some sense of movement, this technique undermines the very idea of progress in time. Similarly, for Blake, a time-bound perspective must be replaced by the vision of the prophet/seer, whose standpoint is eternity and for whom the division between past, present, and future has lost its meaning.18 An illustrator who, albeit with a different language, had worked in the same direction is Sandro Botticelli, whose drawings also seem to have inspired some of Blake’s illustrations – and not only through the intermediaries mentioned before. Botticelli is the first illustrator who is credited with grasping the visionary dimension of Dante’s journey, a dimension that the woodcut vignettes could not render. Blake’s Beatrice, in particular, seems drawn after Botticelli, but reminiscent of the Florentine artist are also Blake’s vortex, the congested movements of the bodies in hell, the fluttering of the angels, and even the coiling of serpents and dragons. Having argued that Blake’s drawings need to be read with an eye to the early illustrated editions of the Comedy, for many of his scenes seem to be based on these editions (Bonini, Stagnino, etc.), I am suggesting that it is precisely in the way he handles these sources that he manifests his distinctive language. After Roe, I believe that we cannot overlook the consistent use of self-quotations. However, I no longer follow Roe when he claims that these are used merely or mostly against Dante. Although the high incidence of Blake’s own topoi may reflect back on him rather than shed light on the text illustrated and its author, and thus foreground Blake’s system at the expense of Dante’s, there are significant instances of a perfect union – Blake would say ‘marriage’ – between illustration and text, which point towards a deeper affinity between the two poets. I intend to show this (apparent) contradiction at work and end with an intriguing instance. A recurrent image in Blake’s art, traditionally linked with the Fall but also with the prefiguration of Christ, is the serpent. Serpents, dragons, scaly creatures half-human and half-reptile find their way into the illustrations of the Divine Comedy well beyond Dante’s provisions. Blake lingers on the metamorphoses of the thieves into serpents in Inferno XXIX, with seven illustrations (one of which engraved) for that single episode. Also, the figure of Geryon (Plate 33), a serpent-like monster, is one of the most impressive in Blake’s production. The connection between the serpent and the Fall, in Blake’s system, precedes the temptation in Eden, for, following a Neoplatonic pattern, Blake regards Creation itself as the original Fall. For Plato it was the fall into a material body, as discussed in Phaedo; for Blake it is the fall into Ulro, the realm of time and space, the reduction into a ‘mundane shell’ with all its consequences of pain and suffering – in Dante’s words, ‘eterno dolore’,‘eternal woe’. Blake often quotes his own creation myth as painted in ‘Elohim creating Adam’ (1805) in the drawings for the Comedy, but it is to Jerusalem, the summa of his own cosmology, that he most frequently returns when illustrating Dante. Quotations from plates 24, 28, 37, 50, 53, 63, 70, 75, 76, 78, and 99 reveal Jerusalem (1820) as the most important hypotext to Blake’s visual responses to the Comedy. As a matter of fact the two poems have a common core, since they both explore the spiritual 18

W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Blake’s Composite Art’, pp. 68-70. The continuity between manuscripts and early printed books is discussed in Margaret M. Smith, ‘The Design Relationship between the Manuscript and the Incunable’, in A Millenium of the Book: Production, Design and Illustration in Manuscript and Print 9001900, ed. by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1994), pp. 23-43.

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condition of man, taking the reader on visionary journeys towards the New Jerusalem. The object of Jerusalem is announced in the very first lines: ‘the passage through / Eternal Death! and […] the awaking to Eternal Life’. The poet invites ‘the Christians’ to take the ‘golden string’ that, through a ‘labyrinth of woe’, ‘will lead at Heaven’s Gate’. Jerusalem is Blake’s epic history of mankind, symbolized by Albion (England, but also the universal man), from the Fall to the vision of New Jerusalem/Golgonooza, the divine city. Christ’s redeeming sacrifice enables Albion to recover his lost integrity, so that his ‘four zoas’ – senses, emotions, reason, and Imagination – are reunited in divine oneness. Throughout Jerusalem, the female and the male principle, Albion and his ‘emanation’ or separated female self strive to reunite. The struggle between reason and desire, the contrast between pity and wrath, has left mankind at the mercy of Reason: a ‘Spectre like a hoar frost […] rose over Albion’ (Plate 54). It is this ‘hard cold constructive spectre’ that has built the ‘Druid Rocks’, the monoliths of the Door of Death, and veiled the ‘Divine Vision’ with ‘Clouds of Blood’. From the relentless tyrannical power of Reason stem all errors: selfishness and jealousy, censorship and frustrated desire, judgement, and the delusion of eternal punishment: ‘shame and jealousy […] annihilate Jerusalem’ (plate 28). Los, the creative Imaginative power, invokes the Lamb of God to come and rescue Albion from Death and Sin. Superimposing his own ‘system’ over the biblical account of sin and salvation, via Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Blake identifies Jesus with the poetic Genius, Los. The idea was first set forth in 1788 in a note on Emanuel Swedenborg: ‘He who loves feels love descend into him & if he has wisdom may perceive it is from the poetic genius, which is the Lord’.19 The concept is fully explored in Milton, while Blake’s interpretation of Christ is given its final formulation in The Everlasting Gospel, on which he was working at the same time as Jerusalem. The opposition between Blake’s belief in ultimate forgiveness and Dante’s view of Hell as a place of everlasting punishment is singled out in critical literature, as one part of the great divide, political and theological, between the two authors. No God, Blake claimed, could have conceived such a place.20 Roe has suggested that Dante triggered Blake’s final picture of this world, the damned being to Blake the personifications of mankind in its material state. And the tormenting devils are aligned with Blake’s ‘spectres’, our rational projections, the manifestations of the evil and sorrow originating from man’s divided self and tyranny of reason. The consequence is the inability to see beyond sin. For Blake, Hell and Heaven were (complementary) states rather than places; but Dante’s kaleidoscopic picture certainly appealed to his imagination. Dante could make his readers ‘see’, thus appealing to the poet/painter/engraver, whose art was addressed primarily to the eye.21 Blake, in turn, amplifies incidents and details that are in keeping with his own mythmaking. The mutilated, fragmented man at the core of Jerusalem (severed heads Quoted in Margaret Bottral, The Divine Image (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letterature, 1950), an early study of Blake’s ‘Christocentric’ imagination. 20 The inevitable quotation, in this connection, is Blake’s remark that ‘whatever book is for Vengeance for Sin […] is not of the Father but of Satan the Accuser & Father of Hell’ (annotation to Boyd). 21 On Blake’s ‘sensibilità ottica’ see Claudia Corti, ‘Guardando attraverso l’occhio: l’iconismo poetico di Blake’, in Seminario sull’Opera di W. Blake, ed. by Tomaso Kemeny (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983), pp. 9-20. 19

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appear in plate 54) become a leitmotif of the infernal landscape, well beyond Dante’s own image of mutilation in Inferno XXIX. 72-118, and merge with the equally essential image of the rock, the rock built by the enemies of Jerusalem. Blake was drawn to Dante’s picture of a fallen state, as manifested in the fact that the seventy-two illustrations for the Inferno by far outnumber the remaining thirty-three for Purgatorio and ten for Paradiso. It is worth mentioning that, also in the early editions, Dante’s Hell is more richly illustrated than his Purgatory and Paradise. Some editions have no illustrations for the third Cantica, certainly the most difficult to interpret. Blake responds to the challenge by changing his style accordingly. One of the most impressive landmarks of Blake’s Hell are the rocks with embedded fragments of human bodies dominating the Malebolge. Through a collation of his sources – the Bible, Dante, and arguably Fuseli – Blake conveys the incompleteness, hardness, and aridity of a world geared to material values and not inhabited by the life-giving energy of creativity, Los, the Holy Ghost. Rocks and dark clouds shield out the light, and contribute to Hell’s atmosphere made of stark contrasts of dissonant colours or scenarios pervaded by dull, painful shades of grey. In this respect, the unfinished state of most illustrations turns out to be the very reason for their effectiveness. Blake’s scenes set in the Malebolge are indicative of the resonances between Dante’s words and his own poetic construction. The rocks described by Dante (Canto XVIII), as well as his clouds shielding out the light, are in keeping with Blake’s early use of rocks surrounding Albion asleep. It is the landscape of a world in need of spiritual awakening. The illustration for Inferno V is one of the most complex instances of Blake’s grafting his own concerns on Dante’s text. The engraver here re-elaborates a pivotal theme in his ‘system’, the separation of the male and female principles as a signifier of the imperfect state of the merely ‘natural’, divided man. The impossibility of Love in a fallen world is at the core of the illustration of Dante’s encounter with the Lustful (Plate 10). The scene appears like a literal rendering of Dante’s episode, apart from a distinctively Blakean detail, a quotation from Jerusalem, Plate 28, in the upper right part of the drawing. The lovers swept away in the incessant vortex that separates them forever are contrasted with the couple peacefully reunited in the sun. The picture can be read in the light of Blake’s statements on the theme: in a world dominated by selfishness and jealousy, a consequence of reason isolated from the other ‘zoas’, the two lovers are sinful and condemned to part, while in the realm of Los, whose emblem is the sun, love glows. Comments on this picture tend to insist on Dante’s and Blake’s different approaches towards adulterous love, but have failed to see that in this canto Dante is all but the self-righteous and revengeful figure that some believe to be the target of the illustrator’s criticism. The picture exhibits two emblematic Blakean symbols, the sun and the vortex, and they stand respectively for the world of Vision and Imagination and the fallen world. A huge dark vortex returns at the gates of Dis, in one of Blake’s most successful monochromatic illustrations. The shapes and colour of Dis, its grey stone and darkness appropriately render the atmosphere of a spiritual wasteland. Hell’s livid hues give way to the pastel colours of Purgatory. In spite, or because of, their incomplete state the opening pictures of Purgatory are especially effective in manifesting the change. Thus, the illustration to Canto I, with its strokes of different shades

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of blue, suggests the spiritual opening up of the landscape and the dawn of Sun/Los: the rising sun is at the centre of the page and the ring of clouds, still present, has lost its stony consistency. The impression conveyed by the picture is in fact coherent with the use of blue as the colour of Los/Imagination in Blake’s art. Dante’s ascent to the mountain of Purgatory, in Blake’s terms, is the laborious process of self-integration, culminating in the reunion with Dante’s ‘emanation’, Beatrice, in Paradise. The ascent and final reunion are made possible by the recognition of man’s errors, illuminated by the Holy Ghost, whom Blake, after Milton, sees as the inspiration for True Poetry. In the foreground Virgil is once more showing his tenderness to Dante, who bends his head to receive the crown of reed. If Virgil acted as Dante’s rescuer in many episodes previously illustrated, it is in Purgatory that Blake’s Virgil openly manifests his Christ-like nature, ‘meek’ and ‘mild’, as in ‘The Lamb’ from Songs of Innocence. At the same time, he shows Dante the way to reach the divine Self to which he must surrender. Virgil’s arm is usually stretched upward, a liberty that Blake took with respect to his sources: as the personification of Los, the Creative Genius, Imagination, he indicates the way out of the ‘sea of space and time’ to Eternity. In this respect, Roe connects Dante’s Purgatory to Blake’s Beulah: a place where recognition of errors and return to Eternity are possible. Beulah, in Blake’s image, is a place where the slumbering soul can still awake from its sleep. Roe insists on this analysis in his commentary to Blake’s illustration to Canto XXVII, where Virgil patiently watches over the sleeping Dante (Plate 89). Visually, the transitional nature of Purgatory is evident, among others, in the illustration to Canto IX. The clouds (colourless in the plate for Canto I) still hover over Dante, but again the sun is visible behind them and throws light on the waters below. As a result, the dark waters of Hell (reminiscent of the gloomy ‘Waters of Space and Time’, an earlier painting by Blake) are lit up by the still pale reflections of the sun. The colour of the clouds has turned to red, recalling the colour of the first step, symbolizing charity. However, the Angel of Purgatory (the typical squatting figure of the Urizen Books) indicates the persistence of law and prohibition. Green and blue waters are visible from the mountain that Dante and Virgil are climbing, passing through the Proud.22 Pride, being the original sin, recalls the Fall; here, however, Blake hints at the original Fall, the creation. The lying figure, the lower part of his body turned into bricks, wrapped in the folds of a sketched serpent, once more recalls ‘Elohim creating Adam’, while the upside-down crowned head reinforces the allusion to the fall as the descent into the material world and its errors. The Pride of power turns kings and armies to dust, as the picture suggests. It is precisely from selfishness and the will to dominate that, according to Blake, universal man must purify himself. Dante’s Hell and Purgatory, then, seem to represent for Blake various 22

Morton Paley has pointed out the association between the colour green (so crucial in Purgatory) and Hope in Jerusalem. See William Blake’s Illuminated Books, collected edition, general ed. David Bindman, 6 vols, vol. I: Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. by Morton D. Paley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), I, pp. 263, 266, 280. In addition, green and blue are also the prevalent tints in water-coloured Renaissance editions of the Commedia.

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degrees of selfishness, error or separation of a Divine Body that demands reintegration. The two poets, separated by their respective ‘systems’, placed Revelation at the core of their final visions, but Blake believed that ‘its vision is seen by the Imaginative eye of Every one according to the situation he holds’. Roe’s claim that Dante, according to Blake, was stuck in Ulro and Beulah, and unable, because of his system, to conceive a perfect return to Eden or an ultimate vision of the New Jerusalem, is still largely influential among scholars. Throughout his analysis, Roe tends to emphasize differences rather than similarities. For example, Plate 94, ‘Dante adoring Christ’, in Roe’s terms would reaffirm the dominant note of Blake’s response to Dante: Christ’s self-sacrifice replaces Law with Mercy. The illustration repeats the compositional scheme of Plate 79 in Jerusalem. Whether standing or kneeling, Albion/Dante, the universal man, receives his own light and power of vision from the light radiating from Christ. The latter’s features are those of the earlier illustration from The Grave. Dante’s, and Albion’s, posture recall ‘Albion’s dance’, one of Blake’s best known pictures of the spiritual man, whose ‘doors of perception’ are open. Christ is Divine Humanity, the embodiment and model of the spiritual man illuminated by the sacred gift of Imagination; he is juxtaposed to the character of Urizen, the personification of God as judge and lawgiver. Urizen is the God conceived by reason (his very name may be a contraction of ‘Your Reason’), the God of the deist. As with Satan, he is a ‘false forgiver’. In Kathleen Raine’s interpretation, Blake’s recognition of ‘forgiveness of sins’ as ‘the cornerstone of Christianity’ is what increasingly attracted him to the Catholic religion – much to the embarrassment of his early biographer, Alexander Gilchrist.23 I am not trying to convey an improbable picture of a Catholic Blake, but I need to stress, once again, that the distance between Blake and Dante has been overrated, with a few exceptions.24 Most commentators believe that Blake, while ‘illustrating Dante’, stigmatizes the latter’s acceptance of the very idea of a final judgement, with the blessed separated from the damned. And the presence of Urizen figures in Blake’s plates for Paradiso is read as a warning to the readers that we are still faced with a rational construction, dominated by law and Judgement. The illustration to Canto XIX seems to visualize this concept. If the upper part of the deity, the uprising wings, and the stars point to an imaginative, spiritual dimension, yet, at the same time, the figure bears signs of closure: the converging, rather than outstretched, wings trap the star. The hoary hair and beard are even too obvious references to Urizen, the giver of law, incompatible in Blake’s view with either the return to Eden or the vision of Jerusalem. His fingers pointing at the scroll (reminiscent of Blake’s Newton), his squatting posture, and his sad grimace are allusions, together with the fallen stars lying at his feet, to his fallen state. Moreover, his scaly legs recall the coils of a serpent, the symbol of the fall par excellence. Another Urizen-like figure is St. Peter in the illustration for Canto XXIV. Klonsky maintains that Blake’s Urizen is based on a gnostic God linked to the idea of a clear-cut separation of absolute good and absolute evil – a division that Blake rejected

23 24

Kathleen Raine, William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), pp. 199-200. Of the same opinion is Richard G. Green, in ‘Blake and Dante On Paradise’, Comparative Literature, 26 (1974), 51-61.

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throughout, as he rejected all dualistic systems. Within this framework, Beatrice is regarded as one of Blake’s ‘emanations’, and the encounter between Dante and Beatrice is interpreted as the visual representation of that ‘thrust to unity’25 that characterize Blake’s poetics and can be singled out as a romantic leitmotif. But the most problematic illustration, in terms of Blake’s view of Dante’s Paradiso, is the last in the series, the ‘mystic rose’, which presents some clearly contradictory elements. Hardly suggestive of the heavenly choir of the blessed, as described elsewhere by Blake (as in his well-known letter to Dr Trusler of 16 August 1799), the picture shows a naked woman with a mirror, certainly closer to Blake’s own female figures than suggestive of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by sketched figures that are supposed to represent the women mentioned by Dante in Paradiso XXXI. Roe’s influential reading has led many critics to believe that Dante’s final vision, grounded in contemporary Mariology, is undermined by Blake, who had already questioned notions of Mary’s virginity in his Everlasting Gospel and here seems to reduce her to Vala, the natural woman in his early works such as Vala or the Four Zoas. In plate 28 of Jerusalem, Vala rises from a sunflower and symbolizes the personification of Female Will, man’s antagonist in the fallen world. This unfinished plate, no more than a pencil sketch, is the last in the sequence of Blake’s Dantean images. The artist seems to have left out Dante’s last canto and ‘concluded’ with an intriguing picture that once more defies schematic interpretations. To the very last, Blake transforms (or, in T. S. Eliot’s words, ‘steals’) Dante’s images into his own. The mirror comes from Dante’s lines in the last three cantos, but is recontextualized within Blake’s own system, and so is the ambiguous flower. Indeed, the latter is not a rose. According to Roe, it is a sunflower, the symbol of ‘man’s spiritual aspirations, which cannot be attained while he is still rooted in the flesh’.26 Raine has noticed the analogy between this compositional pattern and the Buddhist mandala, underlining the syncretic elements in Blake’s response to Christ’s incarnation. Or, perhaps, the flower is a water-lily that floats on the sea of Time and Space and is associated with Love (Jerusalem 28).27 The few strokes of light blue for the background and green for the leaves are at odds with other, generally disturbing details in the illustration, such as a chained Bible, and are indicative of innocence and simplicity. For, as Morton Paley has pointed out, Blake consistently uses this colour to suggest hope and rest. The starting point of Roe’s interpretation is his reading of the mirror in the hands of a mysterious female figure (possibly Mary-as-Vala). To him it signifies the reduction of Dante’s vision to merely natural, as opposed to spiritual, proportions. But this object, a topical image of the imperfect vision (as stated in St Paul’s Corinthians, 13:12, a fundamental hypotext to the Romantic aesthetics of light and vision), points to the contemplation of the ‘Divine’ ‘Light’ – high-frequency words in Dante’s, as well as in Blake’s, works. Jerusalem 54 opens with this image. Commenting on Plate 54, M. Paley quotes Swedenborg in terms that may have a bearing on our reception of the Dante illustration: Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (Columbia University Press: New York, 1959). Samuel Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1988), p. 390. 27 Samuel Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p. 241. 25 26

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Carla Maria Gnappi They who saw God as their creator…are in coelestial light, which gives transparency to every thing they behold, and by different variegations forms therein such beautiful representation of divine things, as gives 28 unspeakable pleasure to their intellectual sight. (Heaven and Hell, no. 489)

Bearing in mind Anthony Blunt’s suggestion that, in Blake’s system, nudity indicates the need to break free from the ‘mundane shell’, I propose a reading that tends to reconcile the two poets.29 The looking-glass, together with the nakedness of the woman who holds it, can be regarded as complementary images that simultaneously point to our fallen state and to the condition to which we must aspire. And this is the object of Dante’s poetry, as well as Blake’s composite art. The same can be said of the sunflower. As Marcello Pagnini remarks, the sunflower, rooted in the ground but constantly turned towards the Sun (Los, Imagination), symbolizes man’s spiritual impulse.30 I would go as far as to say that, with its sun-like shape, it actualizes a principle underlying the Hermetic tradition common to Dante’s Renaissance editors, Swedenborg, and Blake: ‘That which is above is like that which is below’. This principle, with reference to Dante’s final vision, is the basis of the last illustration of the Sessa edition of the Comedy – the only Italian version that, to the present, we know for sure Blake had at hand. This woodcut presents two mirror images of the circular choir of the blessed, with the sun between the two, as if to unite them. In the early illustrations of the Divine Comedy, the ‘mystic rose’ was hardy illustrated as a rose proper, as if the illustrators were looking at the image of harmony and grace of Dante’s vision rather than at its literal description. In this respect, then, Blake is not the first. His sunflower, in turn, seems to me no less suggestive of Dante’s concept. In his attempt to bridge the gap that has been set between Dante and Blake, Rodney M. Baine stigmatizes the ‘botanic vagary’ of those who see a sunflower in Blake’s picture. While I agree with him that ‘completely mistaken […] is the current notion that in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso Blake was burlesquing Dante’,31 I still think that Blake’s flower is ambiguous, and indeed closer to a sunflower than to a rose. The petals turned inward, rather than spread out, are once more indicative of the dynamic tension, in the human experience, between closure and opening, sleep and wake, darkness and light, time and ‘the Life of Immortality’. This is the tension at the core of Jerusalem and the very subject of Blake’s creations. Blake’s ‘land of darkness’, his ‘furnaces of affliction’, as well as his vision of the celestial city had a precedent in Dante’s journey. Blake the painter proved responsive to the ‘pilgrim’s progress’ from Hell to Light. In all the plates, colours and forms vary according to Blake’s own response to the lines illustrated. The first souls encountered in Purgatory are portrayed in the radiance of rainbow colours, reminiscent of the rays from Newton’s prism. Indeed, in spite of his open disparagement of Newtonian physics, even Blake apparently fell under the influence of Newton’s Opticks on early nineteenth-century aesthetics.

28 29 30 31

Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. by Morton D. Paley, I, p. 217. Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). William Blake, Jerusalem, ed. by Marcello Pagnini (Florence: Giunti, 1994), p.166. Rodney M. Baine, ‘Blake’s Dante in a Different Light’, Dante Studies, 105 (1987), 111-35.

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Accordingly, Blake water-colours his fountain of the Empyrean with rainbow hues, visualizing the triumph of light evoked in Dante’s poem: e di novella vista mi raccesi tale, che nulla luce è tanto mera, che li occhi miei non si fosser difesi e vidi lume in forma di rivera fulgido di fulgore, intra due rive dipinte di mirabil primavera. (Paradiso XXX. 58-63)

The very act of drinking from the Empyrean waters can be regarded as the visual rendering of the immersion in the divine light, the opening up of the ‘doors of perception’ that constitutes the quintessence of the poet as ‘man divine’. Blake’s picture is a reverberation of colours, as if matter had been sublimated into light. And this process parallels Dante’s language of the ineffable, the self-effacing language that marks the pilgrim/poet’s ascent to the point where words fail. It was notably William Butler Yeats who first insisted on the irredeemable distance between Dante and Blake. Nevertheless, if we overcome the evident theological divide and narrow the focus on the illustrations beyond the differences in the medium, we may find a way of reconciling the two ‘enemies’. Following Northrop Frye, we can see Blake and Dante sharing a common concern in their attempts to focus on the spiritual man. Seeking to verbalize his spiritual vision, Dante devised a language that, in C. S. Lewis’s words, loses its spatial limitations. This was Blake’s lifelong struggle, for, in his illustrations he parallels Dante’s visualization of a world where forms are transformed and turned into light – with all the philosophical and aesthetic implications of the concept. Although it cannot be denied that the theology embedded in the last canto of Paradiso was distant from Blake, yet, the vision of the blessed is as essential to Dante’s ‘system’ as it is to the Swedenborgean dissenter. The latter’s wife is reported to have said that her husband was often in Paradise, and this lifelong yearning for Paradise was fulfilled on 12 August 1826. His biographers describe the artist at work as ‘a dying Michelangelo’, the folio with his Dante plates spread over his deathbed. The Divine Comedy was the faithful companion of his last days. And Peter Ackroyd has recreated a sympathetic picture of the poet ‘propped upon a pillow’, ‘great dark eyes dominant’: His only thought now was completing his work on Dante, and ‘one of the very last shillings spent was in sending out for a pencil. On the day of his death he stopped work and turned to Catherine, who was in tears; ‘Stay, Kate!’, he said, ‘[...] I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.’ When he had completed it he put it down and then began to sing verses and hymns. [...] At six in the evening, he expired ‘like the sighing of a gentle breeze’ [...] George Richmond wrote to Samuel Palmer, a little later, ‘He died on sunday night a 6Oclock in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all his life wished to see & expressed Himself happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ – just before he died His 32 countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’s and he burst out into Singing of the things he saw in heaven.

32

Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 389.

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Carla Maria Gnappi Blake’s last words and song are reminiscent of Dante’s: Lume è là su che visibile face lo creatore a quella creatura che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace. (Paradiso XXX. 101-03)

Maria Cristina Cignatta (Università di Parma)

William Hazlitt and Dante as the Embodiment of ‘Power, Passion, Self-Will’

Hazlitt’s criticism of Dante is to be assessed almost exclusively on the strength of his article published in the Edinburgh Review in June 1815 as a critical appraisal of J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi’s De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813). Overtly polemical in tone, Hazlitt’s article vehemently rejects the Swiss historian’s objections and reservations about Dante’s poetry as archaic, anachronistic, and totally unfounded. In the eyes of the English critic, Dante’s poetry is the perfect embodiment of the definition of poetry as a unique synthesis of imagination, emotional intensity, expression, and passion. Dante himself, a wondrous personification of ‘power, passion, selfwill’, represents the triumph of original genius and human will. Thus, Hazlitt’s Dante is substantially a Romantic ante litteram, to be evaluated in the light of contemporary aesthetics. Despite its incongruities and limitations, Hazlitt’s article is one of the most penetrating assessments of Dante written by any early nineteenth-century British critic. Together with Coleridge, Hazlitt stands out as one of the earliest critical voices in the century to see Dante as the chief exponent – indeed, the very embodiment – of the Italian Middle Ages and to evaluate his importance within the parameters of his own historical and cultural period.

The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt constitute a serious attempt in English literary criticism at a more impartial approach to Italian Medieval literature. Nineteenth-century critics were beginning to analyze literary works as part of a historical process and to evaluate writers within the social, philosophical, and political currents of the period that engendered their works. In nineteenth-century Dante criticism, Coleridge and Hazlitt represent the first examples of this trend, their method being subsequently adopted by other critics, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle. In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley saw Dante as a key figure. He was […] the second poet, [after Homer] the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it: […] Dante was the first religious reformer, […] Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a 1 language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms.

Hazlitt dedicated two articles in particular to Dante and the Divina Commedia. The more important of the two appeared in the Edinburgh Review in June 1815 as a critical appraisal of the Genevan historian J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi’s De la littérature du midi

1

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and a Letter to Lord Ellenborough (London: The Porcupine Press, 1948), pp. 39-40.

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de l’Europe. From 1803 to 1829, the Edinburgh Review was edited by Francis Jeffrey and, during the decade 1814-24, Hazlitt was a regular contributor to the periodical. Sismondi’s work, published in Paris in four volumes in 1813, was translated into English in 1823 by Thomas Roscoe. It was the expanded version of a series of lectures delivered in Geneva in 1811 on the literature of Southern Europe.2 Contemporary with Sismondi’s work was another extremely influential work by Pierre Louis Ginguené, Histoire littéraire d’Italie, published in Paris from 1811 to 1816. Ginguené (1748-1816) was a critic of the older dogmatic school that prevailed before, and even outlasted, the French Revolution, and his Histoire, with its extremely classical approach, was heavily indebted to the Italian historian Girolamo Tiraboschi’s Storia della letteratura italiana (published 1772-82). Sismondi had received a classical education, yet, by virtue of his friendship with Mme. De Staël, whose circle he frequented at Coppet, he became acquainted with the new ideas in circulation, many of which constituted what historians and critics were subsequently to refer to as Romanticism. Even so, his work relied conspicuously on Tiraboschi. Sismondi’s critical approach was, however, perfectly compatible with his classical education in a country and in a period traditionally hostile to Medievalism. Both Sismondi’s and Ginguené’s writings were highly influential not only within their own national boundaries, but also in Italy and in Britain. Hazlitt’s discussion of Sismondi’s work marks a crucial turning-point in the history of nineteenth-century Dante criticism, in that Italian Medieval literature is finally reassessed with equanimity and enthusiastic appreciation. The English critic polemically rejects Sismondi’s reservations and objections about Dante’s art on the grounds of their being archaic, anachronistic and, ultimately, totally unfounded. The English critic’s analysis of Sismondi opens with some general observations on the overall tone pervading the historian’s work. He complains that it lacks ‘force’, ‘spirit’, and originality, and that the author, although an excellent writer, ‘has visibly less enthusiasm as a critic than as a politician’. He argues that ‘there can be no real love of liberty, or admiration of genius, where there is no enthusiasm’.3 Such indifference on the historian’s part is, according to Hazlitt, to be attributed to his lack of sentiment, his excessive rationalism and, ultimately, his deplorable practice of adapting ‘French rules and German systems of criticism’.4 Furthermore, Hazlitt observes that the historian’s work was originally conceived to be imparted in conference form, thus undoubtedly enhancing its prestige as a work of reference but, at the same time, making it ‘less entertaining to the general reader’.5 From these introductory comments one gains the immediate impression that Hazlitt’s assessment of Sismondi is conducted from the standpoint of the Romantic critic and man of 2 3

4 5

Sismondi had already gained fame as a historian for his monumental Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, published first in 8 volumes (1807-09) and then in 16 volumes in the second edition (1809-18). William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-One Volumes, ed. by Percival Presland Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1933), XVI, p. 24. Henceforth, all quotations from Hazlitt’s article on Sismondi will refer to this text. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 24. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 25.

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letters. This is particularly evident in the prevalently Romantic terminology employed by the critic: ‘force’, ‘spirit’, ‘enthusiasm’, ‘liberty’, ‘genius’, ‘feeling’, ‘original character’.6 Another preliminary observation made by Hazlitt is directed at Sismondi’s apparent lack of interest in the three great Italian Trecentisti and his unjustified, disproportionate preference for other more recent authors – of minor status, in the eyes of the English critic – such as Metastasio. Similarly, Hazlitt considers Ariosto to be underrated with respect to Tasso, to whom Sismondi seems to accord excessive esteem. The critic also assumes that the Swiss historian – by his own admission – draws upon Ginguené and Tiraboschi as his two main sources for Italian literature, whereas, for his observations on drama, he takes a few suggestions from Wilhelm Schlegel: ‘It is to this last author that he seems to be indebted for a great part of his theoretical reasoning and conjectural criticism on the general principles of taste and the progress of human genius’.7 After having dwelt at length on Sismondi’s discussion of Provençal poetry and the literature of Northern France, he proceeds to focus on the historian’s considerations on Italian literature. The critic endorses Sismondi’s opinion that the medieval Mysteries and Moralities gave considerable impetus to the development of drama in Europe and, in all probability, Dante himself took some inspiration for the overall project and structure of the Divina Commedia from these primitive dramatic forms. However, he categorically dissociates himself from Sismondi’s view that the principal merit of the poem lies in its general design; on the contrary, he deems this to be ‘clumsy, mechanical, and monotonous’. It is interesting to note that Coleridge, too, failed to appreciate the structural unity and symmetry underlying the Comedy, and claimed that if one could speak of any unity at all in Dante’s work, this was necessarily of a stylistic, not a structural, nature.8 Indeed, the majority of nineteenth-century British critics unanimously exalted the linguistic and stylistic prowess of Dante, Hazlitt being no exception in this respect: ‘the invention is in the style’.9 Most interestingly, Hazlitt dates the beginning of modern literature from the birth of the Italian language as a vehicle of poetical expression or, more precisely, from Dante’s work. He acclaims the Italian poet as the precursor of modern poetry, the forefather of the modern era and, as such, a contemporary to be evaluated according to contemporary criteria. He affirms: ‘It is […] from the work of Dante, the first lasting monument of modern genius, that we should strictly date the origin of modern literature’.10 Hazlitt voices a similar opinion in his essay On Poetry in General (1818): For the fundamental lexicon of Romantic aesthetics, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, vol. II: The Romantic Age (London: Cape, 1955), Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968), and Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower. Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1971). 7 William Hazlitt: ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 25. 8 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘Lecture X’, in Italian Poets and English Critics, 1755-1859: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. and with an introduction by Beatrice Corrigan (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 72. Here, Coleridge affirms that Dante’s most extraordinary quality resides in his style ‘the vividness, logical connexion, strength and energy of which cannot be surpassed’. 9 William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 39. 10 William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 40. 6

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Maria Cristina Cignatta Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it to burst the thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every page. He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its passage to the other world.11

Thus Dante is hailed as the father of modern poetry and, in consequence, as a model to be imitated. Although, in the nineteenth century, the principle of imitation had lost much of its validity in favour of a more original and spontaneous form of literary expression, Hazlitt claims that ‘the emulation of the antients’ can still constitute a valid principle even in modern times, albeit from a completely different viewpoint. Indeed, he argues that the emulation of certain literary forerunners ‘has been the great moving spring of the grandest efforts of human genius in our own times’.12 He goes on to cite a few passages from Sismondi’s work, which bring to light many interesting points. First and foremost, he quotes the following observation made by Sismondi: Nevertheless, no poet had as yet powerfully affected the mind, no philosopher had penetrated the depths of thought and sentiment, when the greatest of the Italians, the father of their poetry, Dante, appeared, and showed to the world how a powerful genius is able to arrange the gross materials prepared for him, in such a 13 manner as to rear from them an edifice; magnificent as the universe, of which it was the image.

Dante is apparently considered by Sismondi as the father of Italian poetry and not, as Hazlitt declares, the forefather or precursor of modern literature in general. It is equally significant that the Swiss historian views the Divina Commedia as possessing a precise structural framework and layout – an ‘edifice’ – by coincidence the same terminology that Thomas Carlyle was to use in his essay On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840). Sismondi affirms that the subject-matter chosen by Dante for his poem was ‘the most popular of all; at once the most profoundly religious, and the most closely allied to the love of country, or glory, and of party-feelings […] the most loftily sublime of any which the mind of man has ever conceived’.14 However, in Sismondi’s opinion, the true grandeur of Dante’s work lies in the poet’s creativity: ‘Dante himself […] attaches his excellence to purity and correctness: yet he is neither pure nor correct; but he is a creator’.15 From the melting-pot of barbarisms in medieval culture, Dante created a monument, grandiose and sublime, as well as harmonious in all its components. The historian also observes that Dante’s characters are alive, his imagery and illustrations are drawn directly from nature, and his language is such that it appeals to both the imagination and the understanding. He concludes that almost all the stanzas in the poem lend themselves, by virtue of their intrinsic descriptive nature, to pictorial representation: ‘His characters walk and breathe; his pictures are nature itself; his language always speaks to the imagination, as

11 12 13 14 15

William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets and The Spirit of the Age (London: Dent, 1910), p. 17. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 40. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 40. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, pp. 40-41. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41.

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well as to the understanding; and there is scarcely a stanza in his poem, which might not be represented with the pencil’.16 Having cited the above passages from Sismondi, Hazlitt then ventures to express his own opinions on the subject, pointing out by way of introduction, and not without a note of regret, that ‘M. Sismondi seems to have understood the great poet of Italy little better than his other commentators’.17 He argues that Sismondi was just as unsympathetic towards Dante’s art or, more precisely, he was no more inclined towards sympathetic perception and appreciation of his art than many other commentators of Dante (an overt reference to Voltaire’s vitriolic comments on the Divina Commedia). Nonetheless, he fully comprehends why it was so arduous for critics of the French school, attentive as they were to formalistic criteria of harmony, proportion, grace, and decorum, to experience any artistic affinity with Dante’s work: ‘and indeed the Divine Comedy must completely baffle the common rules of French criticism, which always seeks for excellence in the external image, and never in the internal power and feeling’.18 What the critic finds particularly captivating in Dante’s art is his emotional intensity and force of expression. Indeed – by coincidence – Hazlitt’s own prose is a perfect combination of ease and strength, and conveys an impression of cogency, energy, enthusiasm, and determination. Sismondi and the French school of criticism failed to view Dante’s intensity and expressiveness in their correct perspective, because of their slavish adherence to formalism. He argues that it would be impossible to confine Dante within certain literary criteria, because of the elusive nature of his verse: Dante is nothing but power, passion, self-will. In all that relates to the imitative part of poetry, he bears no comparison with many other poets; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies like a dead-weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity like that which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul, that make amends for all other 19 deficiencies.

It is interesting to note that Hazlitt defined poetry in general as ‘the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it’.20 Poetry is ‘the language of the imagination and the passions’ or, in other words, poetry ‘in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling combined with passion and fancy’,21 and Dante’s poetry is the quintessential embodiment of this definition. From these initial considerations, it clearly emerges that the critic not only views the figure of Dante but also filters Sismondi’s appraisal of the Italian poet through the eyes of the Romantic man of letters, whose critique strictly adheres to Romantic concepts and theories. We might go as far as to say that Hazlitt consciously romanticizes the Italian poet, 16 17 18 19 20 21

William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 1. William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 11.

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to the extent of hailing him as a ‘modern genius’.22 Not only does he underrate the formalistic aspect of the Divina Commedia, as he observes: ‘The immediate objects he presents to the mind, are not much in themselves; – they generally want grandeur, beauty and order’;23 but he also deintellectualizes the poet’s work, when he staunchly affirms that ‘Dante’s only object is to interest; and he interests only by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed’.24 This staggering affirmation strikes us as particularly inappropriate, especially when we recall the copious passages dedicated to philosophy, theology, science, and astrology – often of an overtly moral and didactic nature – which extend over the three cantiche of the Commedia, and are particularly abundant in the Paradiso. Indeed, it would be true to say that Lord Byron complained of the exact opposite, when he remarked that ‘the Divine Comedy is a scientific treatise of some theological student […] The poem is so obscure, tiresome and insupportable that no-one can read it for half an hour together without yawning and going to sleep over it’.25 It is worth mentioning that, during the previous centuries in England, Dante’s art had not been appreciated as poetry, on account of a number of problems and difficulties connected with the text. Unsurprisingly, Dante’s involvement with intricate metaphysical, philosophical, and theological issues has presented considerable problems for English readers owing to the deep-seated Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage. Ben Jonson had Lady Politick contemptuously declare in Volpone (1605-06): ‘Dante is hard, and few can understand him’.26 Her words were to be echoed by the Earl of Chesterfield: ‘Though I formerly knew Italian extremely well, I could never understand him [Dante]; for which reason I had done with him, fully convinced that he was not worth the pains necessary to understand him’.27 It was due to its intrinsic obscurity that British translators of the Divina Commedia were slow forthcoming. It will be remembered that the first complete translation of the Inferno by Charles Rogers was published in 1782, whereas the first translation in blank verse of the entire Commedia by the Rev. Henry Boyd, did not appear until 1814, and it was not until 1842 that a whole cantica translated in the original metre saw the light. Indeed, early translators steered clear of terza rima, which posed overwhelming problems due primarily to the scarcity of rhymes in the English language, although a few sporadic attempts had been ventured by poets such as Chaucer, Wyatt, Surrey, Harington, and Milton, and subsequently by Hayley, Byron, Hunt, Shelley, and others. Unsurprisingly, an atheist of radical political convictions such as Hazlitt would be insensitive to Dante’s prolix theological disquisitions and, indeed, he referred to the ‘nakedness and dreary vacuity’ of the subject-matter of the poem.28 Indifferent as he was to

William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 11. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London, 1847), II, pp. 252-53. Act III, scene 4, Ben Jonson, Volpone, in Four English Comedies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. by J. M. Morrell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 65. 27 Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield, 4 vols (London, 1792), II, p. 333. 28 William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. 22 23 24 25 26

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the intellectual dimension of Dante’s work and being inclined to award him essentially Romantic attributes – imagination, intensity, sensation, and expressiveness – he inevitably failed to appreciate to the full the multifaceted genius of the Italian poet, audaciously overlooking some of the most refined elements in his verse. This emerges clearly in his weighted affirmation that Dante is ‘nothing but power, passion, self-will’.29 As previously stated, Hazlitt considered Dante’s poetry as the perfect synthesis of imagination and passion. Dante literally ‘moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul’.30 Thus, according to the critic, he effects a potent interiorization of the external world through the medium of his verse, while his imagination has a strong effect on external reality and transforms it through the process of poetic creation: ‘The immediate objects he presents to the mind […] become everything by the force of the character which he impresses on them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them’.31 Thus Dante is romanticized in the light of Coleridge’s theories and almost forcefully – and, indeed, not totally convincingly – moulded to Hazlitt’s Romantic aesthetic. Like Coleridge and other Romantics, Hazlitt was deeply interested in exploring the expressive potential of poetry, convinced that man’s inner impulses and hidden resources could effectively combine to create the language of poetry. He thus voiced one of the major preoccupations of the Romantics, fascinated as they were by the catalytic and organic processes taking place within the human mind during poetic creation. In his essay On Poetry in General, Hazlitt states that ‘poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind’.32 On the subject of the interiorization process in Dante’s poetry, he affirms that the Italian poet excels in ‘combining internal feelings with familiar objects’,33 adding that he ‘habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism’.34 This statement, reminiscent of Coleridge, is worthy of note in that once more we see Dante filtered through Hazlitt’s Romantic critique. The poet’s imagination transforms the common objects of nature, according to the inner qualities they possess, thus encompassing them in his poetic vision, and, as an example, the critic cites the description of Satan as a cormorant. In this way, Dante produces poetry of extraordinary vigour, force, and emotional intensity. According to the critic, poetry of this kind may become a vehicle of emotional catharsis, a purification of one’s inner self, the identification and expression of one’s inarticulate aspirations and desires.35 The principle of interiorization also prompts the critic to contest the widespread opinion, also shared by Sismondi, that Dante’s excellence resides in his natural descriptions and dramatic invention. While conceding that Dante’s characters are authentic and realistic, he argues that they become great because they are impregnated with the poet’s spirit and 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 3. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 42. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 18. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 42. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 18. See Percival Presland Howe, The Life of William Hazlitt (London: Martin Secker, 1922), pp. 349-50.

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intensity of feeling, and the vitality he instils into them: ‘His characters are indeed ‘instinct with life’ and sentiment; but it is with the life and sentiment of the poet. In themselves they have little or no dramatic variety’.36 Parallel to the process of interiorization that Hazlitt identifies in Dante’s poetry is his appraisal of the ‘Gothic’ elements in the Divina Commedia. This is particularly evident in the critic’s fascination for the ‘gloomy’ aspect of Dante, his ‘terrible obscurity’ and ‘gloomy abstraction’: ‘There is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies like a dead-weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity like that which oppresses us in dreams’.37 Dante’s poetic expression is so intense as to give the reader the impression of an oneiric vision that leaves him in an overwhelming state of anguish, a ‘benumbing stupor’. Several English poets and critics referred in their writings to Dante’s gloominess, grimness and terror. Dante had, in fact, gained the reputation of ‘master of the terrible’, a disparager of mankind dwelling essentially on the negative aspects of man’s existence: this was, of course, largely due to the enormous popularity of the Inferno throughout Europe. In this respect, Hazlitt endorses the opinion of Sismondi, namely that the Purgatorio and Paradiso represent a falling-off in quality or an anti-climax with respect to the first cantica: ‘The Purgatory and Paradise are justly characterized by our author [Sismondi] as ‘a falling off’ from the Inferno. He however points out a number of beautiful passages in both these divisions of the poem’.38 Other critics of the period referred to the ‘terrible’ aspect of the Comedy. Walter Savage Landor, who had benefited from a rigorously classical education, nurtured an instinctive dislike for Dante, whose faults, in his opinion, abundantly outweighed his merits. He discussed Dante on several occasions, notably in the Pentameron (1836), where the historical background, in true classical fashion, was largely drawn from Sismondi. In this work, he placed the most vehement criticism of Dante in the mouth of Petrarch. He stigmatised Dante as ‘the great master of the disgusting’, and referred to his ‘splenetic temper, which seems to grudge brightness to the flames of Hell, to delight in deepening its gloom, in multiplying its miseries, in accumulating weight upon depression and building labyrinths about perplexity’.39 Even a ‘sympathetic’ critic such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, in an essay first published in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine (January 1824), spoke of Dante’s ‘reviled details’, as opposed to Milton’s ‘sublimity’, but specified that Dante’s aim was to work upon man’s feelings in a realistic way: The solemnity of his asseverations, the consistency and minuteness of his details, the earnestness with which he labours to make the reader understand the exact shape and size of everything that he describes, give an air of reality to his wildest fictions […] This is the real justification of the many passages in his poem which bad 40 critics have condemned as grotesque. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 43. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 43. Walter Savage Landor, The Complete Works, ed. by T. Earle Welby, 16 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1931), IX, pp. 192 and 239. 40 ‘Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers, N° 1 – Dante’, in Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1868), p. 27. 36 37 38 39

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For his part, Hazlitt regards the ‘terrible’ aspect of Dante’s work as a positive quality conferring cogency and vehemence to his poetic expression, and insists that it must be viewed essentially in this light. On the assumption that Dante’s sole objective is to ‘interest’ his readers, the critic goes on to explain how the Italian poet achieves his objective. Dante captivates our attention and interest by working on the emotions and on the effect his powerful images have on our feelings and sensations. His outstanding merit is that […] he interests only by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed. He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been excited; but he seizes on the attention, by showing us the effect they produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly frequently gives us the thrilling and overwhelming sensation which is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object of 41 horror.

Hazlitt’s observation regarding the Italian poet’s excellence in ‘combining internal feelings with familiar objects’ affords him a convenient pretext for a brief comparison between the art of Dante and that of Milton. He affirms that both poets seem to incorporate in their writings a ‘gloomy tone’ and ‘prophetic fury’, but ‘there is more deep-working passion in Dante, and more imagination in Milton’.42 As an example, the critic quotes the inscription above the entrance to Hell, which instils a feeling of terror and pain in the reader. In Hazlitt’s opinion, this is the very essence of Dante’s art: he effects a perfect fusion of gravity and sentiment, of severity and intensity of feeling, although he objects that some of the images the poet uses ‘want grandeur’.43 Another objection raised by Hazlitt is that, contrary to what Sismondi states, Dante’s poetry does not lend itself to pictorial representation and, moreover, he severely criticizes Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon’ (1773).44 He declares that Dante’s images ‘afford […] very few subjects for picture’,45 an astonishing affirmation when we consider the close relationship that existed between art and literature in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the endless illustrations of the Comedy made by countless artists, in particular of the two episodes of Francesca da Rimini (Inferno V) and Conte Ugolino (Inferno XXXIII). Hazlitt is prepared to admit that the Comedy as a whole is not bereft of certain faults and shortcomings. The images Dante presents ‘generally want grandeur, beauty, and order’, he refers to the ‘nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject’, and further specifies that ‘the improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno are excessive’.46 Hazlitt is, of course, by no means alone in his listing of the Italian poet’s defects. As a general rule, Dante has been mainly criticized for his lack of decorum, his crudity and

41 42 43 44

45 46

William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, pp. 41-42. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, pp. 17-18. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 42. See note 23 above. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting entitled ‘Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon’, dated 1773, contributed enormously to the popularity of Dante’s works in England. See also Quarterly Review, 28 (January 1823), p. 370. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 42. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, pp. 41-42.

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impropriety, his inappropriate use of vulgar language, and his presentation of scenes of grotesque realism. Anna Seward wrote in 1805: ‘the terrible graces of the Inferno lose all their dignity in butcherly, grid-iron, and intestinal exhibitions’.47 Coleridge himself spoke of Dante’s ‘occasional fault of becoming grotesque from being too graphic without imagination; many of his images excite bodily disgust and not moral fear’.48 After a brief discussion of what he considers to be Dante’s failings, Hazlitt goes on to assess his merits. And one of Dante’s most excellent qualities lies in his use of language, a quality unanimously recognized by all nineteenth-century commentators as one of the poet’s prime merits. Before the Romantic period, very few English critics had fully appreciated Dante’s use of language, to say nothing of his linguistic theories adumbrated in the De Vulgari Eloquentia. In connection with Dante’s influence on the Italian vernacular, Dryden declared that: ‘[…] Dante’s polish’d page / Restor’d a silver, not a golden age’.49 However, during the Romantic period, Dante’s linguistic virtuosity became widely acclaimed: Coleridge deemed it his principal asset, Shelley referred to Dante’s linguistic superiority in his Defence of Poetry, and even ‘hostile’ Romantic critics, such as Walter Savage Landor, were forced to acknowledge that the poet’s use of language was extraordinarily effective. Macaulay wrote: He was the first man who fully descried and exhibited the powers of his native dialect […] no writer had conceived it possible that the dialect of peasants and market-women should possess sufficient energy and precision for a majestic and durable work. Dante adventured first […] And he has thus acquired the glory, not only of producing the finest narrative poem of modern times, but also of creating a language, distinguished by unrivalled melody, and peculiarly capable of furnishing to lofty and passionate thoughts their appropriate garb 50 of severe and concise expression.

He praised the ‘incomparable force’ of his style and added: The style of Dante is, if not his highest, perhaps his most peculiar excellence. I know nothing with which it can be compared. The noblest models of Greek composition must yield to it. His words are the fewest and the best which it is possible to use. The first expression in which he clothes his thoughts is always so energetic and comprehensive that amplification would only injure the effect. There is probably no writer in any language who has presented so many strong pictures to the mind. Yet there is probably no writer equally 51 concise.

Hazlitt is no exception in this respect, and writes: ‘In point of diction and style, he is the severest of all writers, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering – who relies most on his own power, and the sense of power in the reader – who leaves most to the imagination’.52

47 48 49 50 51 52

The Letters of Anna Seward written between the years 1784 and 1807, ed. by A. Constable, 6 vols (Edinburgh: A. Constable and co., 1811), VI, p. 225. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lecture X’, p. 77. From the poem ‘To the Earl of Roscomon, on his Excellent Essay on Translated Verse’, in The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. by James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p.322. The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, pp. 21-22. The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, p. 31. William Hazlitt, ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. See also William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17.

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In his opinion, Dante’s use of language is totally in keeping with the general effect of power and intensity he creates and, moreover, it is precisely through the medium of language that he achieves this effect. As an example, the critic quotes the concluding lines of the story of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno V): ‘And all that day we read no more!’.53 Hazlitt resumes his discussion of Dante’s poetry in his later Notes of a Journey through France and Italy, which first appeared in the columns of the Morning Chronicle in 1826. In chapter XX of this work, Hazlitt concentrates on the Pia de’ Tolomei episode (Purgatorio V), providing biographical information about Pia, her birth, upbringing, unhappy marriage, and atrocious death in the Tuscan marshes, and comments: Nothing can be conceived more noble or more delicate than the manner in which the ill-fated Pia addresses herself to Dante […] One such incident, or one page in Dante or in Spenser is worth all the route between this and Paris, and all the sights in all the post-roads in Europe. Oh Sienna! if I felt charmed with thy narrow, tenantless streets, or looked delighted through thy arched gateway over the subjected plain, it was that some recollections of Madonna Pia hung upon the beatings of my spirit, and converted a barren waste into the 54 regions of romance!

Hazlitt holds an important place in our understanding of the history of English literary criticism and of the Romantic period in particular. At a time when awareness of past literature, both English and European, was steadily increasing, his curiosity encompassed a wide range of literary traditions, while his sense of comparative value stemmed from his deep knowledge of the literature of his own day. The vigour, individuality and uncompromising sincerity of Hazlitt’s appraisals may strike the modern reader as being somewhat generalized and indiscriminate; nevertheless, they afford him the opportunity to give voice to his own imagination and enthusiasm as a critic. Indeed, the overt display of personality reflected in his writings can be regarded as one of the prominent traits not only of Romantic criticism, discernible also in Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, but also of Victorian criticism in the writings of John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and Walter Pater. Hazlitt’s judgements are based on conspicuously Romantic ideas and the considerations emerging from his review of Sismondi’s work conform to these principles, being almost totally conditioned by his Romantic perception of poetry and literature in general. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Dante is hailed as the first poet of the ‘modern’ age, a Romantic ante litteram to be assessed according to contemporary aesthetic criteria. Hazlitt sees him as the poet par excellence of the imagination, of strength, emotional intensity, expressiveness, and sensation, a poet whose production celebrates the triumph of original genius and human will: ‘His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the sullen heat of a furnace. He is power, passion, self-will personified’.55

Cited by Hazlitt in a footnote to ‘Sismondi and the Trecentisti’, p. 41. William Hazlitt, ‘Notes of a Journey through France and Italy’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, X, pp. 251-52. 55 William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, p. 17. 53 54

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Silvia Bordoni (University of Nottingham)

‘The Sonnet’s Claim’: Petrarch and the Romantic Sonnet

This essay focuses on the importance of Petrarch and the Petrarchan poetical tradition in the Romantic revival of the sonnet, which dominated British poetry in the last decades of the eighteenth century. All the major Romantic poets, among whom many women writers, participated in the critical debate concerning the stylistic aspects of the sonnet. An analysis of some sonnet collections published at the end of the eighteenth century reveals how the revival of this form was intimately connected with the Petrarchan tradition and, at the same time, the emergence of women’s poetry. Charlotte Smith’s, Mary Robinson’s, and Anna Seward’s poetical and critical contributions to establish the ‘sonnet’s claim’ is an important example of how women exploited and manipulated the Petrarchan tradition in order to assert their own poetical authority. Similarly, the best-selling poetry of the Della Cruscans uses Petrarch and his imagery to popularize new modes of love and erotic poetry, while their sonnets, and particularly Mary Robinson’s, demonstrate how the Petrarchan tradition undergoes an important process of eroticization and feminization in late eighteenth-century British culture.

The Romantic Revival of the Sonnet The Romantic revival of the sonnet was a massive literary phenomenon which covered almost a century of poetic production. The sonnet became one of the favourite forms for Romantic authors, and all the major poets participated in the critical debate concerning the pattern and stylistic aspects of the sonnet, a debate which spread rapidly in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and continued until the beginning of the Victorian Age. Thomas Gray’s sonnet ‘On the Death of Mr. Richard West’, composed in 1742 but published posthumously in 1775, was the first to re-popularize the form, followed by Thomas Warton’s sonnets and, later, Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784), the first sonnet sequence of the Romantic period. The revival was initially marked by the desire to adapt the form to a modern sensibility, and soon generated a debate over the importance of the original Petrarchan structure as the dominant and most legitimate one. Stuart Curran observes how the sonnets which initiated the revival were ‘sonnets of sensibility’, and how the original form was ‘bended, stretched, reshaped, and rethought’ over a century of experimentations.1 The more modern content of the sonnet, however, was constructed around the ‘sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world’, a polarity that also characterizes the Petrarchan tradition.2 In this way, the Petrarchan form of the sonnet was incorporated into, and renovated by, the Romantics’ production of sonnets, thus establishing an important continuity between the poetic tradition of fourteenth-century Italy and Romantic1 2

Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 29. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, p. 37.

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period Britain. With these premisses in mind, this essay discusses how the Romantic revival of the sonnet was linked to a renewed interest in Petrarch’s poetry. In particular, I intend to demonstrate how Romantic poets tend to use Petrarch’s poetic voice in order to strengthen their own authorial position and gain respectability in the contemporary cultural milieu. The sonnet was popularized through the publication of individual books of poetry, periodicals, anthologies, annuals, gift books, and even novels. A common element among the different productions of sonnets was the author’s intention to focus on the intensity of feelings, the clarity of perception, and the harmony of language. Petrarch’s sonnets were commonly taken as the most suitable examples of the achievement of a perfect balance among these elements. More specifically, the sonnet revival was based on a renewed interest in Petrarch’s poetry and the translating of his sonnets into English. The majority of eighteenthcentury anthologies of sonnets, for instance, included numerous translations and imitations of Petrarch’s poems, besides compositions by modern authors. The prefaces to these anthologies of sonnets not only contained various theoretical reflection on this poetic form and its origins, but most importantly tended to associate the Petrarchan tradition with women’s conspicuous production of sonnets. Capell Lofft’s five-volume anthology Laura: or Sonnets and Elegiac Quatuorzains, published in 1814, is one of the most complete collections in the Romantic period. In his long preface, the editor establishes the sonnet as a ‘perfect poetic form’, better adapted to produce ‘condensed thought, imagery and diction’, especially in its legitimate – or Petrarchan – form.3 By placing the origins of the sonnet in the courtly-love lyric tradition of Southern Europe, Lofft points out that the subject to which this form is most peculiarly applicable is ‘all that is most endearing, most interesting, most beautiful, excellent and sublime’, that is the ‘tenderest, purest, most generous feelings of love and friendship’.4 Interestingly, the editor clearly assimilates the Petrarchan tradition with women’s substantial production of sonnets. In the Preface, Lofft justifies his choice of naming the anthology Laura, by claiming it as ‘an affectionate and respectful remembrance of Petrarch, and of that mysterious passion to which we owe the fact that the sonnet has such celebrity’.5 The editor then praises the importance of Petrarch and Italy in the development of European lyricism: ‘we are indebted for the taste and refinement formed and diffused by his delicate and cultivated Genius, by whose peculiar amenity, purity, tenderness, calm and graceful elevation, the style, the poetry, the sentiments and the manners of Italy, and progressively Europe, have been so happily influenced’.6 After celebrating the importance of the Petrarchan tradition for the development of European lyric poetry, Capell Lofft further explains his choice of naming the collection after Laura. He argues that, since ‘many female poets have graced this elegant department of poetry, many of whose beautiful productions will be found in these volumes’, he thought that dedicating the collection to one of the most celebrated women in the history of European literature would be a homage to all women poets.7 Sig-

3 4 5 6 7

Laura: or Sonnets and Elegiac Quatuorzains, ed. by Capell Lofft (London, 1814), p. xxxiv. Laura, p. lvii. Laura, p. ii. Laura, p. ii. Laura, p. ii.

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nificantly, Lofft is the first to recognize the crucial connection between women sonneteers and the Petrarchan tradition. A similar association between the revival of the sonnet and women, even if a less explicit one, is suggested in the preface to another important anthology of sonnets published in 1803: Petrarca, a Selection of Sonnets from Various Authors with an Introductionary Dissertation on the Origin and Structure of the Sonnet. Here, the editor George Henderson proclaims the importance of the Italian form, and especially of the Petrarchan prototype.8 Even if the association between the sonnet and the rise of women’s poetry is not overtly discussed, the selection of sonnets included in the anthology shows how the editor was aware of the importance of women’s contribution to the revival. Besides the classical sonnets of Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, the editor selects various male sonneteers of the time such as William Lisle Bowles (1726-1850) and Thomas Warton (1728-1790), and includes the most famous women sonneteers: Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, and Charlotte Smith. Although in this collection male poets outnumber women poets, women’s sonnets outnumber men’s, thus suggesting that the editor considers women’s production of sonnets more important from a qualitative point of view. For both editors, the most substantial elements at the origins of the Romantic sonnet revival appear to be the development of women’s poetry, and the interest in Petrarch and his love for Laura, whose relationship is a fundamental aspect in the evolution of this poetic form. By connecting these three elements, Capell Lofft and George Henderson draw a clear picture of what at the time appeared as a disordered and confusing fashion for the sonnet. By the end of the eighteenth century, the fashion for the sonnet had become a general obsession with the form and, as Ann Wagner observes, by the time all the major Romantic poets had died the ‘renaissance of the sonnet was apparent from the sheer number of poems that appeared’.9 The further we proceed into the Romantic era, the more the sonnet takes an independent direction from the predominant Petrarchan characterization at the origins of the revival. However, when by the end of the eighteenth century the sonnet started to be considered too fashionable and feminized to be part of the major poetic production, the writing of sonnets in the legitimate form was seen as evidence of special skills. Furthermore, in using Petrarchan lyricism, Romantic poets demonstrated how they could appropriate and manipulate a long-lasting poetic tradition, thus indirectly strengthening their own authority within the contemporary literary scene. The revival of the sonnet was important not only in terms of poetic compositions, but also in terms of critical and stylistic investigation of the form. Charlotte Smith’s introduction to Elegiac Sonnets, for example, defines the sonnet following the dictates of modern sensibility, rather than anchoring it to a strict classical structure; while Anna Seward’s preface to Original Sonnets (1799) claims the importance of the author’s effort to write one hundred sonnets all respectful of the Petrarchan metrical and rhyming scheme. In the preface to the first and second edition of Elegiac Sonnets, Charlotte Smith defines the sonnet as ‘no improper vehicle for a single Sentiment’, mainly inspired by ‘very melancholy mo8 9

Petrarca: A Selection of Sonnets from Various Authors with an Introductory Dissertation of the Original Structure of the Sonnet, ed. by George Henderson (London, 1803), pp. viii-ix. Ann Wagner, A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet Form (New York: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), p. 15.

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ments’, and she supports the choice of a personal and original form by reporting the opinion of ‘very good judges’ that the legitimate structure is ‘ill calculated for our language’.10 On the other hand, Anna Seward’s emphasis on the legitimate structure of almost all the sonnets included in the 1799 edition of Original Sonnets, suggests how her poetic skills are a sign of distinction: Prais’d be the Poet, who the Sonnet’s claim, Severest of the orders that belong, Distinct and separate to the Delphic song, Shall venerate, nor its appropriate name Lawless assume. Peculiar is its frame, From him derived, who shunn’d the city throng, And warbled sweet thy rocks and streams among, Lonely Valclusa! – and that heir of fame, Our greater Milton, hath, by many a lay Form’d on that arduous model, fully shown That English verse may happily display Those strict energic measures, which alone Deserve the name of Sonnet, and convey 11 A grandeur, grace and spirit, all their own.

In this sonnet on the sonnet, the poet clearly establishes the supremacy of the legitimate form and of the poets who respect and imitate it, and are thus associated with Petrarch and Milton. Consequently, writing legitimate sonnets was a way of demonstrating how the poet’s skills were equal to those of Petrarch and Milton, and superior to those poets who opted for illegitimate sonnets, claiming the Italian form to be too difficult for the English language. The fact that Anna Seward did not have a good opinion of Smith’s sonnets is confirmed in the preface to Original Sonnets. Here, Seward rudely dismisses Smith’s conviction that ‘the regular sonnet suits not the nature of genius’, and conversely maintains that ‘this cannot be demonstrated’, therefore is ‘not worthy of attention’.12 Although they follow different traditions and claim the superiority of one over the other, it is significant that, by writing sonnets, Romantic poets, and especially women poets, ask for special recognition in the poetic production of the time. The more we proceed towards the turn of the century, the more evident becomes the need to distinguish oneself from the countless sonneteers that dominate the literary market. In her 1796 preface to the love sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon, for instance, Mary Robinson makes clear her intention to distinguish her poetry from that of the numerous sonneteers that proliferated in the last decade of the century. At the same time, however, she states that, by using the Italian sonnet and re-writing the Petrarchan tradition from her own point of view, she wants to enter this same tradition in an authoritative and original way. After explaining that ‘it must strike

The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 3. The popular idea that the sonnet was ‘not very suitable for the English language’ came from Samuel Johnson’s entry on ‘Sonnets’ in A Dictionary of English Language (London, 1775). 11 Anna Seward, Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased from Horace (London: printed for G. Sael, 1799), p. 3. 12 Anna Seward, Original Sonnets, p. 3. 10

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every admirer of poetic compositions, that the modern sonnet, concluding with two lines, winding up the sentiment of the whole, confines the poet’s fancy, and frequently occasions an abrupt termination’, she claims that for the purpose of writing a sonnet sequence the legitimate sonnet helps to form ‘in the whole a complete and connected story’.13 Thus Robinson communicates to her readers that her sonnets are clearly different from, and superior to, those produced by ‘the variety of authors who have written sonnets’, among whom ‘few deserve notice’. By differentiating her work from the fashionable production of sonnets by ‘school-boy and romantic scribbler’, who think ‘a sonnet a task of little difficulty’, Robinson overtly aligns her poetry with the major sonneteers, among whom are Petrarch and Milton: Sensible to the extreme difficulty I shall have to encounter in offering the world a little wreath, gathered in that path, which, even the best poets have thought it dangerous to tread; and knowing that the English language is, of all others, the least congenial to such undertaking […] I only point out the track where more able pens may follow with success; and where the most classical beauties may be adopted, and drawn forth with 14 peculiar advantage.

Seward’s and Robinson’s definition of the Petrarchan sonnet as the most challenging but also the most successful form shows their ambition as emergent women poets to enter a poetic tradition historically dominated by male authors. The ‘sonnet’s claim’ thus becomes an attempt at self-canonization, and an opportunity to exploit a long-lasting lyric tradition in order to gain respectability and success. The predominance of women sonneteers in the Romantic revival of the form became increasingly evident. In fact, by the end of the eighteenth century the phenomenon was commonly associated with the rise of women poets. And the connection between the revival of the sonnet and women poets was obvious, for example, to Coleridge. Although he produced very few sonnets during his career, he played an important role in the sonnet revival in terms of critical contributions to the debate about the most suitable structure of the sonnet.15 In his preface to Bowles’ Fourteen Sonnets (1789), Coleridge clearly states his preference for the modern form of the sonnet, and shows a certain dislike for Petrarch’s model in which he ‘cannot discover either sense, nature, or poetic fancy’, but only ‘cold glitter of heavy conceits and metaphorical abstractions’.16 Although he acknowledges Petrarch’s importance for the development of the sonnet, Coleridge quickly dismisses the Italian rhyme scheme as being the consequence of ‘the defeat of a foreign language’, and he praises the ‘excellencies’ of the English language, which allows for the construction of a more variegated rhyme pattern.17 Coleridge recognizes in Bowles and Smith the two sonneteers who

Mary Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. by Judith Pascoe (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 144. Mary Robinson, Selected Poems, p. 146. See Daniel Robinson, ‘“Works Without Hope”: Anxiety and Embarrassment in Coleridge’s Sonnets’, Studies in Romanticism, 39 (2000), p. 81. Besides the Preface to William Bowles’ Fourteen Sonnets, Coleridge published in 1796 a pamphlet entitled ‘Sonnets from Various Authors’ in which he discusses the importance both of Smith and Bowles’ contributions. 16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Preface’ to William Bowles’ Fourteen Sonnets, Written Chiefly on Picturesque Spots During a Tour (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991), p. 1. 17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Preface’, p. 2. 13 14 15

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most successfully express the new sensibility. However, Coleridge’s participation in the female-dominated sonnet revival became a source of embarrassment by the time he completed his Biographia Literaria in 1817. By then, Smith’s authority had been entirely replaced by Bowles’s style of poetry, which Coleridge defines as ‘so tender’, but also ‘so manly’.18 In 1817, then, the importance of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets had been completely dismissed in favour of the more masculine poetic authority of the Oxford-educated clergyman. As this analysis has revealed, Petrarch was commonly considered as the most authoritative voice in the Romantic revival of the sonnet. The Canzoniere was often imitated and translated with the purpose of anchoring the production of modern sonnets to a tradition so historically fundamental for the development of modern European lyricism. However, Petrarch’s collection of sonnets was not only important in terms of the establishment of an aesthetic definition of the form, but also because of its crucial position in the evolution of love poetry. The Romantics’ use of the Petrarchan tradition was often deliberately intended to strengthen their authorial positions and poetic subjectivity.

The Della Cruscans and the Use of the Petrarchan Tradition The phenomenon of the revival of the sonnet took place in the cultural environment known as the Age of Sensibility. The transformations in culture and society made possible the proliferation not only of the sonnet as a poetic expression of sensibility, but also of love and erotic poetry, both inherently connected with the Petrarchan tradition. As Jacqueline Labbe and Stuart Curran have demonstrated, the popularization of romance as a literary genre is linked to the renewed interest in romance literature and to the fashionable reintroduction of chivalry and the language of courtly love in poetry.19 The publication of poems that reelaborate and re-vision the Petrarchan imagery and the system of Renaissance courtly love increased in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It is interesting to note how both revivals – that of the sonnet and that of romance – find their origins in the Petrarchan tradition and its Italian background. Stuart Curran points out that the ‘etymological root of Romanticism […] is romance’, and argues that ‘the term by which we retrospectively define the period simply honours the primacy of romance in British poetry during this epoch’.20 However, the Romantic-period interest in romance is deeply rooted and supported by the interest in Italian narrative and lyric poetry, in which Petrarch and the sonnet play a fundamental role. The best-selling poetry of the Della Cruscans, in particular, was constructed upon the revival of interest in Romance literature and the courtly-love tradition and, at the same time, it made conspicuous use of Petrarchan imagery and the sonnet form. Significantly, the poetry of the Della Cruscans is exemplary of the connection between the revival of the sonnet, the renewed interest in Petrarch and the Italian cultural and literary background. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Life and Opinions, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), I, p. 14. 19 See Jacqueline Labbe, The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence, and the Uses of Romance, 1760-1830 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000), and Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism. 20 Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, p. 129. 18

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The Della Cruscan circle was obviously related to the Italian environment, since it was created in Italy in the summer 1785 when Robert Merry, Hester Piozzi, and William Parsons found themselves in Florence idly enjoying the ‘Italian sunshine’.21 Although the name Della Crusca had a political connotation, since it was meant to commemorate the suppression of the liberal Accademia della Crusca by Duke Leopold of Tuscany in 1783, thus symbolizing the opposition of the poets to the repressive Tuscan government of their day, the main subject of their poetry was love. Their first collection, The Florence Miscellany (1785), was intended as an instance of literature of leisure ‘to while away an afternoon’, and contained also some poems by Italian authors and translations, among which were some of Petrarch’s sonnets.22 The volume was imported into England at Robert Merry’s return in 1787, and continued to develop in an epistolary form in The British Album between 1788 and 1794.23 In England, the Della Cruscans’ poetry assumed a strong erotic connotation and acquired notoriety. Other poets joined the original Italian group, among whom were Edward Jerningham, Samuel Rogers, Hannah Cowley and, later, Mary Robinson. Although Brian Moloney observes that nothing specifically Italian characterizes the Della Cruscans’ poetry, except a ‘tenuous connection with the Petrarch-Laura situation’, the Italianness of the movement was evident to contemporary readers and to the members themselves.24 The Florence Miscellany is the result, in Piozzi’s words, of a ‘reciprocation of confidential friendship and mutual esteem’ between British and Italian authors, among whom Ippolito Pindemonte, Lorenzo Pignotti, Angelo d’Elci, and Giuseppe Parini.25 Piozzi also presents the work to the public as a mere collection of occasional verses written while enjoying the Southern and warm Italian weather: Why we wrote the verses may be easily explain’d, we wrote them to divert ourselves, and to say kind things about each other; we collected them that our reciprocal expressions of kindness should not be lost, and we 26 printed them because we had no reason to be ashamed of our mutual partiality.

In spite of Piozzi’s effort to demystify the work, The Florence Miscellany was enthusiastically received by Italian critics, who tended to emphasize the importance of the AngloItalian collaboration. In Novelle Letterarie (1785), for example, Marco Lastri, an Italian member of the Della Cruscans, comments: Rara combinazione e gloriosa per la Nazione Inglese! Quattro Viaggiatori, o Cavalieri erranti, tra i quali una Dama, lasciato il Tamigi, s’incontrarono accidentalmente sull’Arno, dove in quell’aura stessa che rispondeva Hester Lynch Piozzi, The Florence Miscellany (Florence: G. Cam, 1785), p. 6. Hester Lynch Piozzi, The Florence Miscellany, p. 6. For details about the Italian and English activity of the Della Cruscans, see W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, The English Della Cruscans and Their Time 1783-1828 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967). 24 Brian Moloney, ‘The Della Cruscan Poets, the Florence Miscellany, and the Leopoldine Reforms’, Modern Language Review, 60 (1965), 18-57. Moloney observes how only later, in the 1790s, with the publication in England of The Laurel of Liberty, the Della Cruscans’ poetry became overtly political. Robert Merry launched a vigorous attack on Leopold of Tuscany, ‘expressing comments much more severe than usual British travellers in Italy’ (p. 48). 25 Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy and Germany, 2 vols (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1789), I, p. 275. 26 Hester Lynch Piozzi, ‘Preface’ to The Florence Miscellany. 21 22 23

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Silvia Bordoni un tempo alle voci armoniche di Dante e del Petrarca, risponde alle loro, essendo tutti e quattro Poeti. Sono i 27 loro nomi, Madama Piozzi, ed i Cavalieri Bertie Greatheed, Roberto Merry, Guglielmo Parson.

The passage clearly presents the Della Cruscans’ production in terms of Anglo-Italian collaboration. By emphasising words such as ‘dama’ and ‘cavaliere’, however, Lastri seems to characterize the Della Cruscans’ activity as reminiscent of the system of courtly love.28 The connection is made even more explicit by the creation of an imaginary poetic dialogue between the English Della Cruscans’ and the two most famous Italian poets: Dante and Petrarch. As a matter of fact, The Florence Miscellany is marked by the influence of Italian literature, both in terms of stylistic constructions and thematic choices. Following Jerome McGann’s opinion, the ‘entire movement took the meridian graciousness of Italy as a point of departure’, and its production enters the eighteenth-century tradition of sentimentality which Sterne initiated and first linked to Italy.29 In a way, the Della Cruscans’ production is the first real eighteenth-century English engagement with Italian poetry, anticipating the later experimentations with Italian improvisation so popular in British poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is an important connection, especially if we bear in mind that poets such as Byron and Shelley were quite familiar with the Della Cruscans’ poetry. In particular, the association with the Italian tradition of extemporaneous verse puts Della Cruscan activity at the source of British authors’ fascination with this poetic form. It is not by chance that Hannah Cowley, herself a Della Cruscan poet, repeatedly defines their verse as spontaneous and improvisational, due mainly to the speed of their compositions.30 To put it another way, the Della Cruscans’ poetry is at the origin of the popularization of Italian improvisation so dear to nineteenthcentury writers, while their use of the Petrarchan tradition as the principal means of expression connects two among the most important elements of influence of Italian literature and culture on British Romanticism. The fact that the Della Cruscan poets were consciously following the examples of Dante’s dolce stil novo and Petrarch’s model was evident in their later publications, especially in The British Album (1790). The basic assumption common to these poetic productions is a heterosexual erotic exchange. As with Petrarch, the Della Cruscans use the sonnet as the most suitable form for love poetry; at the same time, their use of purely imaginative symbols is strongly evocative of the Petrarchan language of love. For example, the emphasis on sensuous experience and bodily activity in Della Cruscan poetry is based on the same mechanism of bodily response to external stimuli, of social relations, and psychological interaction that may be found in Petrarch’s Canzoniere. The destabilization of the love experience is the main topic of the Della Cruscans’ poetry. The use of symbolism and imagery is very similar to the Petrarchan language of love, only more overtly eroticized. An imporMarco Lastri, Novelle Letterarie (Florence: Stamperia Bontucciana, 1785), pp. 673-76. Though these titles were still commonly used in spoken Italian in the eighteenth century, the recurrent use that Lastri makes of words such as ‘dama’ and ‘cavaliere’ in a short paragraph could be evocative of Renaissance courtly manners. 29 Jerome McGann, ‘The Literary World of the English Della Cruscans’, in Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990, ed. by Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 95-122. 30 See The World for 22 December 1787. 27 28

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tant difference between Petrarch’s Canzoniere and The British Album, however, lies in the fact that women in Della Cruscan poetry appear as agents of poetry, thus creating a dialectic that is absent in the Petrarchan tradition. This implies that, under the influence of the new culture of sensibility, erotic formalities appealed to both men and women. Actually, several of the conventions established by the Della Cruscans were suitable for women, such as the possibility of anonymity and the focus on the affections and emotions. Hester Piozzi makes explicit the importance of the Della Cruscan movement for women poets: This fashion makes well for us Women however, as Learning no longer forms any part of the Entertainment expected from Poetry – Ladies have therefore as good Chance as People regularly bred to Science in Times 31 when fire-eyed Fancy is said to be only requisite of Popular Poet.

Here Piozzi argues that, by positing poetry as a means of entertainment and not simply a vehicle for learned people and intellectual debate, the Della Cruscans make poetry, and the sonnet in particular, more accessible to women writers and readers, who were traditionally excluded from masculine ‘Learning’. This is a crucial point that elevates the Della Cruscans’ poetry to the rank of one of the first Romantic literary manifestations that equals male and female poets. Revisioning the position of women in that Petrarchan tradition of which it makes use, Della Cruscan poetry imagines female roles that are very different from the idea of an angelic woman found in Petrarch’s poetry. In Della Cruscan verse, women are not only able to write poetry and respond to their admirers, they also hold a very different position in men’s sonnets, being transformed from unattainable and spiritual creatures into earthly and sensuous beings. Therefore, the Petrarchan language of love typical of the sonnet is converted into an eroticized poetry. Here is, for example, the sonnet ‘Melissa’ that Benedict writes to her pen-lover in order to establish and reinforce their romance:32 Her dark-brown tresses negligently flow In curls luxuriant, to her bending waist; Her dark brows, in perfect order placid, Guard her bright eyes, that mildly beam below. The Roman elegance her nose displays – Her cheeks – soft blushing, emulate the rose, Her witching smiles, the orient pearls disclose: And o’er her lips, the dew of Hybla strays Her lib’ral mind, the gentler virtues own; Her chasten’d wit, instructive lore impart; Her lovely breast is soft compassion’s throne, And honours temple is her glowing heart. But I, like Patriarch Moses, praises and blesses 33 The Canaan which I never shall possess.

Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Piozzi) 1776-1809, ed. by Katharine Balderston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 790. 32 Edward Jerningham contributed to The British Album under the pseudonym of ‘Benedict’. 33 The British Album, II (London: John Bell, 1790), p. 34. 31

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The language of this sonnet is clearly artificial; yet, it is also self-consciously erotic and reminds the reader of the intensity of courtly passion. Interestingly, this sonnet could be read as a sort of parody of Petrarch’s rare physical descriptions of Laura. In sonnets 75 and 133 of the Canzoniere, for example, Petrarch describes Laura’s eyes as a source of love, compassion and sweetness, and in sonnet 90, one of the few where Laura’s body is evoked, Petrarch describes her ‘loose and curly hair’, her ‘gleaming eyes’, and her ‘lovely face’ which inspire pity and sympathy: Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi, che’n mille dolci nodi gli avolgea; e’ l vago lume oltre misura ardea di quei begli occhi, ch’or ne son sì scarsi; e’ l viso di pietosi color farsi, non so se vero o falso, mi parea: i’ che l’ésca amorosa al petto avea, qual meraviglia se di subito arsi? Non era l’andar suo cosa mortale; ma d’angelica forma; e le parole suonavan altro che pur voce umana: uno spirto celeste, un vivo sole fu quel ch’i vidi; e se non fosse or tale, 34 piaga per allentar d’arco non sana.

Benedict’s sonnet transforms Laura’s angelic beauty into the exotic and sensuous beauty of Melissa. Benedict changes the chastened body of Laura into an eroticized object of desire. Though some courtly-love conventions are still present, such as the comparison between Melissa’s cheeks and a rose or the praise of her liberal mind and chastened wit, these same conventions are directed to emphasize the sensuousness and eroticism of her body. The sonnet is actually an imaginary picture of a woman’s physical form, and very little is left to the imagination of the reader. The angelic appearance of Laura has apparently nothing to do with the sensuality of Melissa’s body, her exotic darkness, and her ‘witchery smiles’. And, in Benedict’s sequence of sonnets to Melissa, Laura’s eyes, the primary source of Petrarch’s love, are converted into the more sensuous and erotic ‘balmy and rosy lips’ as the most attractive part of a woman’s face. In Della Cruscan imagery the female body clearly undergoes a process of erotic intensification, so that the poetic tradition of the Italian dolce stil novo is deprived of its chastity and prudery, typical of a time when Christianity was central to both culture and society. In the sonnet entitled ‘Melissa’s retirement’, the intention is still parodic, although even more evocative of Petrarchan language and imagery: Ah me! Why heaves my breast with frequent sighs? What chills my heart with such unusual fear? Why steal the tears, unbidden, from my eyes? Why sink my wearied spirits in despair? The fatal cause, alas! I know too well!

34

Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere (Rimini: Gulliver, 1995), p. 118.

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Far from my arms you, cruel you mean to go: Hence, hence my unvailing sorrows flow: But, – can I live to hear you say ‘farewell!’ Yes, I shall live, to grief a wretched prey – For, when your presence cheers the calm retreat, My moans the widow’d dove will oft repeat, And ev’ry gale will sighs of mine convey! Then go! – But think of him who, sad, – forlorn – 35 Here pines and sickens for your dear return!

Sonnet 273 of the Canzoniere describes Petrarch’s painful and dramatic separation from Laura after her death: Che fai? Che pensi? Che pur dietro guardi? Nel tempo, che tornar non pote ormai? Anima sconsolata, che pur vai giungendo legne al foco ove tu ardi? Le soavi parole e i dolci sguardi ch’ad un ad un descritti e depinti hai son levati da terra; et è, ben sai, qui ricercarli, intempestivo, è tardi. Deh, non rinovellar quel che n’ancide; non seguir più pensar vago, fallace, ma saldo e certo, ch’a buon fin ne guide. Cerchiamo ‘l ciel, se qui nulla ne piace; ché mal per noi quella beltà si vide, 36 se viva e morta ne devea tor pace.

The language Benedict uses for his unwanted farewell to Melissa is more passionate and extreme, but the experience of destabilization is similar for both speakers. The loss of mental and sentimental stability is the first instinctive reaction of the lover on parting from the object of his attraction. Hyperbolic language characterizes both sonnets, with the difference that in Petrarch the emphasis lies on a spiritual level, whereas in Benedict corporeality is the predominant dimension. The erotic mechanism is, in fact, very similar. In the poetry of the Della Cruscans, as in Petrarch’s, love is continually deferred, since each sonnet contains an outburst of desire which is entirely consummated in the shape and space of the sonnet itself. The fourteen lines of the poem represent the only bodily dimension of the romance. By using the Petrarchan tradition as a standpoint for a new modern poetry of sensibility, the Della Cruscans seek to validate their own poetic achievements. Having highlighted the connection between the Della Cruscans, the Italian poetic tradition, and the increasing visibility of women poets, it is important to stress how William Gifford, one of the most ardent opponents of this new wave of poetry, uses these three elements to invigorate his critique. A careful reading of The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795), in which he describes what he saw as ‘the vacuousness’ of Della Cruscan poetry,

35 36

The British Album, II, p. 51. Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, p. 287.

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shows the role that both gender and Italy play in it.37 Although The Baviad is principally an aesthetic critique of the Della Cruscans, here Gifford associates the success of this type of verse with the feminization of poetry, a process he clearly finds disturbing. Interestingly, he connects this feminization of poetry to the Italian origins of the Della Cruscans’ poetic sensibility. In his introduction, Gifford defines the success of Della Cruscan poetry as an ‘epidemic malady spreading from fool to fool’. However, it soon becomes clear that this epidemic malady is an ‘infection’ coming from the South, particularly from Italy: The first cargo of poetry arrived from Florence […] and was given to the public through the medium of this favourite paper [The World]. There was a specious brilliancy in these exotics which dazzled the native grubs, who had scarce ever ventured beyond a sheep, and a crook, and a rose-tree grove, with an ostentatious display of ‘blue skies’, and ‘crashing torrents’, and ‘petrifying suns’ […] From admiration to imitation is but a step. Honest Yenda tried his hand at a descriptive ode, and succeeded beyond his hopes; Anna Matilda followed […] The fever turned to frenzy: Laura Maria, Carlos, Orlando, Adelaide, and a thousand nameless names 38 caught the infection; and from one end of the kingdom to the other, all was nonsense and Della Crusca.

In Gifford’s words, Della Crusca, as initiator of the movement, caught this ‘infectious disease’ in Italy and brought it to England. However, even after its contamination of the body of national letters it did not lose its foreignness, as all the participants took on exotic names. When we come to the poetic text of The Baviad itself, Gifford makes clear that women have an important responsibility in the creation and spreading of this new poetry, especially in the person of Piozzi and her ‘bluestocking’d friends’ (ll. 45-46). When Gifford complains of ‘a specious brilliancy in these exotics, which dazzled the native grubs’, therefore, he clearly suggests the idea of an exotic feminized poetry which colonizes a stronger – more masculine – native strain. In other words, Della Cruscan poetry is criticized for being feminine and Italian at the same time, thus overtly confirming a connection between the revival of the Italian lyric tradition and the progressive feminization of British poetry.

Mary Robinson and the Petrarchan Tradition Mary Robinson’s interest in the Petrarchan tradition originates in her participation in Della Cruscans verse competitions and exchanges. She joined the poetic correspondence of the Della Cruscans in 1788, when her literary career was only at the beginning, with the fictional name of Laura Maria. She replaced Anna Matilda (Hannah Cowley) in the position of Della Crusca’s (Robert Merry) pen-lover, after the young Merry had finally met Cowley and found her an oldish and unattractive lady. He then refused to dedicate any more erotic poems to her and transferred his attention to the young and beautiful Mary Robinson. By choosing the name Laura, Robinson anticipates her interest in the Petrarchan tradition and, most importantly, reveals her intention to enter it from an unusual point of view, that of the silent and unassertive Laura. Robinson’s interest in Petrarchan lyricism and love poetry For a detailed analysis of Gifford’s The Baviad, see Michael Gamer, ‘“Bell’s Poetics”: The Baviad, the Della Cruscans, and the Book of The World’, in The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period, ed. by Steven E. Jones (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 31-54. 38 William Gifford, The Baviad and Maeviad (London: William Cobbett, 1798), pp. xi-xii. 37

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characterizes the largest part of her poetic production. She translated and imitated some of Petrarch’s sonnets, and composed poems inspired by the relationship between Petrarch and Laura. Her use of Petrarch, like the Della Cruscans’, helped her to enter an established poetic tradition and strengthen her identity as an emergent poet. Moreover, by translating and imitating Petrarch, Mary Robinson entered a field, that of love and erotic poetry, commonly considered inaccessible to women, with the intent of rewriting and adapting a long-lived tradition to her own perspectives. Thus, in her long poem ‘Petrarch to Laura’ (1790), Mary Robinson’s use of Petrarch’s lyric voice enables her to write love poetry and, at the same time, to rewrite the story of Petrarch and Laura from her own point of view. Interestingly, she successfully adapts the story of Petrarch to a modern sensibility, and presents the Italian poet as a sort of passionate and unhappy Romantic hero, a fourteenth-century Manfred: Ye silent haunts, ye dark embow’ring shades, Lone shaggy wilds and melancholy glades; Ye mountains black’ning o’er the thorny vale; Ye lucid lakes that trembling meet the gale; Ye gloomy avenues of dire despair, Dear last asylums of long-cherishe’d care; Eternal solitude! Where LOVE retires To bathe his wounds, and quench his fatal fires; Where frantic, lost, forlorn, and sad I go A wand’ring pilgrim in a maze of woe; Oh! To your deepest caverns let me fly, 39 Breathe a fond pray’r, and ‘MIDST YOUR HORRORS DIE’.

Mary Robinson informs the reader that this long poem is supposed to have been written during Petrarch’s retirement at Vaucluse, a short time before Laura’s death. Petrarch’s recurrent retreats in the countryside near Avignon in order to restore his mind and his feelings through a close contact with nature, far away from the source of his distress, is one of the most appealing aspects of Petrarch’s life to eighteenth-century readers. As the above passage suggests, Petrarch’s approach to the natural landscape is transformed into a protoByronic search for solitude and forgetfulness in sublime settings. Similarly, Petrarch’s recurrent invocation of death as a liberation from the sorrows of love is another relevant connection between the fourteenth-century poet and the prototype of the Romantic hero. The focus on Petrarch’s love for Laura as the central feature in the poet’s life helps women to enter the Petrarchan lyric tradition and appropriate and elaborate a language of feelings traditionally connected with the feminine. As Isobel Armstrong observes, a typical feature of eighteenth-century women’s poetry is its ability to create and mediate feminine subjectivity by a transformation of traditional genres and poetic language.40 From this perspective, Petrarch’s sonnets display the poetic subjectivity of a distressed lover that women can easily exploit in order to create their own lyric voices. By appropriating and elaborating an estab39

40

Mary Robinson, Poems 1791 (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994), pp. 46-51. Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon 1730-1820, ed. by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. viii.

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lished poetic tradition, women are able to enter the Romantic poetic landscape in successful and original ways. The issue of adaptation and imitation of the Petrarchan tradition, however, becomes particularly complex for women poets. As Mary Moore remarks, ‘even when men and women use exactly the same words, they are not speaking from the same position and hence they are not really saying the same thing at all’.41 The fact that, by using Petrarchan themes, women are actually exploiting a poetic tradition in order to express their own feelings and desires, otherwise suppressed by cultural assumptions on feminine propriety, is an important aspect of their sonnet writing. As a consequence, while approaching women’s translations and adaptations of Petrarch, the reader should keep in mind that a certain revisionary perspective strongly connotes the rewritten poem. Let us consider, for example, the following passage from Mary Robinson’s ‘Petrarch to Laura’: Fix’d to the earth with trembling zeal I gaz’d. Each passion waken’d, and each sense amaz’d! Involuntary sighs, too soon confess’d The struggling tumults lab’ring in my breast; No thought sublime on my rapt feelings hung, No sacred eloquence unchain’d my tongue; ALL, ALL WAS LOVE! While thro’ my burning brain Rush’d a fierce torrent of convulsive pain; From my dim eyes celestial radiance stole, While howling demons grasp’d my sinking soul, Guilt’s writhing scorpions twining round my heart, Enflam’d each wound, and heighten’d every smart; In vain I sought Religion’s calm domain, And at her footstool pour’d my hopeless pain; The priestess frowning on my impious pray’r, 42 Check’d the bold suit, and hurl’d me to despair.

This is one of the most dramatic passages of the poem, in which the complexity of the speaker and the power of the passions are displayed in all their effectiveness. A first interpretation of these lines suggests that Mary Robinson is rewriting (and adapting) the confusion of feelings and the destabilization of mind proper to Petrarch’s condition as unreciprocated lover. However, if we read the passage from the perspective of gender, its meaning presents deeper implications. First of all, what emerges is that the female author is using a language of passions and eroticism commonly condemned as inappropriate for an eighteenth-century lady, and thus she dares tread upon an unusual, if not unconventional, field for women poets. But, more importantly, Mary Robinson is implying that women’s approach to the experience of love and eroticism is similar to men’s, thus universalizing a lyric tradition that was conventionally seen as distinctively masculine. The subjectivity of the speaker, in this case a male speaker created by a female author, shows a complexity and subtlety which demonstrate how women can successfully reproduce the destabilizing exMary Moore, Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Carbondale: Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 12. 42 Mary Robinson, Poems 1791, p. 50. 41

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perience of love in their poetry. The fact that Mary Robinson’s poem is neither a translation nor an imitation of Petrarch’s verse, but an original composition which simply takes inspiration from Petrarch, stresses the author’s ability to enter a literary field, that of love poetry, traditionally confined to male authorship. As Mary Moore observes, ‘since culture limited women’s subjectivity and agency’, women’s attempt at rewriting the Petrarchan tradition ‘explores subjectivity but also names and shows the cultural process by which subjectivity has been undermined’.43 Women’s poetic subjects, therefore, write from a different standpoint, even when they simply appropriate a male experience, since their method of writing implies a revision of traditional gender roles and cultural stereotypes. In conclusion, the connection between the Romantic revival of the sonnet and Petrarch is an important one. The renewed interest in the Petrarchan tradition is a fundamental element in the diffusion of the sonnet in late eighteenth-century British literature. The popular poetry of the Della Cruscans is an important example of how the Petrarchan tradition is assimilated and adapted to a modern sensibility, thus enabling emergent poets to anchor their productions to an established literary tradition. In particular, women’s conspicuous contribution to the revival of the sonnet and Petrarchan themes becomes central to the development of women’s poetic subjectivity and authorship. Women’s use of the Petrarchan tradition, as Mary Robinson demonstrates, implies an important process of appropriation, integration, and renewal of a time-honoured poetic tradition which, for centuries, had marginalized and excluded women writers.

43

Mary Moore, Desiring Voices, p. 12.

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Luca Manini (Università di Parma)

Charlotte Smith and the Voice of Petrarch

Charlotte Smith was one of the first poets who retranslated Petrarch into English, after the blooming of the Petrarchan sonnet sequences in the Renaissance period. Four of her Elegiac Sonnets are translations from Petrarch (Canzoniere 145, 90, 279, and 301, rendered as Elegiac Sonnets 13-16). She translates Petrarch’s sonnets in a free way, transforming them into a micro-text within the macro-text of her sequence, where she concentrates the love-story between Petrarch and Laura, subtly humanizing the latter and evoking a requited feeling of love on her part. After her death, Laura appears to Petrarch to tell him that she is waiting for him in Heaven, thus giving a precise goal to his wandering as an exile on earth. This precise goal, by contrast, is missing in Smith’s Sonnets where, by contrast, she presents herself as a wanderer, a pilgrim, and an exile looking for a path that constantly eludes her. If Petrarch addresses Laura as a consoler, Smith addresses a series of female entities (Poesy, the Muse, Fancy, the moon, nature), but unlike Laura, none of these can offer either shelter or relief to the poetic subject. Smith’s thematic distance from Petrarch is reflected in the form she chose for her sonnets – not the Italian form as employed by Milton, but the English form, with which, however, she often experiments, showing her intention to define a specifically female poetic voice. Nonetheless, she cannot totally avoid the burden of a literary tradition which has been the domain of male poets, so that, in her poetic world, the only entity that can give her the oblivion she longs for is Death, which, in her sonnets, is a male personification.

The epigraph to Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets is taken from the final stanza of a poem by Petrarch.1 Four of the ninety-two Elegiac Sonnets are translations from Petrarch. If the epigraph suggests the overall tone of the sonnet sequence, which is one of disconsolate melancholy, the four sonnets make up a sort of micro-text inside the macro-text of the sequence: it is a micro-text with features of its own, which, in the way Charlotte Smith has devised it, establishes with the other sonnets a relationship of complementarity and opposition, in the sign of a contiguity and continuity which becomes willing difference and gap. This micro-canzoniere is to be read alongside the other micro-text contained in the Elegiac Sonnets, that is the five sonnets inspired by Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (sonnets 21 to 25). The epigraph is the envoi of the Petrarchan canzone ‘Che debb’io far? che mi consigli, Amore?’ (Canzoniere 268): Non t’appressar ove sia riso e canto Canzone mio, nò, ma pianto: Non fa per te di star con gente allegra 2 Vedova sconsolata, in vesta nigra. 1 2

The epigraph was added to the second volume of the 1797 edition. Charlotte Smith deletes the first line of the stanza, which actually reads ‘Fuggi ’l sereno e ’l verde, / non t’appressare ove sia riso o canto, / canzon mia no, ma pianto: / non fa per te di star fra gente allegra, / vedova sconsolata in veste negra’. (‘Flee the serene air and the green, do not approach where there is laughing and

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These lines reinforce the title of the sonnet sequence and prepare the reader for the elegiac tone of Charlotte Smith’s poems, the vein of sadness which flows through them and informs them. What is to be stressed is the hint at weeping and tears, one of the constant motifs of the collection; the invitation to flee the company of merry people, a theme that Charlotte Smith, like Petrarch, expands so as to include in it ‘a desire […] to turn away from the social scene’ and ‘to be removed from all that is mundane’3 in order to find shelter in solitude;4 the adjective ‘disconsolate’, which she inflects in endless synonimic variations, and the noun ‘widow’,5 which suggests the idea of a loss which is beyond the reach of compensation; and finally, the colour ‘black’ which, in many nuances, is ubiquitous in the Elegiac Sonnets. An examination of the rest of Petrarch’s canzone reveals further motifs Charlotte Smith transfers into her sonnets, articulating and varying them: the absence of any reason for joy in a man’s life (caused in Petrarch by Laura’s death) and the wish for death,6 which is seen as the state that will put a definite end to the torments of life – themes which appear, in a set of extreme tones, in the Werther sequence as well.7 Elegiac Sonnets 13 to 16 are translations ‘From Petrarch’.8 They are sonnets 145 (‘Ponmi ove ’l sole occide i fiori e l’erba’), 90 (‘Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi’), 279 (‘Se lamentar augelli, o verdi fronde’) and 301 (‘Valle che de’ lamenti miei se’ piena’), the former two from the first part of the Canzoniere, which is traditionally called ‘In vita di Madonna Laura’, the latter two from the second part of it, known as ‘In morte di Madonna Laura’.

3

4 5 6 7

8

singing, you are not a song but a complaint; it is not for you to be among merry people, you disconsolate widow dressed in black’). Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. by Mario Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), p. 1068. These lines are taken from a canzone, and not a sonnet, as wrongly indicated in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Stuart Curran (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 1. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are mine. For English translations of Petrarch see, Mark Musa’s versions in Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Anthony Mortimer’s Petrarch, Canzoniere (London: Penguin, 2002). All subsequent quotations from Petrarch’s Canzoniere are taken from Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. by Mario Santagata, and all quotations from Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets are The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Stuart Curran, and will be indicated by the number of the sonnet in brackets. Sarah M. Zimmerman, ‘Doest thou know my voice? Charlotte Smith and the Lyric’s Audience’, in Romanticism and Women Poets, ed. by Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), pp. 109 and 112. See for instance Canzoniere 129 (‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’) and 259 (‘Cercato ò sempre solitaria vita’). Some editors read the word as an adjective: ‘vedova, sconsolata, in veste negra’. Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. by Ugo Dotti (Milan: Donzelli, 1996), p. 723. See Canzoniere 300 (‘Quanta invidia io ti porto, avara terra’, 324 (‘Amor, quando fioria / mia spene’), and 333 (‘Ite, rime dolenti, al duro sasso’). On the voice of Werther, see Jeffrey C. Robinson, ‘Werter’, in Romantic Presences (Berrytown: Station Hill Literary Editions, 1995), pp. 144-46, and Adela Pinch, ‘Sentimentality and Experience in Charlotte Smith’s Sonnets’, in Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 61-62. Charlotte Smith probably learnt Italian in her school years in Kensington. See Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (New York: Palgrave, 1999), pp. 13-14.

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Charlotte Smith translates freely, operating on Petrarch’s poems by addition and subtraction, substituting both on the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes: she modifies, refashions, and recreates Petrarch’s verse, and is fundamentally faithful to his sense and meaning, but also shows herself willing to introduce elements which respond to her own poetical discourse, thus creating a close-knit network of verbal echoes. On the one hand, she pervades her own sonnets with Petrarchan echoes, on the other, she introduces features of her own into Petrarch’s verse, ‘modernizing’ and ‘romanticizing’ him. Petrarch’s sonnet 145 is constructed on a series of oppositions (heat/cold; east/west; good luck/bad luck; youth/old age; sky/earth/abyss; life/death) which lead to the final lines, where the meaning of the poem is revealed: in whatever state or condition Pertrach will be, he will continue loving Laura: ‘sarò qual fui, vivrò com’io son visso, / continüando il mio sospir trilustre’.9 This set of oppositions, which had appealed to Petrarch’s early translators (Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey rendered this poem as ‘Set me whereas the sonne doth perche the grene’), is greatly simplified by Charlotte Smith. In sonnet 13 she uses (and this is the only occurrence in the Elegiac Sonnets) nine-syllable lines instead of iambic pentameters, eliminating most of the Petrarchan contrasts and amplifying the semantic field of ‘burning’ just hinted at by Petrarch. She transforms ‘il sole’ into ‘burning noon’, and she expands l. 8 (‘[Ponmi] a la matura etate od a l’acerba’), into two lines: ‘Let youth’s warm tide my veins inflame, / Or sixty winters chill my blood’ (ll. 7-8). The continuity of love, which in Petrarch also represents a continuity of lament, becomes with Charlotte Smith a declaration of the absolute faithfulness of love, and she expresses it in three lines, not in two, and her rendition is totally different from the original text: ‘My heart, O Laura, still is thine. / Whate’er my destiny will be, / That faithful heart still burns for thee!’ (ll. 12-14). Line 12 is not to be found in Petrarch, and neither is the adjective ‘faithful’, which Charlotte Smith introduces in line 14, a line in which she clearly associates the semantic field of burning with the sentiment of love. In line 11 she sets the opposition (not in Petrarch) ‘Prisoner or free’, which she had probably derived from Surrey, who, in the same place, translates ‘Thrall, or at large’.10 In the context of the Elegiac Sonnets, this contrast takes on a particular significance, as the author, for instance in sonnet 3, depicts herself as a prisoner who longs for freedom. Similarly, Petrarch’s l. 11, ‘libero spirto, od a’ suoi membri affisso’ is rendered by Smith as ‘Tho’ my fond soul to heaven were flown, / Or tho’ on earth ’tis doom’d to pine’ (ll. 9-10). Being ‘doomed to pine’ is indeed typical of the life condition Smith attributes to herself in her sonnets. The image of burning for love appears once more in Elegiac Sonnets 14, based on Canzoniere 90. Charlotte Smith preserves the Petrarchan line ‘qual meraviglia se di subito arsi?’ (l. 8), translating it as ‘What wonder then those beauteous tints should move, / Should fire this heart, this tender heart of mine!’ (ll. 7-8), but, significantly, she eliminates the tone of doubt which Petrarch uses in ll. 5-6 (‘e ’l viso di pietosi color farsi, / non so se vero o falso, mi parea’) to introduce a sense of certitude of love on the part of Laura: ‘Was I deceived? – Ah! surely, nymph divine! / That fine suffusion on thy cheeks was love’ (ll. 56). Similarly, Petrarch’s lines ‘e ’l vago lume oltre misura ardea / di quei begli occhi, ch’or 9 10

‘I will be the way I was, I will live the way I lived, / continuing my fifteen-year-long moaning’. See Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies (London: Dent, 1992), p. 88.

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ne son sì scarsi’ (ll. 3-4) become in Smith more determined and less vague ‘And tho’ averted now, her charming eyes / Then with warm love, and melting pity beam’d’ (ll. 3-4). Petrarch’s last line, ‘Piaga per allentar d’arco non sana’, is expressed by Charlotte Smith in two: ‘Nor cure for me in time or change be found: / The shaft extracted does not cure the wound!’ (ll. 13-14). This is an instance of Smith’s assimilation of Petrarch’s condition to her own: as she writes in sonnet 8, she addresses spring and its ability ‘Of Sorrow’s rankling shaft to cure the wound’ (l. 10), and in sonnet 90 she writes about her ‘cureless woes’ (l. 4). In this sonnet Laura is a ‘nymph divine’, a ‘goddess’,11 and in the two following sonnets, an ‘angel form’, ll. 7 and 12). Indeed, ‘angelica forma’ is a typically Petrarchan phrase, found in Canzoniere 90, but not in Canzoniere 279 and 301. Another significant modification occurs in the translation of Canzoniere 279, for, in Elegiac Sonnets 15, Charlotte Smith accentuates Laura’s consoling function.12 In his sonnet Petrarch narrates how Laura appears to him in a vision, inviting him not to bewail her, as, with her death, she has become immortal: ‘Di me non pianger tu, ché miei dì fersi, / morendo, eterni, et ne l’interno lume, / quando mostrai de chiuder gli occhi apersi’ (ll. 12-14).13 In the first version of this sonnet, Smith translated: ‘Ah! wherefore should you mourn, that her you love, / Snatched from a world of woe, survives in bliss above!’.14 She then modified these last two lines, and concluded her sonnet differently, adding a line which is not in Petrarch: ‘Ah! yield not thus to culpable despair, / But raise thine eyes to Heaven – and think I wait thee there!’ (ll. 1314). This rendition emphasizes not the immortal essence of Laura’s soul, but the fact that Laura, very humanly, is waiting for her ‘sad lover’ in heaven. In this fashion, Charlotte Smith merges into this poem themes that Petrarch deals with in other sonnets of his Canzoniere, for instance, sonnets 275, 302, and 346.15 In Sonnet 301 Petrarch tells of his unceasing and inevitable return to the places where he used to see Laura, and remarks how changeless they are, while his spirit has undergone such dramatic changes: ‘ben riconosco in voi le usate forme, / non, lasso, in me, che da sì lieta 11

See Canzoniere 281, l. 9: ‘Or in forma di nimpha o d’altra diva’ (‘Now in the shape of a nymph or another goddess’).

12

See Canzoniere 282, ll. 1-2: ‘Alma felice che sovente torni / a consolar le mie notti dolenti’ (‘O happy soul who often do come back / to console my mournful nights’), and 283, ll. 9-10: ‘Ben torna a consolar tanto dolore / madonna, ove Pietà la riconduce’ (‘My Lady returns to console my grief / there where Pity leads her’).

13

‘Weep not for me, know that my days were made/in death eternal; when I closed my eyes, / towards the inner light they opened wide’ (trans. by Anthony Mortimer, in Petrarch, Canzoniere).

14

This version can be read in Romantic Women Poets, ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 79.

15

See Canzoniere 275, ll. 1-3: ‘Occhi miei, oscurato è ’l nostro sole; / anzi è salito al cielo, et ivi splende: / ivi il vedremo anchora, ivi n’attende’ (‘My eyes, our sun is darkened; / Nay, to Heaven it has gone, and there it shines; / There we will see it again, there it is waiting for us’); 302, ll. 5-6: ‘Per man mi prese, et disse: – In questa spera / sarai anchor meco, se ’l desir non erra’ (‘She took my hand and said: “If hope can guide, / You will again be with me in this sphere”’) and ll. 9-10: ‘Mio ben non cape in intelletto humano: / te solo aspetto [...]’ (‘No human mind can understand my bliss: / You I await [...]’, trans. by Anthony Mortimer, in Petrarch, Canzoniere]; and 346, ll. 11-12: ‘et parte ad or ad or si volge a tergo, / mirando s’io la seguo, et par ch’aspetti’ (‘and often, turning back, she seems to wait / So that to heaven I raise all hope and thought’, transl. by Anthony Mortimer, in Petrarch, Canzoniere).

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vita / son fatto albergo d’infinita doglia’ (ll. 9-11).16 Charlotte Smith preserves this motif, but romantically humanizes the places, calling them ‘witnesses of love’ and ‘conscious scenes’, and, while maintaining Petrarch’s basic concepts, she once more stresses his faithfulness in love, adding lines which are not in Petrarch: ‘For ye beheld my infant passion rise, / And saw thro’ years unchanged my faithful flame’ (ll. 5-6). Again, she repeats the adjective ‘faithful’, which is not in Petrarch, and highlights the theme of burning for love. Smith translates Petrarch’s last three lines – ‘Quinci vedea ’l mio bene; et per queste orme / torno a vedere ond’al ciel nuda è gita, / lasciando in terra la sua bella spoglia’ (ll. 12-13)17 – by stressing, with Gothic overtones,18 the sense of loss, yet another basic motif of her Elegiac Sonnets: ‘To Heaven she’s fled! and nought to me remains / But the pale ashes which her urn contains’ (ll. 13-14). Charlotte Smith ideally closes this Italian micro-canzoniere with the translation of a cantata by Metastasio, ‘Il nome’, reduced from the original thirty-nine lines to the form of a sonnet. The poetic voice is that of a lover who carves his beloved’s and his own initials on a tree, but while Metastasio expresses the hope that, by this carving, his lady will be faithful to him, Charlotte turns this sentiment of hope into a certainty of faithfulness and happiness. Let us compare Metastasio’s initial stanza with Smith’s beginning: Scrivo in te l’amato nome Di colei per cui mi moro, Caro al sol, felice alloro, Come Amor l’impresse in me. Qual tu serbi ogni tua fronda, Serbi Clori a me costanza: Ma non sia la mia speranza 19 Infeconda al par di te.

Smith translates: ‘On thy grey bark, in witness of my flame, / I carve Miranda’s cypher – Beauteous tree!’ (ll. 1-2). Once more she employs the image of the flame of love (not in Metastasio) and eliminates any suggestion of the sorrows which may be caused by the woman. The carving on the tree makes it sacred to love (thus Smith makes explicit what Metastasio leaves implicit), and this tree will be a place of tranquillity and peace, a shelter against the world, a place where ‘the nightingale shall build her nest’ (l. 14) – which renders Metastasio’s last lines: ‘E Filomena sol / Vi faccia il nido’. Let us remember the idea of shelter and the figure of the nightingale, as they will be of some importance in the context of the Elegiac Sonnets. ‘I recognize the usual shape in you, / Not in myself who had once a happy life, / And now have been turned into a home of endless sorrow’. 17 ‘I saw my love from here; and along this track / I return to see the place from where she went, naked, to heaven, / Leaving her beautiful spoil on earth’. 18 For the Gothic quality of Smith’s verse, see Stella Brooks, ‘The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, in Critical Survey, 4 (1992), pp. 13-14, and on her connections with the Graveyard poets, see Adela Pinch, ‘Sentimentality and Experience in Charlotte Smith’s Sonnets’, pp. 58-59. 19 Pietro Metastasio, Tutte le opere, ed. by Bruno Brunelli (Milan: Mondadori, 1947), p. 720 (‘I write on you the beloved name / Of her which makes me die, / O happy laurel dear to heaven, / As Love wrote it on me. / As you keep all your foliage, / So may Clori be faithful to me: / And may my hope be / Less unfruitful than you’). 16

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What Charlotte Smith constructs in this micro-sequence is a story of eternal love. Petrarch’s absolute faithfulness to Laura is in the foreground, and Smith humanizes this love, suggesting a correspondence of feeling on the part of Laura, and eliminating any reference to Petrarch’s ‘sospir trilustre’ (his fifteen-year-long moaning), caused by Laura’s rejection of his courtship. The fact that Laura is waiting for him in heaven gives Petrarch’s life a precise and definite goal, while his wandering as an exile on earth,20 as Laura’s disconsolate widower, becomes meaningful thanks to the certainty of his final destination. This idea of a goal and hope in the afterlife is not to be found in Charlotte Smith’s canzoniere, whose sonnets ‘reflect on the experience of being lost, without a goal’.21 Its space is ‘earth-bound’,22 and the few moments of vertical ascent are immediately thwarted. More than once she presents herself as a pilgrim, a wanderer, and an exile.23 She aptly constructs an image of herself as a ‘[p]oor wearied pilgrim’ (4) who, like ‘the wretched pilgrims of the earth’ (27), wanders24 and strays ‘alone and pensive’ (4)25 and ‘with heart oppressed’ (52); already ‘shipwreck’d by the storms of Fate’ (12), she is like the unhappy exile who, on an ‘unfriendly isle’ (43), vainly awaits the ship that can take him back home. Like the ‘wanderers of the earth’ (35), she is lost in ‘pathless forests’ (75) looking for a way which still remains ‘unknown’ (75). She is waiting for a guiding light which does not appear and, if it does, is an illusive one which misleads her even more, as it is for the light of Happiness defined as a ‘false fleeting meteor’ (35), or for the ‘dubious ray’ sent by ‘wavering Reason’ (86). And she is doomed to roam along what she describes as a ‘rugged path’ (1), ‘my painful path of pointed thorn’ (6) and ‘gloomy paths of Sorrow’s cypress shade’ (29). None of these paths will lead the poetic subject to a ‘happy home’ (62). Her life is and will be a ‘long evening’ (28), a ‘long darkling way’ (86), a ‘mournful path approaching to the tomb’ (48). The subject of Smith’s sonnet sequence thus becomes the companion of Werther who, in sonnet 21, states: ‘[I] Pursue the path that leads me to the grave!’. But while Werther’s suffering is caused by love, the reasons for the sorrows which oppress Smith’s largely autobiographical subject are just hinted at in her sonnets. She wanted her contemporaries to grasp echoes of her situation in life – her unhappy marriage, her separation from her husband, the endless legal suit deriving from her father-in-law’s will, her being left alone to take care of her numerous children, her struggle to maintain 20 21 22 23

24 25

See Canzoniere 285, l. 5. Phillis Levin, Introduction to The Penguin Book of Sonnets (London: Penguin, 2001), p. lxii. Judith Pascoe, ‘Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith’, in Re-Visioning Romanticism, ed. by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 193. As Stuart Curran puts it, ‘The constant theme of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets is of rootless exile’. ‘The “I” Altered’, in Romantic Writings, ed. Stephen Bygrave (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 290). See also Lilla Maria Crisafulli, ‘Within or Without? Problemi di prospettiva in Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld e Dorothy Wordsworth’, in Le poetesse romantiche inglesi, ed. by L. M. Crisafulli and Cecilia Pietropoli (Rome: Carocci, 2002), pp. 48-51. See sonnets 62, l.1 (‘While thus I wander, cheerless and unblest’) and 66, l.12 (‘Alone I wander’). See Canzoniere 35: ‘Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi / vo mesurando a passi tardi e lenti’ (‘Alone and deep in thought I measure out / The most deserted fields, with slow dark steps’, transl. by Mark Musa, in Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works; ‘Alone in thought, through the deserted fields / I wander with a slow and measured pace’, trans. by Anthony Mortimer, in Petrarch, Canzoniere).

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them with her job as a novelist and poet – all things which the author overtly discusses in the prefaces to the 1792 and 1797 editions of Elegiac Sonnets.26 Her voice is loud, harsh, and straightforward in these prefaces, while uttering a precise and lucid denunciation of a society which denied basic rights to women. In her sonnets, however, she creates a female poetic persona who, according to the conventions of the age, lives in a state of hopeless sorrow, bound up with a hopeless sense of loss. As she writes in sonnet 90, she is ‘robbed of all that gave my soul delight’, and her ‘embosomed grief’ (39) derives from lack of freedom, separation, and untrue friendship.27 What looms large over this desolate scene is the sense of ‘the loss of past happiness’,28 the death of all illusions, the illusions she had entertained in her youth and which have been shattered by adulthood. In short, her suffering is caused by the passage from a state of innocence to a state of experience:29 […] So the schemes Rais'd by fond Hope in youth's unclouded morn, While sanguine youth enjoys delusive dreams, Experience withers; […] (85, ll. 10-13)

As tides corrode rocks, so cares corrode the human spirit.30 And Charlotte Smith’s persona, ‘crush’d to earth’ (84), invokes death as the only possible form of release. The same situation is to be found in Werther’s sonnets: ‘Why should I wish to hold in this low sphere [?]’ (25). While, for Petrarch, death marks the beginning of a higher form of life together with Laura, the death that Charlotte and Werther poetically invoke as a liberating experience actually amounts to nothingness, self-annihilation, and a form of utter forgetfulness. What is important to remark at this point is that, as some recent critics have convincingly shown, Smith’s autobiographism is to be read as an extremely conscious self-construction and self-presentation. In this fashion, she constructs a poetic persona whose voice partly resembles her own, and partly recalls that of a fictitious character responding to socially acceptable modes and literary clichés.31 The thematic difference stated above corresponds to a formal difference. After nearly two centuries, Charlotte Smith was one of the first poets who retranslated Petrarch into 26

27 28 29 30 31

They can be read in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, pp. 4-12. Stella Brooks connects her sorrows to ‘the difficulties of female existence’ (‘The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, p. 15). Daniel Robinson states that one ‘might assume that the source of Smith’s grief in Elegiac Sonnets is unhappy love, but she rarely gives more than a hint’ (‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet Claim’, in European Romantic Review, 6 [1996], p. 117). Adela Pinch analyzes Smith’s practice of quotation and stresses ‘the literariness of her melancholy’ (‘Sentimentality and Experience in Charlotte Smith’s Sonnets’, p. 66). See also Deborah Kennedy, ‘Thorns and Roses: The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, Women’s Writing, 2 (1995), pp. 43-44, Sarah M. Zimmerman, ‘Doest thou know my voice?’, 116-121, and Judith Hawley, ‘Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains’, in Women’s Poetry of the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, ed. by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), 184-98. See sonnets 3, 52, and 53. Adela Pinch, ‘Sentimentality and Experience in Charlotte Smith’s Sonnets’, p. 58. See sonnets 27, 47, and 58. See sonnets 2 and 66. See Jacqueline M. Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003).

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English.32 In doing so, she ‘deliberately avoid[ed] the Italian form’ and ‘opt[ed] for a form more typically English in style’,33 thus distancing herself from the last great English sonneteer, John Milton, who had reproduced the original Italian form.34 Her choice aroused the wrath of Anna Seward, who defended the form of the ‘legitimate’ sonnet with Italian origins, as can be seen in her sonnet ‘To Mr Henry Cary, on the Publication of his Sonnets’, a poem in which Seward celebrates the metrical rules of sonnets as fixed by Petrarch and followed by Milton.35 The same view is shared by Mary Robinson, whose sequence Sappho and Phaon (1796) bears the subtitle ‘In a series of Legitimate Sonnets’. In the preface to her collection, Robinson defends her own choice by appealing to the example of Milton and the rules dictated by the Italian sonneteers.36 With this collection of forty-four poems Mary Robinson gave new life to love sonnet sequences, even as she introduced an important change of perspective. In her compositions, the voice of the poetic persona becomes the voice of a woman, Sappho in fact, who is no longer a mute or semi-mute (but even the words spoken by women were written by male poets) object of love and desire, but rather a persona who actively loves and desires, and voices her desires to a male object of love, whose turn it is now to be mute.37 Mary Robinson’s sonnet sequence is in a closed form, like Petrarch’s Canzoniere or Spenser’s Amoretti. The Elegiac Sonnets are, on the contrary, an open canzoniere which could develop ad infinitum, as shown by the continual additions to the collection, from the sixteen sonnets of the first edition of 1784 to the ninety-two of the last (the ninth) of 1800.38 While Petrarch’s poetic I undergoes, in the course of his Canzoniere, a profound inner evolution, the self of Charlotte Smith’s persona is immobile, self-reproducing, and selfrepeating from sonnet to sonnet, ‘held in a moment of perpetual sorrow’39 and ‘in a continual present of suffering’.40 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40

See Mario Praz, ‘Petrarca in Inghilterra’, in Machiavelli in Inghilterra e altri saggi (Florence: Sansoni, 1962), pp. 273-74. Daniel Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet’, p. 106. Smith wrote some sonnets according to the Italian model but she usually mixes it freely with the English form. It can be read in The Penguin Book of Sonnets, p. 85. Her opinion is reflected in the largest anthology of sonnets published in England in the nineteenth century, edited by Capel Lofft, the title of which reads Laura, or An Anthology of Sonnets (on the Petrarchan model) and Elegiac Quatorzaines (1814), where the word ‘quatorzaines’ negates the legitimacy to call sonnets the English poems which only have the number of lines in common with the Italian sonnets. See Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 37. See Romantic Women Poets, pp. 184-87. On the debate on the sonnet, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, pp. 29-229, Daniel Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet’, pp. 98-127, Brent Raycroft, ‘From Charlotte Smith to Nehemiah Higginbottom: Revising the Genealogy of the Early Romantic Sonnet’, European Romantic Review, 9 (1998), 363-92, and Jane Stabler, Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 135-47. A detailed account of the editorial story of the Elegiac Sonnets is in Carrol L. Fry, Charlotte Smith (New York: Twayne, 1996), pp. 16-30. Sarah M. Zimmerman, ‘Doest thou know my voice?’, p. 113. Judith Hawley, ‘Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets’, p. 195.

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Petrarch is led to a gradual detachment from earthly love towards divine love thanks to Laura’s function as an instrument of purification and salvation.41 Such a figure, capable of exerting a beneficial and saving influence, is not in the Elegiac Sonnets, and neither is the figure of a guide, or simply that of an interlocutor. Charlotte Smith presents herself as a lonely woman, ‘a solitary speaker lost in a private sorrow’,42 and a ‘perpetual slave to despondency’.43 In Sonnet 3 she represents herself as a nightingale that, according to the myth of Philomela hinted at in Sonnet 1, is a female one.44 In a note Charlotte Smith states that she took inspiration for this poem from a sonnet by Petrarch (Canzoniere 311: ‘Quel rosignuol, che sì soave piagne’), but her rendition of it is utterly personal, independent of the quoted source. Hearing the sorrowful singing of the nightingale, Petrarch remembers his own sad destiny and once more, after Laura’s death, becomes aware of the vanity of all mortal things; Charlotte Smith asks herself what the origin of the nightingale’s sorrow may be and, calling the bird ‘songstress sad’, she identifies herself with the nightingale, and with her she shares the condition of those who ‘sigh and sing at liberty’. The Elegiac Sonnets stage a continual complaint about the sadness of living, accompanied by a search for relief. Yet if, for Petrarch, relief could come from Laura, his sweet nymph, his ‘cara duce’ or ‘dear guide’ (Canzoniere 357, l. 2), Charlotte Smith addresses a series of entities, both concrete and abstract, which can grasp her sorrow and help her find shelter from the evils that torment her. Thus she addresses a series of figures which she transforms into feminine entities by making them nymphs and goddesses. And so she speaks to ‘fair Poesy’ (36) and to the Muse, who has been ‘partial’ (1) to her and who is as ‘pensive’ (7) and ‘mournful’ (26) as she is. She speaks to the Moon, the ‘Queen of the silver bow’ (4), the ‘Night’s regent’ (59), the ‘soft Evening’s Queen’ (80), whose ‘mild and placid light’ can shed calm upon her ‘troubled breast’ (4). Far away, untouched by the conflicts of the ‘troubled earth’, secluded in her ‘calm pavilion’ and in her ‘placid elevation’ (59), the moon appears to Charlotte Smith as the place where the unhappy of the earth can eventually find peace and rest, taking shelter in her ‘benignant sphere’, in her ‘world serene’ (4) and ‘silent reign’ (80). She addresses ‘kind fancy’ (65), who can, with her ‘fairy fingers’ (63), weave ‘visionary garlands’ (65) and ‘schemes of bliss’ (63) to veil the horrors of the world. She appeals to ‘tranquil nature’ (40), a nurse (31 and 79) who can give her shelter in her ‘hills belov’d’ (5) and ‘copses wild’ (54), in the ‘season of delight’ which is spring with her ‘balmy air’ (8) and her ‘green lap’ (54). Especially touching is Smith’s invocation to the Goddess of 41

On Petrarch’s mutatio animi, see Roberto Antonelli, ‘Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta di Francesco Petrarca’, in Letteratura italiana: Le opere, ed. by Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), pp. 413-30, Mario Santagata, I frammenti dell'anima: storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), pp. 192-252, Marco Ariani, Petrarca (Rome: Salerno, 1999), pp. 220-48, and Roberto Fedi, Francesco Petrarca (Milan: Mursia, 2002), pp. 121-38.

42

Sarah M. Zimmerman, ‘Doest thou know my voice?’, p. 107.

43

Adela Pinch, ‘Sentimentality and Experience in Charlotte Smith’s Sonnets’, p. 56.

44

See Stella Brooks, ‘The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, p. 17 and Deborah Kennedy, ‘Thorns and Roses: The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, p.45.

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Botany,45 the ‘sweet Nymph’ which can offer her rest amidst her ‘silent shades of soothing hue’ (79). And she invokes forgetfulness, also ‘feminised’46 as the ‘Sister of Chaos and eternal Night’, the only cure possible for her ‘cureless woes’, to whom Charlotte asks to accept her into her ‘silent reign’ (90). These gendered entities, however, become figures for a ‘failure of consolation’,47 as one by one, unlike Laura, they show their illusory quality and their ‘inadequacy’48 in giving the poet an actual and lasting relief. Hope, whom Charlotte Smith also addresses by calling her ‘soother sweet of human woes’ and ‘sweet nymph’, an ‘Enchantress’ who can ‘charm my cares to rest’ (6), turns out to be an ‘illusive’ (77) ‘Syren’ (42), a ‘flatterer’ who ‘flies, and will not hear’ (6) and who leaves the poetic subject disillusioned and once more alone with her torments. The Muse is ‘delusive’ (1), as is the light which comes from her (84), and she is not able to cancel Charlotte’s ‘ills’ (1) or ‘heal an heart like mine that bleeds’ (84). Similarly, Fancy is a ‘delusive’ (43) ‘Queen of Shadows’ (47) who, even if she can make the world seem lovelier, cannot sustain the fictitious beauty created by her ‘false medium’ (47) and is forced to stop drawing with her pencil when reality becomes too strong.49 In her icy distance, the moon is indifferent to the evils of the world, and cannot give actual consolation.50 She is as indifferent as nature, whose elements are ‘deaf’ and ‘cold’ (39), and so it is vain for human beings to seek a friendly ear in them. Neither can the river Arun, more than once sung by Smith, give her the ‘Lethean cup’ (5) she wishes for in order to forget her unhappiness. And if the cycle of seasons is uninterrupted, and every winter is followed by a new spring giving new life to nature,51 this is not the case, Smith reflects, for unhappy men and women: ‘Ah! why has happiness – no second Spring?’ (2).52 Appropriately, the one feminized entity whom Smith addresses and does not show herself to be helpless is Fortitude, defined in Sonnet 35 as a ‘Nymph of the rock’. This nymph cannot give her serenity or happiness or rest, she can just teach her how vain all human hopes and cares are, how frail human happiness is. Above all, Fortitude can teach her how to bear life and how to die. Fortitude fails to save Werther, who commits suicide; for Petrarch, fortitude means faith in God and Laura’s purifying strength;53 in Charlotte Smith’s collection, fortitude is the human strength which keeps her poetic subject alive and prevents her from killing herself. And this is what the author did in her actual life, as she 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53

This poem is analyzed in detail in Judith Hawley’s ‘Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains’, pp. 191-94. Deborah Kennedy, ‘Thorns and Roses: The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, p. 46. Brent Raycroft, ‘From Charlotte Smith to Nehemiah Higginbottom’, p. 376. Stella Brooks, ‘The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, p. 15. See sonnets 36, l. 11, and 48, l. 6: ‘Imagination has lost her powers’. See sonnets 59 and 80. See sonnets 42, 53, 55, and 78. See Canzoniere 310: ‘Zephiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena’ (‘Zephir comes back and brings with him fair weather’, trans. by Mark Musa, in Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works). This sonnet was translated more than once during the Renaissance: see Jack D’Amico, Petrarch in England (Ravenna: Longo, 1975), pp. 172-80. See, for instance, Canzoniere 290, 305, 347, 351, and 362.

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kept on struggling against an adverse destiny until her death. And yet, in her sonnets, her poetic persona longs to be dead. To be dead is, indeed, the ultimate relief, her final rest, the utter forgetfulness of all her cares. Over and over again does she express her envy towards the dead who, in their dreamless sleep, have left the sorrows of living behind.54 Death is defined by Smith as the ‘tranquil shore, / Where the pale spectre Care pursues no more’ (36); it is the state of perfect oblivion (5), the condition where she will at last be free from all forms of suffering, since death means dropping vain hopes and forgetting the anguish which has been hers in life.55 The spouse of death will be tranquillity, the ‘beauteous sister of the halcyon peace’ (41). In the Elegiac Sonnets, following the English linguistic and poetic tradition, death is personified as a male being: ‘And Death [shall] receive me to his long repose’ (54). After having sought help from female entities and having searched for an empathetic communion with nature – both in her calm and stormy manifestations, as storms are in sympathy with Smith’s feelings56 – help in extremis comes to her from a male entity, as death will cancel her sorrows by taking her persona to self-annihilation. If, for Petrarch, death means reaching a heavenly sphere of immortality, for Charlotte Smith, as for Werther, death is nothingness. And if, for Petrarch, Madonna Laura is the guiding light to heaven, for Charlotte Smith all female beings turn out to be powerless. The power of giving her what she longs for is in the hands of a male entity. On the one hand, Charlotte Smith protests ‘her refusal to be an enfeebled victim’,57 her own strength as a woman, capable of bearing up the torments of life. She thus makes her poetic persona invoke death but, unlike Werther in Sonnet 25, ‘never quite contemplates the act of suicide’.58 By writing sonnets, she claims her own place in a poetical field which had been ‘the domain of male poets’.59 She translates Petrarch but, at the same time, rewrites and recreates him, and, by experimenting with new rhyme schemes, shows how independent she wants to be of both the Italian and the English traditions. On the other hand, however, she is forced to admit the limits of her freedom as a woman writer, who must come to terms with the burden of a literary tradition dominated by men, and does so, poetically, by accepting the tradition of seeing death as a male entity. If Petrarch was crowned with a laurel garland on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, in Sonnet 19 Charlotte Smith bestows this laurel garland on another male poet, William Hayley. For herself, by contrast, Charlotte describes a garland made of ‘wild flowers’ (1), simple flowers picked from fields which are doomed to fade, a garland made of ‘buds so brief’ (19).60 Her garland is evidently a transient one, as if made of the colours of the rainbow, and harsh reality will make it wilt and fade away:

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

See sonnets 44 and 49. See sonnets 4 and 41. See sonnets 12, 66, 67 and 87. Deborah Kennedy, ‘Thorns and Roses: The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, p. 45. Brent Raycroft, ‘From Charlotte Smith to Nehemiah Higgingbottom’, p. 376. Daniel Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet’, p. 103. See Deborah Kennedy, ‘Thorns and Roses: The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’, pp. 49-51.

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The young and visionary poet leaves Life's dull realities, while sevenfold wreaths Of rainbow-light around his head revolve. Ah, soon at Sorrow's touch the radiant dreams dissolve! (77, ll. 11-14)

Edoardo Zuccato (IULM)

Writing Petrarch’s Biography: From Susanna Dobson (1775) to Alexander Fraser Tytler (1810)

Petrarch’s poetry played a major role in the revival of the sonnet in late eighteenth-century British literature. Enthusiasm for his poetry was preceded and fostered by an interest in his life, and the most important biography was Susanna Dobson’s The Life of Petrarch. Collected from Memoires pour la vie de Petrarch (1775), an abridged translation of the Abbé de Sade’s monumental Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque (1764). These works transformed the love-story of Petrarch and Laura into a potentially adulterous relationship. The most direct riposte to Sade and Dobson came from Alexander Fraser Tytler who, in 1784, published an Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch to refute their view of Petrarch and Laura. In 1810 he brought out a second, expanded version of his essay, which included the former pamphlet as part I of the book. This essay offers a reconstruction of this controversy and an assessment of the moral implications of Dobson’s and Sade’s ‘Petrarch’ to open up new insights into the Romantic-period debate on the sonnet and, especially, its lively and often harsh tones.

It is well known that Petrarch’s poetry played a relevant role in the revival of the sonnet that took place in Britain in the late eighteenth century. As poetry was never a merely technical enterprise, especially in an age when art and life were often intertwined, British attention to Petrarch was not confined to his verse. In fact, an interest in the poet’s life preceded and fostered the enthusiasm for his poetry, which is autobiographical and lends itself ideally to a mixed interest of this type. If we look at chronology, the date that marks the real beginning of the eighteenthcentury British revival of interest in Petrarch is 1775, the year of publication of The Life of Petrarch. Collected from Memoires pour la vie de Petrarch. It is a biography in two bulky volumes that Susanna Dobson abridged and translated from the most important biography of Petrarch of the time, the Abbé de Sade’s Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque (Amsterdam, 1764).1 The main aim of Sade’s monumental study (three huge quarto volumes) was to correct some biographical conjectures that had long been taken as facts in Petrarch criticism. In particular, he did his best to find out the real identity of Laura and the main events of her life. Sade argued that she was a Laura de Noves who married an ancestor

1

Dobson’s translation was published by Buckland, London, 1775. The complete title of Sade’s work is Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque, tirés de ses œuvres et des auteurs contemporains; Avec des Notes ou Dissertations, et les Pièces justificatives, 3 vols (Amsterdam: Arskée et Mercus, 1764), which appeared without the author’s name.

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of his, Hugues de Sade, bore him eleven children, and died of the Black Death in 1348.2 The views he wanted to refute were that she was a member of the Sade family, as some French scholars believed, or a Laura de Cabriers born at Avignon in 1314 and unmarried, a view introduced by Alessandro Vellutello in the sixteenth century.3 As a result, one of the archetypal love-stories of Western literature was rendered uncomfortable by Sade’s study, which met considerable critical opposition for some time after its publication. Such an alarmed response owed much to the fact that, as Sade emphasized, Petrarch was commonly regarded as a poet for women or for the effeminate men who spent time with them.4 As with Dante, Petrarch decided to write in the vernacular because he wanted to be understood by women too, and he always remained their favourite poet.5 Although these explicit sentences were omitted by Dobson, it was undeniable that her English edition contained many points of extreme interest for women. She accepted Sade’s main theses and reproduced most of the biographical events contained in his essay. The tone of her edition, however, belonged to another intellectual climate.6 Sade believed that love-stories were monotonous; moreover, Petrarch’s Canzoniere was a melancholy tale which the French generally disliked.7 It was probably for that reason that he gave little space to the in morte poems of the Canzoniere.8 Significantly, these statements were not included by Dobson, who, on the contrary, affirmed in the first pages of her edition that only a mind as profound as those of Petrarch and Laura can understand and justify them. Petrarch will be cherished only by ‘susceptible and feeling minds’ – in other words, Dobson made Petrarch and Laura heroes of sensibility.9 In the conclusion to her translation, where she expressed her opinions openly, she argued that Petrarch ‘was a prey to the keenest sensibility’ in his youth and early maturity. Thereafter he failed to recover peace. His story was a great lesson for everybody, because it showed the wonderful power of love, which was not something vain that ought to be avoided.10 Her last paragraph solemnly affirms: ‘Those Readers who have been interested in the fortune of Petrarch, will pity his fate, admire his sublime and exalted genius, and revere his humble piety, which their candour, penetration and sensibility will draw out to life from this faint and imperfect representation’.11 Evidence and documents are contained mainly in the Appendix to vol. I of Sade’s Mémoires. Laura’s identity remains an open question today. See the two major twentieth-century biographies of Petrarch, Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Vita del Petrarca e La formazione del ‘Canzoniere’, ed. by Remo Ceserani (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964, repr. 1985; orig. edns, Life of Petrarch, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961; The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e di Letteratura, 1951), p. 23, and Ugo Dotti, Vita di Petrarca (Bari: Laterza, 1987), p. 53. 3 Mémoires, I, pp. 127-28. 4 ‘Aux François amateurs de la poésie e des belles-lettres’, Mémoires, I, pp. xcvii-xcviii. 5 Mémoires, I, pp. 81 and 86. 6 According to Dobson, it was ‘clearly proved’ (a phrase not in Sade) that Laura was married. Sade was right; it was the other scholars who fictionalised Petrarch’s life (The Life of Petrarch, I, pp. 39-40). Dobson also mentioned Laura’s will and contract of marriage, which were preserved in the house of Sade (The Life of Petrarch, I, pp. xxvi-xxvii). 7 Mémoires, I, pp. cxii-xiii. 8 Mémoires, III, pp. 609-12. 9 The Life of Petrarch, I, pp. xxii-xxiii, which are a sort of paraphrase of Sade’s Mémoires, I, pp. xcvii-xcviii. 10 The Life of Petrarch, II, p. 559. 11 The Life of Petrarch, II, p. 560. 2

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Dobson believed that Petrarch’s private character was the most interesting part of his life. She concentrated on it and left out many erudite details of the French original.12 Her Petrarch was a lover and a poet more than a scholar and a politician. However, despite her perspective and despite the fact that she reproduced the essential points of the original, she toned down Sade’s statements and made several additions to render the protagonists of the story more respectable. After all, if Sade was right, theirs was an adulterous relationship, however noble and dignified. In her introduction Dobson stated that, even though Petrarch and Laura were not guilty of anything, she was a married woman, and therefore their behaviour could not be wholly justified.13 It was presumably for this reason that, despite her sincere admiration for Petrarch’s poetry, Dobson did not subscribe to Sade’s view that the great advantage of Petrarch over the classical love poets was that even a virgin could read him without blushing.14 However, Dobson’s reservations may well be merely inevitable, preliminary lip-service paid to the mentality of her cultural context, since the story she told with enthusiasm pointed to a very different direction. What is the image of the protagonists that Sade and Dobson created for their readers? As a young man, Petrarch was very handsome, impulsive, and sometimes even violent. At that time he had some illicit affairs, of which he repented later in life.15 On the contrary, Laura looked extremely delicate and beautiful, and was naturally elegant in her behaviour.16 Sade pointed out how Petrarch’s initial shyness was gradually replaced by outbursts of passion that alarmed Laura, who ran away and left him in despair. Dobson translated most of the French text in this section, but toned down the intensity of Petrarch’s passion, adding that ‘he behaved with tenderness and esteem, and she enjoyed at ease the pleasures of his conversation’.17 As Sade and Dobson described it, the relationship between Petrarch and Laura was an extenuating sequence of meaningful smiles and severe frowning, vague hope and bitter The Life of Petrarch, I, p. xix. The Life of Petrarch, I, pp. xx-xxi. Sade pointed out that, in comparison to the classical love poets, Petrarch has been admired mainly for the delicacy and honesty of his passion, which was of a Platonic purity. ‘Sa manière de traiter l’amour, lui donne encore un grand avantage sur les Anciens, c’est que la Vierge la plus scrupuleuse peut le lire d’un bout à l’autre sans rougir’ (The italicized phrase is by the sixteenth-century bishop of Asti, Francesco Panigarola) Mémoires, I, pp. c-ci. Analogously, Sade defended Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written in a very particular period, after the Black Death, and it needed not be censored later (Mémoires, III, pp. 609-12). He argued that it was composed to entertain the fair sex, whereas Dobson more cautiously said that it was written as a divertissement (The Life of Petrarch, II, p. 421). 15 The Life of Petrarch, I, pp. 33-34. When Dobson talked about Petrarch’s son, she did not mention the fact that he was illegitimate (pp. 386-87). This was part of her campaign to render the story morally suitable for her contemporaries. 16 The Life of Petrarch, I, pp. 36-37: ‘Her person was delicate, her eyes tender and sparkling, and her eyebrows black as ebony. Golden locks waved over her shoulders whiter than snow; and the ringlets were interwoven by the fingers of Love. Her neck was well formed, and her complexion animated by the tints of nature, which art vainly attempts to stimulate. […] Nothing was so soft as her looks, so modest as her carriage, so touching the sound of her voice. An air of gaiety and tenderness breathed around her, but so and happily tempered, as to inspire every beholder with the sentiments of virtue: for she was chaste as the spangled dew-drop of the morn’. This description, supposedly the first impression Laura made on Petrarch, is a patchwork of lines from his poems. Dobson only added the last sentence (from ‘for she was chaste’; see Mémoires, I, pp. 122-23). 17 The Life of Petrarch, I, p. 118. 12 13 14

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disappointment, expectation and dejection. Their narratives point out on several occasions how Laura was displeased with both Petrarch’s boldness when he wooed her openly, and his indifference to her when she withdrew from him. The morality of her behaviour was, of course, dubious and needed defence. Dobson affirmed that Laura’s love was constant and undivided, that is, the opposite of coquetry.18 Evidence for this could be found in an episode, when there were rumours that Petrarch was wooing another woman under Laura’s name. Laura was indignant and disappeared, an action which, in Dobson’s mind, showed her love for Petrarch.19 Unlike Sade, Dobson believed that the Middle Ages were times of great moral corruption and common debauchery.20 The ‘declining age of Chivalry’ bore ‘a strong resemblance to that of the present times’, and she hoped that especially the young would revive the pristine spirit of that age to ‘check the progress of dissipation’.21 Laura was very reserved, and though she lived in a corrupt age, she (Dobson’s addition) always put honour before life.22 However narcissistic and questionable it might appear, Laura’s behaviour was the only way she had of preserving her honour and, at the same time, keeping alive a genuine sentiment for twenty years.23 Dobson even affirmed that Petrarch and Laura would have been a happy couple if they had got married. Unfortunately, Petrarch was compelled to wander and agonize throughout his life.24 Laura’s lot was equally woeful: her married life was unhappy, her husband jealous, and her eleven childbirths quickly impaired her health and spoiled her beauty.25 In spite of the moral reservations put forward in her introduction, Dobson was at pains to highlight how true and mutual the relationship between Laura and Petrarch was, so that, for instance, she added Laura’s anxiety for Petrarch’s absence as a cause of her early physical and spiritual decay.26 If Dobson envisaged a happy married life for Petrarch and Laura, Sade was more ambiguous towards the character of their relationship. In two passages omitted in the English edition, he rejected indignantly Ercole Giovannini’s insinuation that there was an affair between Petrarch and Laura.27 At the same time, he reported Benedetto Varchi’s

18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27

The Life of Petrarch, II, p. 421. The Life of Petrarch, II, pp. 419-20. This was Dobson’s version. In fact, Sade only stated that eventually she turned up again, as he convinced her of his innocence (Mémoires, I, pp. 294-95). Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry, to which are added The Anecdotes of the Times, from the Romance Writers and Historians of those Ages, tr. from the French of Monsieur De St. Palaye, by the translator of the Life of Petrarch (London: J. Dodsley, 1784), pp. 335-36. Sade believed that in Petrarch’s time, unlike in the eighteenth century, love was an honest passion (Mémoires, I, pp. 117-18). This passage was omitted by Dobson. Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry, pp. 373-74. The Life of Petrarch, I, p. 538. The Life of Petrarch, I, p. 117. The Life of Petrarch, II, pp. 553-36. This section was entirely added by Dobson. Mémoires, I, Appendix, p. 44; The Life of Petrarch, I, p. 289. Dobson, in fact, wrote that Laura bore ten rather than eleven children (p. 534). The Life of Petrarch, I, p. 421, which corresponds, with that characteristic interpolation, to Note VI in the Appendix to vol. I of Sade’s Mémoires. On his part, Sade argued that, out of sympathy with Laura, Petrarch too aged quickly (Mémoires, II, pp. 62-63). Mémoires, II, p. 68. Giovannini published some letters as evidence for his argument. Sade was probably referring to Giovannini’s Li due petrarchisti (Venice, 1623).

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opinion that there is a mixture of sublime and gross sentiments in any kind of love, including that between Petrarch and Laura. This is what Sappho meant when she argued that Love was born from heaven and earth. Yet, Sade concluded that he could not make up his mind because he had not read enough about this topic. Was it a subtle way of agreeing without compromising himself as a clergyman? In any case, he disagreed with two other views: that Petrarch never desired Laura’s favour, and that he eventually obtained it. He believed that both were offensive to Laura.28 At the same time, Sade defended Petrarch’s poems from the unjust censure and accusations of immorality voiced by many ecclesiastic scholars.29 The poems were obviously an element of immense attraction for the readers of Dobson’s biography, all the more so as English translations from Petrarch were rare at that time. However, Dobson gave readers only a vague idea of them. In her introduction, she said she did not dare translate the sonnets. She just preserved some lines to illustrate Petrarch’s life.30 And Dobson translated Sade’s French translations, rather than Petrarch’s original poems, which are included in the French essay. Against the advice of many French scholars who argued that poetry translates better in prose than in verse, Sade translated freely and took the liberty of improving and amending the original when necessary. He left out the most obscure texts, such as some canzoni and sonnets, and suppressed some quatrains and single lines here and there.31 Sade’s taste was that of eighteenth-century French classicism and, in most cases, his versions are a sort of free paraphrase of the original.32 He disliked the ‘Metaphysical’ elements in Petrarch, such as puns, antitheses, and hyperboles, and omitted most of them. Dobson carried these forms of adaptation a step further and left out some physical details of the French versions, thus making them even more abstract than they already were. A clear example of her method is ‘Zephyr returns’, which became the most popular of Petrarch’s sonnets in Romantic Britain.33 Dobson translated Sade’s prose translation by making some typical changes.34 After the second sentence, ‘Jupiter regarde Venus avec complaisance’ was omitted probably both as neoclassical ornament and an erotic allusion; ‘les animaux recommencent à aimer’ was rendered as ‘all creatures feel his [Love’s] sovereign power’, which implies a passive rather than an active attitude; ‘the charms of beauty’ is more abstract than that of ‘les plus belles Dames’ of the French

Mémoires, III, Appendix, note 21, ‘Sur la nature de l’amour de Pétrarque’, p. 80. Mémoires, I, p. 11. This part was omitted by Dobson. The Life of Petrarch, I, p. xxix. Mémoires, I, pp. cvii-cviii. This passage was omitted by Dobson. See, for instance, Mémoires, I, pp. 178 ff., on Petrarch’s puns and sonnets on Laura/Lauro, and, at p. 182, the sonnet ‘Non Tesin’, which Sade translated or, rather, imitated in an extremely condensed version. 33 See George Watson, The English Petrarchans: A Critical Bibliography of the Canzoniere (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1967), p. 41. 34 The complete text runs as follows (The Life of Petrarch, II, p. 159): ‘Zephyr returns; he brings with him the mild season, the flowers, herbs, and grass, his dear children. Progne warbles, Philomela sighs, the heavens become serene, and the valleys smile. Love re-animates the air, the earth, and the sea: all creatures feel his sovereign power. But alas! this charming season can only renew my sighs! The melody of the birds, the splendour of the flowers, the charms of beauty, are in my eyes like the most gloomy desarts; for Laura is no more!’ Sade’s versions appears in his vol. III, p. 209. 28 29 30 31 32

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version; in the conclusion, Dobson did not specify that ‘the most gloomy desarts’ were ‘abité par des bêtes féroces’, whereas she added, ‘for Laura is no more!’. Nonetheless, Dobson could be literal in her translation, presumably in those sections she considered as crucial. One of these moments, in particular, is worthy of attention. Dealing with Petrarch’s early fame, Sade wrote that a lady called on him ‘comme un oracle’. She was Giustina Levi-Perotti and belonged to the Italian branch of the Levis, one of the noblest French families. Her father was a learned and sensible man who gave her an unusual education. ‘From her earliest years she was inspired by the Muses’ and wrote poems; however, ‘the people of the world’ teased her and advised her to ‘“cease to aspire to the poetic laurel; lay down your pen, and take up the needle and distaff”’.35 At this point, Giustina asked Petrarch’s advice in a sonnet she sent him, which Sade gave in the original in a note: Io vorrei pur drizzar queste mie piume Colà, signor, dove il desio n’invita E dopo morte rimaner’ in vita, Col chiaro di virtute inclyto lume. Ma ’l volgo inerte, che dal rio costume Vinto, ha d’ogni suo ben la via smarita, Come degna di biasmo ogn’ hor’ m’addita Ch’ir tenti d’elicona al sacro fiume. All’ago, al fuso, più ch’al lauro, o al mirto, Come che qui non sia la gloria mia, Vuol c’habbia sempre questa mente intesa. Dimmi tu hormai, che per più dritta via A parnasso t’en vai, nobile spirto, 36 Dovrò dunque lasciar sì degna impresa?

Dobson translated the French prose translation: O Thou! who by a noble flight hath arrived at the summit of Parnassus, tell me what part ought I to act? I would fain live after I am dead: and the Muses can alone give me the life I desire. Do you advise me to devote myself to them, or to resume my domestic employments, and shield myself from the censure of vulgar minds, 37 who permit not our sex to aspire after the crowns of laurel or of myrtle?

Here too Dobson simplifies the French, although she does not weaken the text’s claims.38 Petrarch’s reply to this sonnet was ‘La gola e ’l somno’, a frequently anthologized poem which, in this context, reads like a defence of women’s right to poetry, writing, and education:

Mémoires, I, pp. 189-90; The Life of Petrarch, I, pp. 69-70. The passage is italicised in Sade; Dobson translated it closely. 36 Sade relied on Filippo Tomasini’s authority about the authenticity of the sonnet and its author. Mémoires, I, p. 190. 37 The Life of Petrarch, I, p. 70. 38 She omitted ‘de bonne heure’ after ‘Parnassus’, turned ‘l’immortalité’ into ‘the life’ she desired, ‘de m’y livrer’ into ‘to devote myself to them’, and above all, left out ‘qui ne veut pas que les femmes fassent des vers’ after ‘vulgar minds’. 35

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Idleness and the pleasures of the table have banished all the virtues; the whole world is changed; we have now no light to direct our way; the man inspired by the Muses is pointed at; the vile populace who think of nothing but advancing their interest say, Of what use are crowns of laurel or myrtle? Philosophy is abandoned, and goes quite naked. O thou! whom Heaven has endued with an amiable soul, be not 39 disheartened by such advice! Follow the path you have entered, though it is but little frequented.

This, again, is a translation of Sade’s prose version with a few minor changes, the most relevant being the vaguer ‘who think of nothing but advancing their interest’ for the more specific ‘ne songe qu’à gagner de l’argent’.40 After this poem, Dobson moved on to narrate some political events, omitting a philological discussion which gives the French reader a different sense of Giustina’s sonnet. Sade specified that some Italian critics argued that Giustina’s poem was in fact written in the sixteenth century using the rhymes of Petrarch’s ‘La gola e ’l somno’. They believed no woman could have written such a good sonnet at so early a date. Even though Sade defended the sonnet against these strictures, his section does not read as boldly feminist as it does in Dobson, who omitted the philological debate completely.41 What the English text presents is a young noblewoman with a literary talent who, ridiculed by common people for her poetic interests, claims her intellectual rights and is supported by Petrarch in her battle. The impact of this section is not weakened by another, several hundreds pages later, where Sade and Dobson argue that Laura was not interested in poetry and probably received the same education as most young women of her time.42 Such a celebration of women’s rights, intellectual claims and adulterous love could not go unnoticed, especially because Dobson’s biography ran through six editions and Petrarch’s poems became more and more popular in the later eighteenth century. The most direct riposte to Sade and Dobson came from Alexander Fraser Tytler, the author of the Essay on the Principles of Translation, who in 1784 published an Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch to refute their view of Petrarch and Laura. In 1810 he brought out a

The Life of Petrarch, I, p. 71. Mémoires, I, p. 191: ‘La gourmandise & la paresse ont chassé du monde toutes les vertus. Tout est changé. Nous n’avons plus de lumiere qui nous guide. On montre au doigt un homme qui fait de vers. La vile populace qui ne songe qu’à gagner de l’argent, dit: a quoi bon couronner sa tête de myrte ou de laurier? La Philosophie est abandonnée, & va tout nue. O vous que le ciel a doué d’un esprit aimable! que ces propos ne vous rebutent pas! suivez la route que vous avez prise, quoiqu’elle soit peu fréquentée’. Sade and Dobson moved ll. 5-6 of the original (‘whom Heaven has endued with an amiable soul’) towards the end of their versions and referred the sentence more specifically to the ‘thou’ of the text. On the contrary, l. 11 has been moved near the middle (from ‘the vile populace’ to ‘interest’). 41 Mémoires, I, p. 191: ‘Mais dans le fond le Sonnet de Justine ne vaut pas mieux que celui de Petrarque; & combien de fois a-t’on vu les femmes l’emporter sur les hommes, dans toutes les opérations de l’esprit, qui ne demandent que de la finesse & de l’agrément!’ Sade argued that Petrarch wrote the sonnet using her rhymes rather than the opposite. Also, he cited other sources as evidence that Giustina was a Levi, against the arguments of some critics who found it impossible (p. 192). 42 Sade noted that Petrarch never mentioned Laura’s poems; in fact, he said that Laura ‘non curò giammai rime né versi’ (never cared for rhyme or verse). Besides, there is no Laura among the troubadours. Mémoires, II, pp. 471-72; The Life of Petrarch, I, p. 540. Sade, however, pointed out that Laura played an actively intellectual role towards Petrarch when she spurred him to cultivate his poetic talent instead of living for superficial pleasure, as he did as a young man (Mémoires, I, p. 116). 39 40

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second, expanded version of his essay, which included the former pamphlet as part I of the book.43 Tytler approached his subject through Sade’s Mémoires, which shed light on several aspects of Petrarch’s life but impaired the general esteem for his morality, ‘the most important point of his character’.44 Tytler could not believe that Laura was a married woman and, consequently, that Petrarch was a rake, almost as if she were an eighteenth-century coquette ‘sensible to the passion of her Cicisbeo’, albeit ‘without a direct breach of her matrimonial vow’.45 Although Tytler acknowledged that the view of Laura’s identity introduced by Vellutello was unfounded, the only way of restoring the older, more respectable image of Petrarch was to refute, point by point, the evidence produced by Sade.46 In particular, sections II, III, and IV of the 1810 essay, which were considerably enlarged in comparison to the 1784 edition, were devoted to confuting Sade’s argument that Laura was Laura de Noves, born at Avignon in 1307 or 1308, who married Hugh de Sade in 1325, and died in 1348. Tytler tried to demonstrate that she was neither born nor married nor buried in Avignon.47 He returned to the traditional view that Laura was a descendant of the Sade family, rather than a woman married into it.48 In this respect, he wondered how Sade could support the view that an ancestor of his was a potential adulteress. The answer was that Sade and his countrymen were ‘but very little acquainted’ with the morals Tytler was referring to. For them, coquetry and extra-marital relationships, though only potential, were acceptable.49 Laura was not insensible to Petrarch’s love: she only pretended she was indifferent. Tytler reported some passages from Sade which describe Laura as a coquette kindling Petrarch’s love with ‘doux regards’ and ‘petits mots’. He was flabbergasted that Sade could describe her as ‘une femme tendre et sage’ who kept alive Petrarch’s passion for twenty-one years, 43

44 45 46

47

48 49

The complete titles are: Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch. To which are added seven of his sonnets, translated from the Italian (London: T. Cadell, 1784) and An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch. With a Translation of a Few of His Sonnets (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne; London: John Murray, 1810). This book, dedicated to T. J. Mathias, was reprinted in 1812. Tytler stated that some Italian friends spurred him to publish it to correct some common errors in Petrarch biographies (pp. vivii). An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 4-5. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 47-48. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, p. 54, note. To refute Sade, Tytler drew especially on an influential 18th-century reprint of Castelvetro’s edition of Petrarch’s poems, Le rime del Petrarca brevemente esposte per L. Castelvetro, ed. C. Zapata de Cisneros, 2 vols (Venice: Zatta, 1756). In the Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, his confutation of Sade’s evidence for Laura’s marriage was contained in a long note at pp. 24-39. In An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch (pp. 59, 84-85, 89-94) he also discussed the conjectural discovery of Laura’s tomb in Avignon in the sixteenth century, which he believed was not hers. In addition, he believed that two other famous documents were forgeries: a sonnet found in Laura’s tomb, and a famous marginal note on Laura’s death in Petrarch’s Virgil, which contradicted many passages in Petrarch’s letters and poems. He also questioned Sade’s reading of an abbreviation in a letter where Petrarch talked of Laura’s ‘crebris partubus’ or, since the last word was abbreviated, ‘perturbationibus’ (i.e. that she was tormented by her passions, which Sade thought impossible as she was a virtuous woman; see Mémoires, I, Appendix, note II). Tytler preferred this to the former interpretation (Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 135-77). An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 119 ff. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 128-29.

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‘and all this sans faire la moindre breche à son honneur’.50 She bore eleven children and died of consumption at about forty years of age, and yet […] all the while, this hackneyed and antiquated coquette, regardless of the character of a wife and a mother, is practising her petit manege of alternate favours and rigours, to turn the head of an infatuated inamorato [sic], whose passion was in itself an affront to virtue and morality, and amuse him for a lifetime with the expectation of favours which she is determined never to grant. Such, in the system of the Abbé de Sade, is the all-accomplished Laura, and such the respectable and virtuous Petrarch. How absurd, how disgusting, how 51 contemptible the one; how weak, how culpable, how dishonourable the other!

Despite the touch of Francophobia, Tytler did not dismiss Sade’s essay as drastically as James Beattie, who called it a romance concocted for commercial purposes. However inaccurate, it was ‘a most instructive as well as a most amusing work’.52 Though Tytler found Sade’s libertine Petrarch unpalatable, he was not persuaded by the opposite view either, and thus rejected the idea that Petrarch’s love was entirely Platonic. As evidence, he quoted some passages of Petrarch where the poet seems to be longing to possess Laura physically.53 In other words, Tytler did not believe that Petrarch’s passion was merely literary and fictional.54 Rather, he seems to have been looking for a middle ground between real adultery and fiction. Tytler even wondered why the story between Laura and Petrarch did not end up in marriage, which he could not explain, even though he hinted at ‘a temporary indiscretion’ of Petrarch’s which irritated Laura.55 She was coy in order to test Petrarch’s attachment, but she also ‘gave him at times abundant testimony of a reciprocal affection’. Such favours were ‘small indeed, and unimportant expressions to insensible and vulgar minds’, but they made Petrarch temporarily happy.56 Whatever may have happened, there was no doubt that their relationship remained virtuous. Had Laura conceded herself to Petrarch, he would not have written the Canzoniere, ‘for it is not to be denied that Petrarch cherished his sorrows’, as many a sonnet shows.57 Tytler believed that Sade’s view was not only unsupported by

50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57

An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 130-33. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 134-35. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 161-63. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 206-10. One of these poems is the sestina ‘Deh or foss’ io con vago de la luna’, especially part I. The idea that Petrarch’s passion was mere fiction goes back to his friend Giacomo Colonna, who asked him whether Laura existed; Petrarch answered in a letter that Laura and his passion were all too real (Wilkins, Vita del Petrarca, p. 23). Some major scholars, probably influenced by the formalism of the mid-twentieth century, still believe that Laura is a fictional figure invented by Petrarch, among other things, to cover up his illicit affairs with the women who bore him two children. See, for instance, Giuseppe Billanovich, ‘Biografia e opere del Petrarca tra fiaba e realtà’, in L’Italia letteraria e l’Europa, vol. I: Dalle origini al Rinascimento, Atti del Convegno internazionale di Aosta 20-23 ottobre 1997, ed. by Nino Borsellino and Bruno Germano (Rome: Salerno editrice, 2001), p. 82. Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 43-44. In the 1810 essay, this section was expanded and replaced by one on the non-Platonic character of Petrarch’s love. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, p. 16. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, p. 14. Tytler cited sonnet 141, ‘Fera stella’ (‘Ill-omen’d star’), which he translated in the Appendix.

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historical evidence but, also, that it went against the grain of the love expressed in Petrarch’s sonnets. The enthusiasm Tytler put into his argument was due, besides moral reasons, to the fact that he greatly admired Petrarch’s poems. In order to enjoy them, one needed not only ‘congeniality of feeling, but a similarity of circumstance’, which, of course, would have been very embarrassing in case of adultery.58 Although a conservative in his translation theory, Tytler was more of a Romantic in his poetic taste, as his influential version from Friedrich Schiller’s Räuber shows. Tytler’s translations from Petrarch were mainly meant to illustrate some significant points of his argument and, in particular, his view of the pure and honest character of Petrarch’s love.59 First published in 1784, the same year as Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, these translations stemmed from a different and more traditional sensibility. Smith’s selection from Petrarch in her collection was more personal: she chose those sonnets which fitted her project in Elegiac Sonnets, that is, mainly melancholy reflections of a solitary figure in a landscape. This Romantic Petrarch was only a part of Tytler’s choice; the rest was meant to show the idealism of Petrarch’s passion, his torments, and their vanity – the last sonnet included in his selection is the first in the Canzoniere. It is remarkable, however, that most of them belong to the second section of the Canzoniere, that in morte of Laura, which he considered ‘by far the most beautiful’. These poems are so deep that they ‘have exhausted the whole powers of pathetic expression’.60 Sometimes a Gothic vein for the macabre seems to emerge in his taste. He affirms, for instance, that it is impossible not to sympathise with Petrarch’s pain when the poet describes Laura’s fine eyes and body ‘mouldering in the earth’.61 Though not as free as Sade’s, Tytler’s versions are for the most part imitations rather than translations.62 He adds in phrases, paraphrases original lines, and rearranges their position for metrical and ideological reasons.63 The most interesting example for our discussion is his version of ‘Voi ch’ascoltate’, sonnet I of the Canzoniere:

58 59

60 61 62

63

An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, p. 28. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 194 ff., which includes passages from ‘S’honesto amor’, ‘Donna che lieta’, ‘Sol’ un conforto’, a part of ‘Vergine bella’ and a sonnet of Boccaccio’s for Petrarch, ‘Or se’ salito, caro Signor mio’. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 34 and 36. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, p. 35. He referred in particular to ‘Gli occhi, di ch’io’ and ‘Quanta invidia’, which he translated in the Appendix as ‘Those eyes’ and ‘O earth’. The form is mainly Shakespearean and sometimes Petrarchan or irregular. Occasionally he translated more literally, as in his version of ‘Lieti fiori, e felici’, ‘O happy flowers’ (An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 107-08). He did not draw on Sade for his versions. A good example is the second quatrain (ll. 5-8) of ‘Zephiro torna’, ‘Ridono i prati e ’l ciel si rasserena; / Giove s’allegra di mirar sua figlia; / l’aria et l’acqua et la terra è d’amor piena; / ogni animale d’amar si riconsiglia’: ‘And thou, sweet Philomel, renew’st thy strain, / Breathing thy wild notes to the midnight grove: / All nature feels the kindling fire of love, / The vital force of spring’s returning reign’ (An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, p. 265). Line 5 has been moved and paraphrased in l. 4 (‘And tender green light-shadows o’er the plain’); ‘Philomel’ appears in l. 3 of the original together with ‘Progne’, whom Tytler omitted; ‘sweet’, ‘Breathing’, ‘wild’ and ‘midnight groves’ are not mentioned in the original; l. 6 was omitted, probably on account of its mythological and erotic content (Jove’s daughter is

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Ye, that with favouring ear, and feeling heart, ’Sdeign not to list to these disorder’d rhimes, Which the full sorrows of my soul impart, Whilst, error-led, in those past early times, I cherish’d in my breast th’ impoison’d dart: For these poor trifles which the Muse inspir’d, Alternate birth of fleeting hope, and pain, From you, whose hearts a kindred flame has fir’d, Should pardon be denied, I trust to gain At least compassion.—Late, at length I know, That, as, through many a year, the bitter scorn And taunting speech of men I’ve meanly borne, And reap’d alone the fruits of shame and woe; 64 So this said truth remains,—that all is vain below!

Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva il core in sul mio primo giovanile errore quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono, del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono. Ma ben veggio or sí come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me medesmo meco mi vergogno; et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto, e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente 65 che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.

Some of Tytler’s choices modify the sense of the original sonnet considerably.66 ‘Whilst, error-led, in those past early times, / I cherish’d in my breast th’ impoison’d dart’ leaves out the partial change in character over the years of ‘quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono’. The ‘poor trifles which the Muse inspir’d’ are not only different from ‘del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono’, but also self-derogatory. The crucial term ‘vain’ in ‘fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore’ does not appear in ‘alternate birth of fleeting hope, and pain’. Above all, the final part of the translation presents a more severe moral tone than the original, as in ‘the bitter scorn / And taunting speech of men I’ve meanly borne’ for ‘Ma ben Venus); l. 8 is a paraphrase of the original, which is somehow sanitised by the scientific language employed by Tytler. 64 An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, pp. 268-69. 65 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, text and introduction by Gianfranco Contini, notes by Daniele Ponchiroli (Turin: Einaudi, 1964, repr. 1987), p. 3. 66 The irregular metrical scheme, the different position of some phrases, like those in l. 1 that correspond to the original l. 7, and other changes are not germane to our discussion.

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veggio or sí come al popol tutto / favola fui gran tempo’, which mentions neither ‘bitter scorn’, nor ‘taunting speech’, nor meanness. Lines 11-12 – ‘di me medesmo meco mi vergogno; / et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto, / e ’l pentersi’ – are an essential passage dealing with raving, a feeling of shame about oneself and other people, and repentance, yet they are not justly reproduced by ‘And reap’d alone the fruits of shame and woe’.67 By contrast, Petrarch’s explicit repentance is made implicit in Tytler’s line, where Petrarch seems more worried about his reputation than his morals. ‘That all is vain below’ is, again, an exaggerated version of l. 14, which observes that ‘what we like on earth is but a short dream’. The most relevant changes, however, are those in l. 8: ‘spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono’ becomes ‘Should pardon be denied, I trust to gain / At least compassion’, whose liberty Tytler felt obliged to point out in a footnote.68 Calvinistically, Tytler’s Petrarch does not seem to expect forgiveness but only compassion, which is the opposite of what was envisaged by Sade, Dobson, and some contemporary women poets, who ultimately justified the two lovers. The debate on Petrarch and Laura did not end with Tytler. In the 1810s several essays on the subject appeared in Britain and France, indicating that this animated controversy was still far from reaching any definitive conclusions. Historians such as Henry Hallam, Pierre Louis Ginguené, and J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, as well as literary figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Walter Savage Landor, and Ugo Foscolo intervened in the discussion, not to mention the fact that Petrarch was a significant source of inspiration for Percy Shelley, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, L.E.L., Felicia Hemans, and a spate of other poets. But that is another story for another time.

Eighteenth-century English translators found the stammering pun on ‘me’ in l. 11 particularly distasteful, since most of them paraphrased or omitted it. 68 An Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch, p. 269. 67

Laura Bandiera (Università di Parma)

Wordsworth’s Ariosto: Translation as Metatext and Misreading

Following John Harington’s 1591 pioneering translation, three complete versions of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso appeared between 1755 and 1823: one by William Huggins, the second (published in 1783) by John Hoole, the last produced by William Stewart Rose. This essay discusses these works through an exploration of the textual and paratextual strategies employed by the translators to cope with traditionally contradictory evaluations of Ariosto’s work, thus paving the way for new approaches. In particular, the essay focuses on William Wordsworth’s surprisingly insensitive translation, dated November 1802, of a fragment from Canto I of the Furioso. In the light of Wordsworth’s poetics and poetical practice, this fragment reveals an ambivalent attitude towards romance and Ariosto that may be reconstructed through Book V of The Prelude (written in 1804) and Peter Bell (1798 and 1806 versions).

In 1802 William Wordsworth embarked on the task of translating Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a rather singular choice for a poet who had consciously rejected fantasy for reality, and the exotic for the humble. Of this version, presumably comprising the first two cantos of the poem, only a fragment has survived (I, 5-14).1 Very little is known about the poet’s initiative, when exactly it took place or to what extent it was carried out,2 although Wordsworth’s rather surprising but well-documented predilection for Ariosto’s masterpiece may be sufficient to account for it.3 It must seem even more surprising, then, that the only surviving part of the version, which must be either a preliminary draft or a fragment of a much longer completed work, appears to be ultimately devoid of literary merits and in no way indicative of Wordsworth’s great poetical ability. Nor do the poet’s own comments help to clarify the matter. For, strangely enough, considering Wordsworth’s almost obsessive habit of revising his texts, he never seems to have had any doubts about this work. On the contrary, from what we know, he looked on it with unjustified confidence. In words that sound disrespectful towards Ariosto’s great artistic achievement, Wordsworth

1 2

3

For Wordsworth’s text, see the Appendix to this essay. The few existing indications suggest that Wordsworth carried out and completed the English version of Cantos I and II in the latter part of November 1802. But it also seems that Wordsworth returned to the Orlando Furioso at least once in later life, this time translating, in his own words, ‘three books of Ariosto’. None of this material, however, has survived. See June Sturrock, ‘Wordsworth’s Italian Teacher’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 67 (1985), 797-812, 227-28. Surprising, at least, for the general reader, or even for the scholar not intimately acquainted with Wordsworth’s life and minor production.

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announces in 1805: ‘I can translate, and have translated, two books of Ariosto at the rate nearly of 100 lines a day’.4 In this essay, I shall first reconstruct the history of the Orlando Furioso translations that appeared in Britain in the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods, with a twofold aim. First, by investigating the specific problems facing its translators, I will try to map the history of the reception of the poem, the knowledge of which they contributed to divulge, while orienting its assessment by their own textual and paratextual practices. Thus, the double awareness with which translators – qua translators – are endowed as a result of their being acquainted both with the original text and with their own cultural context, is here considered as a linguistic site of crucial importance for focusing on the aesthetic, moral and, ultimately, ideological issues raised by Ariosto’s poem in eighteenth-century Britain. Secondly, although this panorama was presumably unknown to Wordsworth in its entirety, his attempt to translate from the Orlando Furioso will be inscribed in it in order to historicize his procedures and explore their implications on account of their distinctiveness, rather than exclusively in terms of the translator’s fidelity to the original. Judging from the surviving fragment, Wordsworth endeavoured to produce a close translation of Ariosto’s text, itself a gesture of some significance when its results are viewed as a type of metatext or literary criticism. But what he produced, in fact, was no more than an experiment manqué, though apparently not recognized as such by its great, extremely self-demanding, author. In other words, if Wordsworth failed to carry out an acceptable translation from the Orlando Furioso – a work that, at least in his youth, he was extremely fond of – it is still more puzzling that he also failed to realize that it was a failure. Since there exists no study of the subject comparable to the manuscript research recently conducted on Wordsworth’s modernizations of Chaucer and his partial translation of Virgil’s Aeneid,5 I have turned for an explanation to Wordsworth’s own poetry and poetics and, in particular, to Peter Bell (1798-1819), the ‘tale in verse’, the revisionary nature of which is revealed by its texture of Ariostesque allusions.6 Indeed, it is such works as Peter Bell (first composed in 1798) and The Prelude, Book V (composed in the early months of 1804) that support the view that Wordsworth’s unsatisfactory translation may, in fact, be an act of misreading. Although a less consciously parodic form than Peter Bell, a poem where the literary conventions of romance are invoked and overtly repudiated, the 1802 translation of Ariosto may also be seen as a ‘parody’ which paradoxically testifies to the powerful attraction exerted on Wordsworth by the Orlando Furioso, a poem, one might add, whose 4

5

6

See Wordsworth’s letter to Sir George Beaumont of the 17-24 October 1805. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 628. There exists only one specific contribution on Wordsworth’s translations from the Italian, Rudolf Carpanini’s article on the translation of five sonnets by Michelangelo – one of which was rendered in two different versions – carried out by Wordsworth from December 1804 for Richard Duppa’s projected Life and Letters of Michelangelo, published in 1806. See Rudolph Carpanini, ‘“So much meaning…into so Little Room”: Wordsworth’s Translation of Michelangelo’, English Diachronic Translation: Atti del 7. convegno nazionale di storia della lingua inglese, ed. by Giovanni Iamartino (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni librari, le istituzioni culturali e l’editoria, Divisione editoria, 1998), pp. 251-68. Wordsworth’s references to the Orlando Furioso in Peter Bell have been signalled by June Sturrock in ‘Wordsworth’s Italian Teacher’.

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importance for the British Romantics is generally recognized, even though its influence on single works and authors, and on the development of Romantic aesthetics is still largely unexplored.7 Scholars generally agree that Ludovico Ariosto’s masterpiece, Orlando Furioso (1532), came back into favour in the Romantic period, a fact also documented by the substantial number of translations between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a silence of nearly two hundred years following the first English version of Orlando Furioso by Sir John Harington in 1591, three complete translations appeared in Britain in the space of less than eighty years: the first, by William Huggins, published in 1755; the second, by John Hoole, published between 1773 and 1783; and, finally, the highly celebrated version by William Stewart Rose, published in eight volumes between 1823 and 1831, and regarded as the definitive rendering of the poem in the nineteenth century. As is well known, translation is more than a merely interlingual practice, but rather a culture-bound operation that both reflects and promotes important reception-related phenomena. As inherent signs of a new interest in works written in a different language, translations establish durable connections between cultures, initiating processes that are, however, conditioned a priori by the cultural system to which they are addressed. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to see the three complete Orlando translations that followed one another at short intervals in the preRomantic and Romantic periods as an indication of the progressive revaluation of a poem notoriously misunderstood by neoclassical criticism. For the pioneer work carried out by William Huggins, with the occasional assistance of Giuseppe Baretti, is the work of an enthusiast – a man ‘possessed by Ariosto’ as Baretti describes him8 – and cannot be considered representative of an age which gazed rather coldly, if at all, upon Italian literature in general, and on Ariosto in particular, a poet deemed too prone to flights of fancy and too indifferent to the rules of classical composition and decorum. Particularly instructive, from this point of view, is the work of Thomas Warton, which was to prove decisive for the revaluation of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1589-96), the poem authoritatively described by Mario Praz as ‘a moralised contamination of Orlando Furioso and the Gerusalemme’.9 For, in spite of his many merits as a critic, Warton did not hesitate to manifest strong reservations about Ariosto’s poetry. And, although he dedicated a whole chapter of his Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754) to ‘Spenser’s Imitations of

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With the sole exception of Byron, perhaps. See, in particular, Giorgio Melchiori, Byron and Italy (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1958), and Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (London: Macmillan, 1984). Good starting-points for research in the field are Anna Benedetti, L’Orlando Furioso nella vita intellettuale del popolo inglese (Milan: Bemporad, 1914), Mario Praz, ‘L’Ariosto in Inghilterra’, in Machiavelli in Inghilterra (Florence: Sansoni, n.d.), pp. 277-96, Roderick Marshall, Italy in English Literature 1755-1815: Origins of the Romantic Interest in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), and Joseph Gibaldi, ‘The Fortunes of Ariosto in England and America’, in Ariosto 1974 in America: Atti del Congresso Ariostesco – Dicembre 1974, Casa Italiana della Columbia University, ed. by Aldo Scaglione (Ravenna: Longo, 1976), pp. 135-58. Joseph Gibaldi, ‘The Fortunes of Ariosto’, p. 144. Mario Praz, ‘L’Ariosto in Inghilterra’, p. 279 (my translation).

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Ariosto’,10 he went so far as to lament the Italian poet’s influence on the Elizabethan writer: the latter, ‘ambitious of rivalling the Orlando Furioso in a poem formed on a similar plan’ (I, p. 224), had carefully studied Ariosto, but only to produce what, even in Warton’s view, is a structurally failed masterpiece. Interestingly, however, Warton drew a further distinction: if, owing to its faulty design, Spenser’s poem does not satisfy critical judgement, unlike the Furioso, it is ultimately redeemed by the sublime genius of its author. Indeed, the Elizabethan author ‘abounds with beautiful and sublime representations’ and transports his readers with ‘magnificent conceptions’ and ‘elevated invention[s]’, whereas the Italian poet only ‘gives us the grotesque for the graceful, and extravagance for majesty’ (I, pp. 224-25, 226). Thus, although an innovator and a forerunner of historical criticism, Warton does not dissociate himself in his evaluation of Ariosto’s poem from the opinions voiced by both Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson, at the beginning and at the end of the century respectively. According to Addison, writing in 1712, it is to ‘the Spirit of Spenser and Ariosto’ that some ‘Defects’ of the otherwise admirable Paradise Lost are imputable, the allegorical figures of Sin and Death in particular.11 For Johnson too, writing in 1779, it was because of ‘his desire of imitating Ariosto’s levity’ that Milton ‘has disgraced his work with the Paradise of Fools; a fiction not in itself ill-imagined, but too ludicrous for its place’.12 William Huggins (1696-1761), who professed himself ‘so great an admirer of Ariosto’13 and described him as ‘a delightful author for the surprizing variety of incidents, descriptions, inventions, still rising upon each other, in amusement, delicacy, grandeur’ (p. v), could not subscribe to such judgements and took up his pen – in a pamphlet seething with indignant sarcasm, The Observer Observ’d (1756) – to defend the poet whom, he felt, had been ‘so grossly malign’d’ by the author of the Observations on the Faerie Queene: ‘Altho’, saith our Observer, Spencer formed his Faerie Queene upon the fanciful plan of Ariosto – Poor Spencer! Wretched Ariosto! – And oh! Most mighty Warton!’.14 In short, according to Huggins, there was no objectivity in that vast chapter where, with uncommon competence for the age, Warton had closely compared the Italian and English poems, signalling Spenser’s borrowings of episodes, motifs and characters: for instance, the encounter between Angelica and ‘un eremita […] devoto e venerabile d’aspetto’, in reality

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I am quoting from the second and revised edition of the Observations (1762). See Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Warton’s Observations and Hurd’s Letters, ed. by David Fairer, 3 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), I, pp. 198-228. Further quotations, from this edition, will be indicated in parenthesis in the text. No 297 (Feb. 9, 1712), in Joseph Addison, Robert Steele & Others, The Spectator, ed. by Gregory Smith, 4 vols (London: Dent & Sons, 1958), II, p. 386. Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’ (1779), in Lives of the English Poets, ed. by Arthur Waugh, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), II, p. 130. William Huggins, ‘The Preface’, in Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, in Italian and English, trans. by William Huggins, with the assistance of T. H. Croker and others, 2 vols (London: The Editor, 1755), I, p. viii. Further quotations, from this edition, will be indicated in parenthesis in the text. [William Huggins], The Observer Observ’d: Or Remarks on a certain Curious Tract, intitled, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spencer, By Thomas Warton, A. M. (London: S. Crowder and H. Woodgate, 1756), p. 18.

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‘un frate che sapea negromanzia’,15 which reappears at the beginning of The Faerie Queene in ‘the circumstance of the Red-crosse knight and Una, meeting with Archimago disguised like a hermit’ (I, p. 198); or the episode of the fight between Arthur and Maleger, the ‘person without spright’ and ‘flesh without bloud’16 whom Warton saw as a transformation of Orillo, the monster whose limbs regenerate themselves and who is slain by Astolfo after a struggle depicted with all the fantastic extravagance that also characterizes the description of Arthur’s struggle; or, again, the attractive Duessa, indicated by Warton as ‘a copy of Ariosto’s Alcina’ (I, p. 204), and who, like Ariosto’s figure, is revealed to be a loathsome old woman; finally, Arthur’s ‘warlike shield all closely cover’d’ (I. 7. 33) which reproduces the shield of Atlante – ‘D’un bel drappo di seta avea coperto / lo scudo’ (II. 55, ‘He had his shield covered with a beautiful silken cloth’) – while the horn, the ‘great virtues’ of which open the gates of Orgoglio’s castle to Arthur’s Squire, is seen by Warton as deriving from the horn that Logistilla ‘presents to Astolfo’ (I, p. 201).17 In his textually detailed survey, Warton offered ample evidence in support of Huggins’s notion that Ariosto’s poem had been a ‘fountain-head’ or ‘a golden mine’18 for later poets, yet he irritated the translator of the Furioso because of his severe critique of Ariosto’s work. In order to magnify, effortlessly, Spenser’s genius, Huggins retorted, Warton had disparaged the Italian poet and, at the same time, had underrated Spenser himself in order to add to his own reputation as a critic.19 It is clear, however, that more than personal matters were at stake; for, the fact that Orlando Furioso was generally looked upon indifferently or superciliously in Warton’s time is borne out by the undeserved, yet total failure of Huggins’s edition, a work praised by the Critical Review as ‘one of the best and most useful translations that have appeared in our language’.20 And it is made even clearer by the lengthy and cautious negotiation with the reader that the next translator of the Furioso, John Hoole (1727-1803), felt the need to enter into, twenty years later, in the preface to his publication of a first series of ten cantos in 1773. In introducing his version, Huggins had compared the Orlando Furioso to ‘a fair garden’, or rather to a Miltonic ‘delicious paradise […] long kept seemingly recluse from human eye’, thus identifying his task with its disclosure, so that it might be ‘enjoyed by all the intelligent world, and more especially by my own country’ (p. v). More prosaically, in his preface, John Hoole focused on the reputation of the poem, going back to French criticism and its repercussions in Britain.21

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Canto II. 12, 14, in Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. by Marcello Turchi, 2 vols (Milan: Garzanti, 2000), I (‘a hermit appearing devout and venerable’, ‘a friar who practised necromancy’, my translations). Further quotations, from this edition, will be indicated in parenthesis in the text. II. 11. 40, in Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 2001). Further quotations, from this edition, will be indicated in parenthesis in the text. See Faerie Queene, I. 8. 3ff, and Orlando Furioso, XV. 15ff. William Huggins, ‘Preface’ to Orlando Furioso, pp. viii, xi. For a detailed survey of Huggins’s polemic against Warton, see Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The Critical Review, 3 (May 1757), p. 398. I quote from John Hoole, ‘Preface’, in Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso: translated from the Italian of Lodovico Ariosto; with notes: by John Hoole, 5 vols (London: George Nicol, 1785), I, pp. i-liv. The first

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The uncompromising dogmatism of the French Classicists had prompted disrespectful comments about the Italian poet and his masterpiece: Adrien Baillet in his Jugements des savants (1685) had compared the Orlando Furioso to an ill-built trophy raised from the spoils of every other Italian production; Rapin, in his Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote (1674), had argued that its design was too vast, disproportionate, and injudiciously interspersed with unnatural episodes; even the judicious Père Bouhours, in La manière de bien penser (1687), had condemned Ariosto’s work for its extravagances and absurdities; finally, Voltaire, in his famous ‘Essay on Epick Poetry’ (first published in English, 1727), to which Baretti was to react indignantly,22 had declared Ariosto’s poem to be far inferior to Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, arguing that it is much easier to depict ogres than heroes, and to deviate from nature than follow it. How was Hoole to arouse the attention of a reading public, whose indifference had caused Huggins’s unsuccess, towards such an underrated poem? A poem that neither Dryden nor Addison had shown any willingness to defend, and which Johnson in his Life of Milton (1779) would still mention as an example of Ariosto’s notorious ‘pravity’?23 Cautiously, in spite of his previously successful edition of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1763), or perhaps because of it, John Hoole strategically opted for substitutes. In order to respond to the accusations of improbability, he summoned David Hume to his aid: ‘Ariosto pleases; but not by his monstrous and improbable fictions […]; he charms by the force and clearness of his expressions, by the readiness and variety of his inventions, and by his natural pictures of the passions, especially of the gay and amorous kind’.24 He called on Voltaire to retract his youthful allegations and reinstate Orlando Furioso among the epic poems, as in fact had recently been the case with the entry ‘Epopée’ (1770), written by Voltaire himself for the Encyclopédie. To justify the irregular narrative structure of the poem, Hoole referred to the writings of Ariosto’s nephew Orazio, while for himself he reserved the task of pointing out – to a readership more and more inclined to posit aesthetic pleasure as the almost exclusive standard of judgement – how difficult it was not to perceive the beauty of Orlando Furioso, as indeed was demonstrated by the French critics themselves who, as he pointed out, ‘often appear a contradictory mixture of praise and censure’ in their censorious observations (p. xxi). Nonetheless, among the evidence shrewdly assembled by Hoole to show how, as in a cross-examination, all current charges had been contested and extenuated, one fault found complete edition of John Hoole’s translation was published in 1783. All further quotations, from this edition, will be indicated in parenthesis in the text. 22 See Giuseppe Baretti, ‘A Dissertation upon Poetry in which are Interspersed some Remarks on Mr. Voltaire’s Essay on the Epic Poets’ (1753), in Prefazioni e Polemiche, ed. by Luigi Piccioni (Bari: Laterza, 1933), pp. 89-114. For an earlier reaction to Voltaire’s essay, see Paolo Rolli’s ‘Remarks upon M. Voltaire’s Essay’ (1728). 23 See Dryden’s ‘A Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire’ (1693), in John Dryden, Selected Criticism, ed. by James Kinsley and George Parfitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 216: ‘Ariosto neither designed justly, nor observed any unity of action, or compass of time, or moderation in the vasteness of his draught; his style is luxurious, without majesty or decency, and his adventures without the compass of nature and possibility’. And Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, I, p. 124: ‘Ariosto’s pravity is generally known’. 24 David Hume, Four Dissertations (1757), quoted in John Hoole’s ‘Preface’ to Orlando Furioso, p. xx (my italics).

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no absolution, although it was to be tacitly amended by the translation itself: ‘Whatever liberties we may allow an author like Ariosto, with respect to mixture of character or style, yet proverbial and ludicrous expressions, or vulgar images, immediately mixed with subjects of pathos, or elevation, must be ever disgusting’ (p. xvi). Thus, although Hoole did not subscribe to the usual neoclassical strictures regarding the structural and fantastic exuberance of the Furioso, yet he still failed to appreciate what is most distinctively Ariostesque in the poem: ‘le smorzature repentine, l’alzarsi e l’abbassarsi tempestivo dei toni’, as Lanfranco Caretti wrote in his influential essay first published in 1954;25 or, as Thomas Warton himself had observed, though only to object to it, Ariosto’s ‘mixture of burlesque and serious’ (I, p. 226), his quick transitions from the sublime to the grotesque, and from humour to pathos. Actually, the issue can be seen as partly related to the controversial question of the Furioso’s ‘variety of styles’, which Warton discusses in his Observations by taking up, but eventually discarding, Gian Vincenzo Gravina’s defence of the Italian poet. Whereas the author of La ragione poetica (1708) saw the Furioso’s stylistic wealth as the direct natural consequence of its diversified plots and characters (mirroring in turn ‘the productions of nature, which are never simple but always compounded’26), the English scholar, by contrast, holds fast to the neoclassical notion of heroic poetry. Thus, differing from the conclusions reached by Gravina, who found the sublimity of the heroic poem uncompromised by ‘a moderate and necessary use of mean personages’, Warton maintains that the essential properties of epic poetry are ‘importance and dignity’, from which stems the modern poet’s duty ‘to separate high from low, fair from deformed; to compound rather than copy nature, and to present those exalted combinations, which never existed together, amid the general and necessary defects of real life’ (I, p. 228). Hoole also quotes from La ragione poetica although, significantly enough, not to dispute Gravina’s argument. For him, in fact, the Orlando Furioso is a work which is ‘undoubtedly serious upon the whole, though occasionally diversified with many sallies of humour’. From this point of view, Hoole argues, to deny Ariosto the status of epic poet on the basis of the Furioso’s stylistic heterogeneity would be tantamount to denying that Shakespeare was a great tragic playwright ‘because his plays are not pure tragedies’ (p. xvi). What rather disturbs the translator – who resorts to the strong term ‘disgusting’ – is in fact something more specific: it is the Furioso’s mixture of styles, as Warton accurately but disapprovingly terms it, thus referring to Ariosto’s habitual practice of deviating from the heroic or pathetic codes and resorting to prosaic, vernacular expressions. In time, the disorientating effects of Ariosto’s masterly verbal play will be discussed under the heading of the Furioso’s irony and explored as a continuous oscillation between the ideal and real world, between dream and reality. Expanding on the subject, Ariostesque irony will be seen as a form of discourse that simultaneously creates and de-creates itself in a never-ending process which reveals either the author’s consciousness of the fictitious nature of his work or, alternatively, the poet’s eager commitment to life, which he embraces ‘in all its aspects Lafranco Caretti, ‘Ariosto’ (1954), in Ariosto e Tasso (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), p. 32 (‘ the sudden breakings off, the timely rising and lowering of tone’, my translation). 26 Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Della ragione poetica libri due (Naples: presso Domenico-Antonio Parrino, 1716), p. 227. 25

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and manifestations’.27 Yet Hoole, however tactfully, voices a completely different, though more general, opinion: Ariosto’s muse presents ‘a certain easy negligence [..] that often assumes a playful mode of expression, incompatible with the nature of our present poetry’ (p. xlv). He suggests, moreover, that what is unacceptable by contemporary standards (and therefore ‘disgusting’) is not only the breach of literary decorum caused by that playfulness, but the instability of meanings it engenders. The subtle, inexhaustible wordplay of the poem, and the genial interconnection of the various linguistic registers that is so essential to the Furioso’s multi-perspectivism, is equated by Hoole, as by Warton and Johnson, with skepticism or moral indifference, and transmuted into a more or less open accusation of immorality. What Hoole produced was not an unfaithful translation of Ariosto’s masterpiece, but an opaque, monochrome version of the original. As the Furioso’s next translator, William Stewart Rose, remarked: ‘Every grace, every shade, every gradation of colouring which distinguishes Ariosto is lost in it’.28 It was Hoole’s polished version, nonetheless, that introduced the early Romantic poets to the world of the Italian chivalric poem: William Wordsworth presented it as a gift to his grammar school in Hawkshead in 1789;29 Robert Southey learnt of Ariosto’s poem as an adolescent by perusing the notes to the Jerusalem Delivered, and later recorded: ‘I do not think any accession of fortune could now give me so much delight as I then derived from that vile version of Hoole’s’;30 finally, Walter Scott, in his youthful enthusiasm for Orlando Furioso, dared challenge his Greek master with a composition aimed at demonstrating in detail Ariosto’s superiority to Homer.31 Among the major British poets of early Romanticism, the only one who seems to have entertained no predilection for Orlando Furioso in his youth was Coleridge who, however, put his knowledge of the Italian language (acquired from late 1802 onwards) to good use to read Ariosto’s poem in the original, albeit with no great enthusiasm. For the future author of the Biographia Literaria, Ariosto is indeed a poet of extraordinary linguistic versatility, who ‘displays to the utmost advantage the use of his native tongue for all purposes, whether of

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Ariosto’s irony has, of course, been the subject of much critical debate. One of the most authoritative opinions was that of Benedetto Croce, who viewed it as a linguistic and mental structure encompassing ‘all creation, loving it all, good and evil, the highest as well as the lowest things’. In his famous essay, first published in 1918 and collected in Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille (1920), Croce equated Ariosto’s irony with harmony, tracing both back to his consciousness of the fictitious character of his poem. This highly influential interpretation was challenged and rectified by Lanfranco Caretti who, in an essay first published in 1954, identified Ariostesque irony primarily with a particular Weltanschauung, thus with an active engagement in reality, which the poet embraces ‘in all its aspects and manifestations’. Lanfranco Caretti, Ariosto e Tasso, p. 30 (my translation). William Stewart Rose, ‘Introduction’, in Ludovico Ariosto, The Orlando Furioso, Translated into English verse with notes, by William Stewart Rose, 8 vols (London: John Murray, 1823-31), I, p. x. All further quotations, from this edition, are indicated in parenthesis in the text. See June Sturrock, ‘Wordsworth’s Italian Teacher’, p. 805 (note 33). In 1787, the customary gift to the school library had been Hoole’s version of the Gerusalemme Liberata. ‘Recollections of the Early Life of Robert Southey’ (written in 1823), in The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. by Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, 1850), I, p. 84. See Walter Scott, ‘Memoir’, in Scott on Himself, ed. by David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), p. 30.

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passion, sentiment, humour, or description’;32 but he is also a poet who ‘degrad[es] and deform[s] passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence’.33 Even worse, Coleridge goes on to remark, he is a poet who never resolutely separates ‘[his] own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst […] so as to preclude all sympathy with [them]’.34 In Coleridge’s scattered observations, attentively analyzed by Edoardo Zuccato in his Coleridge in Italy, what emerges again is the connection between the linguistic freedom of the Furioso (considered ‘disgusting’ by John Hoole) and the ‘disgusting licentiousness […] which poisons Ariosto’ (Coleridge’s words).35 It is, in fact, the coexistence of sublime and playful language, a coexistence that both nourishes and shatters illusions, skeptically destroying what is being confidently created, that John Hoole endeavoured to suppress, by simplifying and redressing the textual tangle, which the poem, from its very start, thematizes in the wood (‘la selva’). For the future poets of the Romantic age, the encounter with the Furioso will thus come about under the aegis of the sheer delight conveyed by wonderfully appealing adventures, and not following the lead of a poet, whose bi-focal vision encourages processes of identification – what Coleridge calls the reader’s ‘sympathy’ – which, ultimately, turn out to be frustrating. As Robert Southey remarked, in words that also apply to Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, ‘it was for the sake of their stories that I perused and reperused these poems with ever new delight’.36 John Hoole, whose version appeared in a five-volume edition complete with notes, indexes of names and subjects, a life of the poet and a summary of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, did not act dishonestly or censoriously as a translator. He did not manipulate Ariosto’s text, nor did he suppress episodes which might have been considered offensive (Angelica and the hermit, for instance, or the tale of Giocondo, or the episode of Ricciardetto and Fiordispina). But, by persisting in the effort to achieve an elevated style, he impoverished the verbal complexity of Ariosto’s poem, forestalling its continuous shifting of perspectives, dynamism, and open-endedness. Ungraciously, but not unfairly, Walter Scott remarked that Hoole had transmuted ‘the gold of Ariosto into lead’,37 thus acknowledging the brilliance of Ariosto’s text, while at the same time condemning its English version as heavy and opaque. It is worth stressing, however, that although Hoole’s version may indeed appear ponderous when compared to its original, this is not the result of conspicuous alterations. Rather, it is caused by what may appear to be insignificant lexical variations. Thus, for example, in the episode from canto XXIX where Angelica, falling awkwardly from her horse, is ushered out of the poem, Hoole gives us an abbreviated and

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature, ed. by R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), II, p. 482. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by George Watson (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1967), p. 177. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 177. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lecture 3’, in Lectures 1808-1819, II, p. 95. Robert Southey, ‘Preface to the First Volume’, in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself, 10 vols (London: Longman, 1837-38), I, p. iv. Quoted in Barbara Reynolds, ‘Ariosto in English: Prose or Verse?’, in Ariosto 1974 in America, p. 126.

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more decorous version, by translating the Italian with ‘tumbled headlong from her seat’ (l. 470). By contrast, Ariosto’s lines read: Nel medesmo momento che si trasse l’annello in bocca e celò il viso bello, levò le gambe et uscì de l’arcione 38 e si trovò riversa in sul sabbione .

The vile ‘urtica’ (‘nettle’) – namely, the bed that to the jealous sleepless Orlando appears ‘più duro ch’un sasso, e più pungente che se fosse d’urtica’ (XXIII. 122, ‘harder than a rock and sharper than a nettle’) – becomes ‘[a] pointed thorn’, a substitution that transforms the burning human torments of the betrayed count into a saintly martyrdom, almost a Christ-like Passion. Predictably, ‘le crudette pome’ (X. 96, ‘the budding breasts’) which, bathed in tears, reveal to Ruggiero the living beauty of what he ‘creduto avria che fosse statua finta’ (‘would have taken to be a statue’) are sublimated into a neutral ‘panting bosom’. This, together with the poetical ‘dewy sorrows’ (for ‘lacrima’, ‘tear’) and ‘zephyrs’ (for ‘aura’, ‘air’) result in a rather rigid, stereotyped depiction of the beautiful young woman whom Ruggiero sees coming to life. In his translation, which appeared side by side with the original Italian on two-column pages, William Huggins had proceeded quite differently. Convinced that nothing could do justice to Ariosto’s art but ‘the great[est] care […] not to leave unimitated, when possible, even a turn of diction, much less, any thought, or even material epithet of the original’ (p. vii), Huggins had translated the original text punctiliously, line by line. So reverential an effort at ‘imitative’ recoding was bound to produce unfamiliar results: harsh sounds, twisted sentence structures, neologisms and verbal calques. ‘Pont for bridge’ and ‘brand for sword’, for instance, were singled out for special mention by an anonymous reviewer, possibly Tobias Smollett,39 who, however, hastened to qualify them as venial sins in a work with which, he wrote, ‘[one] must not only be pleased, but even astonished’.40 According to the Critical Review, Huggins’s version might be viewed as the outcome of a contest between an Ariosto who ‘resembles Ruggiero in skill and dexterity’ and a translator who ‘may be compared to Mandricard in force and prowess’, a contest which only ultimately condemns the latter to succumb to his antagonist ‘[who] fights in enchanted armour’.41 And, in fact, Huggins’s version is an instance of interlinear translation which firmly places the ‘rights’ of the original text before those of the target language and culture, but with successful results. Significantly, the Critical Review remarked that ‘in his copy he [Huggins] has preserved every feature and lineament of the original’, adding however that ‘if we lay aside the modern pedantry of criticism […] we shall, in reading this translation, persuade ourselves

Orlando Furioso, XXIX. 65 (‘The very moment Angelica put the ring between her lips and hid her sweet face, she raised her legs and fell off the saddle headlong upon the sand’, my translation). 39 This identification has been suggested by R. D. S. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972). 40 The Critical Review, 3 (May 1757), p. 386. 41 Referring to the nature of the language involved, the reviewer pointed out that the translator had at his disposal only ‘a polished suit of English metal’ (The Critical Review, p. 398). 38

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into a belief, that we are perusing an original work of Spenser’.42 As suggested, Huggins’s technical accuracy results not so much in the creation of an artificial linguistic product, but rather in a text that may be recognized as belonging to the English literary tradition even if it preserves some of the unfamiliar linguistic features of the Italian original. Conversely, John Hoole rewrote Orlando Furioso to adapt it to contemporary standards of language and taste. Aiming at naturalizing Ariosto’s work for English readers, Hoole followed criteria and practices rooted in the culture of his time, to the extent of appearing even slightly outmoded, as is shown by his adoption of Augustan poetic diction and the heroic couplet. In justifying his rendering of the ottava rima – the measure, he remarked, that ‘the Italians apply to the highest kind of poetry’ (p. li) – with the heroic verse employed by Dryden and Pope in their versions of Virgil and Homer, Hoole claimed to have followed a principle of equivalence, though this was clearly also a legitimizing device. And yet, however strategic the choice might have been, the adoption of the heroic couplet had obvious far-reaching consequences, as the following translator of Ariosto, William Stewart Rose, indicated, when he identified the verse form used by Hoole as ‘one among the many causes of his failure’ (p. x). First, Rose rightly argued, this is because the ottava rima is intrinsic to Ariosto’s poetic discourse, which flows beautifully and expands within the selfenclosed unit of the stanza before springing up in the closing couplet with ‘something epigrammatic either in sense or sound’ (p. x). Moreover, Rose continued, by imposing a regular rhyming pattern, the ottava forces the poet into digressions and pauses: those semantically rarefied spaces that, using a term borrowed from the terminology of painting, Rose calls ‘repose’, thus comparing them to the shadows in painting that intermingle with great masses of lights and so relieve ‘the sight that would be tired, if it were attracted by a Continuity of glittering objects’.43 It is with the greatest caution, Rose adds with some subtlety, that the translator must proceed in those spaces that are apparently dictated by sheer metrical necessity. Like shadows in a picture, Ariosto’s digressions and periphrases must remain in their place. They must not be condensed or abridged, as Hoole had done, once he had got free of the constraints of the ottava.44 Such condensation is inadmissible, according to Rose, who remarks perceptively that Orlando Furioso pleases ‘as a whole’, for the beauty of the poem also lies in the effect of the accumulation of details that are essential, ‘though they may appear of little value taken separately’ (p. xiii). When, in the period of his major poetic achievement, William Wordsworth undertook the translation of Orlando Furioso, he also employed – well before Rose – the octave stanza, as can be seen from the single fragment of ten strophes which has come down to us either as a preliminary imperfect draft, or as the only remaining finished part of a now lost longer version. In fact, there is very scant information about this project, which, according to Dorothy’s Journal, got under way on 7 November 1802 – ‘William began to translate

The Critical Review, 3 (May 1757), p. 386. This definition, quoted in the OED, comes from John Dryden’s translation of Du Fresnoy’s Art of Painting (published in 1695). 44 Hoole’s version is about one tenth shorter than the original. 42 43

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Ariosto’45 – and which, according to the poet himself, came to an end with the composition of the first two cantos, as he writes in 1805: ‘I […] have translated, two Books of Ariosto’.46 The last reference to this project is provided by Thomas De Quincey who, in a letter to Dorothy about his meeting with Wordsworth in London in 1808, merely records: ‘The Ariosto I need not say anything about, as Mr Wordsworth told me in London that he wished to keep it for revision on account of some harshness in the versification’.47 Not only, then, is the degree of polish of the surviving version uncertain, but the motives that prompted Wordsworth to render Orlando Furioso into English are perplexing, though we know that – however in constrast Ariosto’s poem may appear with Wordsworth’s taste and with the distinctive traits of his poetry – he was particularly fond of it, especially in his formative years. We know, for instance, that Wordsworth decided to take the poem with him when, in the summer of 1790, he left England on his walking tour of the Alps;48 that in 1794 he wanted to have it sent to him in Keswick together with ‘the Italian Grammar [and] Tasso’;49 and, finally, that two years later, in Racedown, he proudly introduced his sister to Orlando, as by that time she had become proficient enough in the Italian language.50 Not surprisingly for a poet engaged in overtly contesting the lofty language and poetic canons of the Augustan age,51 Wordsworth took a radically different approach in his version from Hoole’s highly successful translation.52 Favouring a plain, literal rendering of the original, he avoided all the typical periphrases (characteristically consisting of a descriptive adjective followed by a collective or abstract noun) with which Hoole’s poetic diction had ‘embellished’ Ariosto’s text: ‘amorous passion’ for ‘innamorato’ (which Wordsworth literally translated as ‘enamour’d’53); ‘beauteous virgin’ for ‘bellezza rara’

45

46 47

48

49 50

51 52 53

The entry in Dorothy’s journal reads: ‘Fine weather. Letters from Coleridge that he was gone to London. Sara at Penrith. I wrote to Ms Clarkson. Wm began to translate Ariosto’. The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. by Mary Moorman (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 163. This statement appears in Wordsworth’s letter to Sir George Beaumont of the 17, 24 October 1805. See herein, note 4. De Quincey’s letter is dated 25 March 1808. See John E. Jordan, De Quincey to Wordsworth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1963), p. 90. In a note, Jordan identifies the ‘Ariosto’ mentioned by De Quincey with ‘Probably Wordsworth’s translation of Orlando Furioso, 2 books of which he had completed by 1805, but only a fragment of which survives’. Wordsworth’s visit to London lasted from the end of February to the beginning of April 1802. The copy, undated, bears the inscription ‘My companion in the Alps with Jones’ on the front page and ‘I carried this book on my pedestrian Tour in the Alps with Jones’ on the last page. See Chester L. Shaver and Alice C. Shaver, Wordsworth’s Library: A Catalogue (New York and London: Garland, 1979), p. 11. The quotation is from a letter, written in May 1794, to Richard Wordsworth. See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805, p. 121. See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805, p. 170. In this letter addressed to William Mathews, Wordsworth writes: ‘she [Dorothy] has already gone through half of Davila and yesterday we began Ariosto’. Unfortunately, this note, like all the others relating to Ariosto’s poetry, is unaccompanied by any further comment. The enlarged version of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, published in April 1802, had probably been written in the early months of the same year which, towards the close, saw Wordsworth trying his hand at Ariosto. Until it was superseded by Rose’s, Hoole’s translation went through at least eight separate editions. See Joseph Gibaldi, ‘The Fortunes of Ariosto in England and America’, p. 146. Orlando Furioso, I. 5; Hoole’s translation, I, l. 33; Wordsworth’s translation, l. 2.

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(literally translated as ‘beauty rare’54); ‘doomed to yield her blooming charms’ for ‘ch’esser dovea del vincitor mercede’ (interpreted literally as ‘remaining there to be the Victor’s prize’55). In addition, Wordsworth eschewed all the rhetorical devices intended to stress the balanced structure of the couplet: for instance, the syntactical parallelisms between hemistiches, which Hoole had introduced by duplicating a single structural unit (as with ‘senza spada adoprar’, translated by Hoole as ‘No sword unsheath’d, no hostile force appli’d’, but rendered by Wordsworth as ‘Not one sword drawn’56); or such devices of verbal repetition as the following anaphora: ‘She, whom from distant regions safe he brought / She, for whose sake such bloody fields he fought’, which emphasizes a much plainer ‘quella che dagli esperii ai liti eoi / avea difesa con sì lunga guerra’: interestingly, a sentence that Wordsworth turns into an accurate and, at the same time, more intelligible (even ‘democratic’) form by proposing the adjectives ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ for Hoole’s generic ‘distant’ on the one hand, and Ariosto’s learned ‘esperii’ (from Hesperus, the western star) and ‘eoi’ (from Eos, the Greek name for dawn) on the other. Thus, his version becomes: ‘She who from western unto eastern coast / […] with so long war’.57 Compared to Ariosto’s original and Hoole’s translation, Wordsworth’s version shows that he was prompted by those same reformist impulses that inspired his reaction against all ‘arbitrary and capricious habits of expressions’.58 Both as poet and translator, he rejects fashionable poetic diction in favour of simple but more forceful expressions and, moreover, he assumes a similar position in both capacities. In the experimental narrative ballads, he represents himself as placed between the traditional low culture on behalf of which he speaks, and the contemporary polite culture to which he belongs and which he addresses. Similarly, in approaching Ariosto’s text, Wordsworth acts as the recipient of a discourse whose integrity he feels obliged to guarantee. In fact, both when dealing with interlingual and intralingual transposition, Wordsworth’s emphasis is primarily on the teller rather than the listener: in the ballads, he allows his characters to speak for themselves, albeit within the framework of a communicative situation that stages the potential transmission of their narratives into refined culture. Similarly, in translating from Orlando Furioso, he shows the same intention not to intrude upon Ariosto’s text, even as he endeavours to make it accessible to his audience. Thus, albeit aware of the complexities involved in any process of linguistic transfer from one culture to another, Wordsworth generally tends to conceal all form of authorial intervention. It would be out of place to dwell here on his highly ambiguous identification of intralinguistic ‘recoding’ as ‘recording’ which, from Coleridge onwards, has in fact been one of the most debated issues regarding the ballads. But it is not entirely irrelevant, perhaps, to notice that the implications of equivalence posited by the literalness with which Wordsworth approached Ariosto’s text reveal at least a similar attitude, though in the latter case the divide runs between different languages, not between

54 55 56 57 58

Orlando Furioso, I. 8; Hoole’s translation, I, l. 57; Wordsworth’s translation, l. 29. Orlando Furioso, I. 10; Hoole’s translation, I, l. 71; Wordsworth’s translation, l. 44. Orlando Furioso, I. 7; Hoole’s translation, I, l. 53; Wordsworth’s translation, l. 24. Orlando Furioso, I. 7; Hoole’s translation, I, ll. 51-2; Wordsworth’s translation, ll. 20-21. As he notoriously states in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads.

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socially connoted varieties of the same language (or, as with his modernizations of Chaucer, between diverse historical stages of linguistic evolution59). It is worth recalling that Wordsworth never modified his view of translation as a form of interlingual transposition that required a minimum of adjustments to be successful. Clearly, the poet was aware that a literal translation ‘and particularly in rhyme, is impossible’, as he states in 1824, while at the same time suggesting that what is unattainable may still be considered as a goal to be aimed at. ‘My own notion of translation’, he explains in a letter containing his most explicit pronouncements on the subject, ‘is that it cannot be too literal, provided three faults be avoided, baldness, in which I include all that takes from dignity; and strangeness or uncouthness including harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions cannot be said to be given at all’.60 Wordsworth’s practice as a translator from Italian, as well as from Latin, bears witness to the consistency with which he pursued these principles. Yet the very fact he applied them to so controversial an author as Ariosto cannot be entirely ignored. For, even though there is no evidence to show that Wordsworth may have entertained a rather unconventional attitude towards the Italian poet, the strain of humour and playfulness that runs through his early and major poetry does at least suggest the capacity – uncommon for his time – to understand and empathize with Ariosto’s superb irony. Neither the ‘simple’ nor the ‘sublime’ poet he has so often been described as by subsequent generations, but himself a master of irony,61 Wordsworth in his own right appears much better equipped Between December 1801 and April 1802, Wordsworth translated into modern English verse the tales of the Prioress and Manciple, a selection from Troilus and Cresida, and The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, then believed to be Chaucer’s. These modernizations – none of which were published before 1820 – show that Wordsworth took great pains to follow the original texts, altering them as little as possible. He generally followed Chaucer’s sentence structure, even preserving the original rhymes, and did not update Chaucer’s language and idiom more than was absolutely necessary. As demonstrated by Bruce E. Graver in his detailed ‘Introduction’, Wordsworth’s experimental methods were radically different from those of his predecessors, since he aimed at preserving ‘as fully as possible the genuine language of Chaucer’. See Bruce E. Graver, ‘Introduction’ to Selections from Chaucer, Modernized, in Translations of Chaucer & Virgil by William Wordsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 11. 60 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, 1821-1834, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev., arranged and ed. by Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, 1979), pp. 247 and 250. Wordsworth’s two letters to Lord Lonsdale, dated 5 and 17 February 1824, are his fullest statements on translation. They were written at the time of, and as comments to, Wordsworth’s last work on translation, his version of Virgil’s Aeneid. The work, consisting of the first three books of the poem plus fragments from Books IV and VIII, was carried out from late summer 1823 to February 1824, and revised periodically over a period of eight years. As explained by the poet himself, the translation was intended to preserve as much of the original as possible, a result Wordsworth achieved by adopting a Latinate diction, and by making the cadences reflect those of the Latin text. Interestingly, as emerges from his comments, he hoped to capture Virgil’s very style, and to do so without ‘a compensation of my own’. Owing to the unfavourable reactions of those to whom he submitted his rendering, however, Wordsworth came to regard his plan (i.e., that of no ‘compensation’, word, or idea beyond what the original contains) as unprofitable. See Bruce E. Graver, ‘Introduction’ to Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, in Translations of Chaucer & Virgil by William Wordsworth, pp. 155-74. 61 Wordsworth’s irony has been influentially discussed by John F. Danby, who drew attention to the Lyrical Ballads’ plural readings, explained in terms of a ‘co-presence of alternatives [..] and refusal to impose on the reader a predigested life-view’. See John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 37. More recent contributions on the subject are by Richard Gravil, ‘Lyrical Ballads (1798): 59

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than Coleridge to appreciate Ariosto’s mixture of earnestness and play, laughter and tears. And the same conclusion can be reached if we compare the two poets’ aversion for literary mannerisms, their linguistic experimentation, and their conscious use of familiar, everyday forms of language. Both for the quantity and quality of his poetry, the late winter and spring of 1802 was a highly prolific period for Wordsworth. To the great poems already written and partly published – Salisbury Plain (composed in Spenserian stanzas in the years 1793-95), The Ruined Cottage (composed in blank verse between March 1797 and March 1798), The Twopart Prelude (concluded in January 1799), as well as the experimental pieces included in the increasingly rich collection of Lyrical Ballads (The Idiot Boy, The Thorn, Michael) – new compositions were added: notably, a series of more than thirty lyrics whose brilliance and variety of metrical forms attest to Wordsworth’s interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry62; the first stanzas of the Immortality Ode; and, finally, Resolution and Independence, the ‘fine poem’ composed between May and July, which Coleridge singles out as most characteristic of its author’s merits and defects, since it is made up of an incongruous (and, one might almost add, Ariostesque) combination of two apparently conflicting elements – sublimity and ‘matter-of-factness’.63 In all these highly innovative texts, Wordsworth’s adherence to ‘matter-of-factness’ and clarity of style are accompanied by a subtle, almost self-effacing, technical virtuosity. In the narrative ballads, for instance, the severe self-imposed restrictions, in both vocabulary and sentence structure, go hand in hand with the use of complex metrical patterns which interact with language so as to achieve an effect similar to that traditionally attained by the combination of poetry and music.64 Equally extraordinary are the lyrical texts and tales in blank verse, with their subtle intermingling of abstract general nouns and specific words and phrases, their compression and expansion of clauses, their skilfully positioned stresses and pauses, aligning sound with meaning and thus enacting, rather than merely recording, the perceptive processes there involved. By contrast, the translation of Orlando is an imperfect text even from a merely technical point of view. Two stanzas out of its total ten (stanzas 5 and 7) are not octaves but nine-line stanzas; the remaining eight stanzas are divided, for the most part, into quatrains which

Wordsworth as Ironist’, Critical Quarterly, 24 (1982), 39-57; R. F. Storch, ‘Wordsworth’s Experimental Ballads: The Radical Uses of Intelligence and Comedy’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 11 (1971), 621-39. 62 The experimental work of spring 1802, showing Wordsworth’s adaptation of certain techniques common to Elizabethan and Cavalier poets has been discussed by Jared R. Curtis, Wordsworth’s Experiments with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802, with Texts of the Poems Based on Early Manuscripts (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1971). See, in particular, ch. 5: ‘Quaint Gaiety: Learning to Sing’, pp. 80113. 63 This quality of Wordsworth’s style is described by Coleridge as ‘the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity (at all events striking and original) to a style not only unimpassioned but undistinguished’. Both in its content and language, the stricture echoes Coleridge’s critique of Ariosto. See ch. 22 in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, p. 248. 64 As William Hazlitt recorded in his recollections of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s recitation of their ballads in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823). See Selected Essays of William Hazlitt, 1778-1830 (London: The Nonesuch Press; New York: Random House, 1948), p. 517.

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follow a variable rhyming pattern; only five stanzas (namely 5, 6, 7, 10, and 13) end with a couplet; no stanza is a regular ottava rima rhyming abababcc. Equally imperfect is the rhythm of the piece which, already seriously compromised by its stanzaic irregularities, is far from being redressed by the stress distribution which, on the contrary, accentuates the instability of the whole. It is true that Hoole had arbitrarily resorted to emphatic terminology and constructions, as is demonstrated, for instance, by the following passage describing the encounter between Rinaldo and Angelica: a passage, where heroic and pathetic connotations are imposed on Ariosto’s fluid and delicate Petrarchan language by the introduction of an extended anaphoric repetition and the contrast between the paladin’s ‘manly heart’ and ‘love’s strong net’: Come alla donna egli drizzò lo sguardo, riconobbe, quantunque di lontano, l’angelico sembiante e quel bel volto ch’alle amorose reti il tenea involto. (I. 12) Soon as his eyes beheld th’approaching fair Full well he knew that soft enchanting air Full well he knew that face which caus’d his smart, And held in love’s strong net his manly heart (Hoole, I, ll. 91-94)

Yet, what can we say of the version provided by Wordsworth who, ignoring in this case the great ‘power of metre’,65 produces a rendering that is somewhat approximate in its rhyme (angelical/thrall) and unsatisfactory in its rhythm? Soon as he to the lady turn’d his eyes, Though distant, he that mien angelical And that fair countenance did recognize, Whereby his knightly heart was held in thrall (ll. 63-66)

It seems superfluous to dwell at length on the imperfections of Wordsworth’s text which, indeed, are all too manifest: the ill-chosen ‘smite his head’ in stanza 6, for instance, which literalizes, in a ludicrous way, the repentance of king Marsilio and king Agramante (‘per far al re Marsilio e al re Agramante / battersi ancor del folle ardir la guancia’); or, the enjambement in stanza 8 (l. 28), which very inappropriately introduces a break, and then a pause, in the last foot of the verse. Even the most successful stanzas are not entirely satisfactory, but rather show traces of haste, or carelessness: octave 13, for example, while presenting an energetic and well-spaced rhythm which aptly reproduces, as in Ariosto’s text, Angelica’s flight on horseback, also features an ‘along the forest’(l. 73), where an ‘across the forest’ might have more accurately conveyed both the literal and self-reflexive meaning of Ariosto’s ‘selva’: a place where the characters’ routes continually intersect or diverge, and which thus turns out to be a source of endless movement for heroes and

65

William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ (1800), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W. J. B. Owen and J. Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), I, p. 144.

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heroines, as well as the conscious paradigm of the constructive principle of the poem, of its labyrinthine structure. The affrighted Lady turn’d her Horse around And drove him with loose bridle through the wood, Nor e’er in rough or smooth did she take thought If safer way or better might be found; But pale, and trembling, taking heed of nought She left the horse to find what way he could, Now up now down along the forest fast She drove, and to a river came at last.

On the whole, there is little in Wordsworth’s inadequate Ariostesque translation that provides evidence of his great technical, expressive skills, though some of his choices (stanzas 5, 10, and 14) may appear valuable if seen in isolation.66 Ironically, three years later, Wordsworth was to despair over the difficulty of turning some sonnets by Michelangelo into English, a task that he accomplished not without some success.67 But on this occasion, however, he also wrote of his translation from Orlando Furioso with amazing self-confidence: ‘I can translate, and have translated, two Books of Ariosto at the rate nearly of 100 lines a day, but so much meaning has been put by Michelangelo into so little room […] that I found the difficulty of translating him insurmountable’.68 The extant version, defective as it is, hardly contradicts these statements which become relevant, however, once their implications are fully explored. For, from the comparison with Michelangelo’s poetry, to which Wordsworth confers the qualities of conciseness, ‘majesty and strength’, Ariosto’s poetry emerges as prolix, languid and ‘charming’.69 In short, to put plainly what is hinted at here, the author of the Furioso is diminished to a ‘feminine’ status, a second-order poet, when measured against the ‘masculine’ model represented by the admired Buonarroti. Wordsworth’s observations on Ariosto are really too scanty and brief to provide any reliable indication of his real assessment of the Italian poet. Nor can we acquire much enlightenment on the matter by consulting the Orlando Furioso (1789) edited by Agostino Isola, Wordsworth’s esteemed Italian teacher in Cambridge in the years 1787-91. For Isola’s work is no critical edition, but rather the work of a linguist who, aiming at introducing the original poem to English readers, has taken pains to ascertain the philological correctness of the text and to facilitate its comprehension through explanatory

Nor does one detect in this work the enthusiasm or, indeed, the sheer gusto that is all too evident in the texts from Chaucer, completed only a few months before Wordsworth turned his hand to Ariosto. 67 For a more carefully detailed assessment of Wordsworth’s sonnets from Michelangelo, see Rudolph Carpanini, ‘“So much meaning…into so Little Room”: Wordsworth’s Translation of Michelangelo’. 68 See herein, note 4. 69 See the letter (dated 28 January 1823) Wordsworth wrote to W. S. Rose after receiving his published translation of the first twelve cantos of Ariosto: ‘accept my acknowledgments for a work which promises to make the English Reader acquainted in a faithful and agreeable manner with a charming writer’. See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, 1821-1834, p. 185. 66

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notes in English.70 Indeed, apart from the act of homage that any translation presupposes, almost no extant source – direct or indirect – seems available when trying to reconstruct Wordsworth’s critical opinions on Ariosto’s work, let alone verifying whether his views changed over time. From this point of view, Wordsworth’s mention of Ariosto’s ‘genius’ in the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815) is hardly illuminating, as it simply serves to affirm that Spenser’s genius was ‘of a higher order’.71 Equally unhelpful is the later remark that ‘Ariosto and Tasso are very absurdly depressed in order to elevate Dante’, or the further comparison between Spenser and Ariosto, which proves to be unfavourable yet again for the Italian poet: ‘Ariosto is not always sincere; Spenser always so’.72 Finally, of little significance is the poet’s mention of Angelica’s flight in Book IX of The Prelude, which intersects with the reference to Erminia’s flight in the Gerusalemme Liberata,73 while alluding less explicitly to Hellenore, the fugitive heroine of the Malbecco episode in the Faerie Queene.74 If anything may be deduced from these scattered references then, it is that, rather than offer specific comments on Ariosto’s poem, Wordsworth creates intertextual structures, which tout court assimilate Orlando Furioso to ‘the hemisphere of magic fiction’,75 that world of romance with which, according to the canons of a scholarly tradition still insensitive to subtle generic distinctions, Ariosto’s romantic epic, Tasso’s heroic poem, and Spenser’s romantic allegoric epic are associated at the time.76 Both Wordsworth’s comments on Ariosto and his translation of the same poet are equally disappointing: rather than put forward arguments, Wordsworth voices dismissive, peremptory judgements. Nor does he show the same perceptiveness towards Ariosto’s art that emerges in Rose’s subtle remarks on the cumulative sublimity of the Furioso. In 1816, Wordsworth was to explain to Southey that ‘there are great objections’ to the use of the Italian ottava rima – or Spenserian stanza – in long works, because of the ‘diffuseness’ they are ‘apt to generate’, an opinion which merely and ungraciously amplifies Milton’s 70

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72 73 74 75

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See ‘Address to the Benevolent Reader’, in Orlando Furioso of Lodovico Ariosto, With an explanation of equivocal words, and poetical figures, and an elucidation of all the passages concerning history or fable, by Agostino Isola, 4 vols (Cambridge: The Editor, 1789), I, pp. 22-25. Agostino Isola’s activities in Cambridge have been carefully documented by June Sturrock, who nonetheless tends to overrate his edition of the Orlando Furioso, crediting it with a critical approach that the work does not possess. ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, III, p. 67: ‘The name of Spenser, whose genius is of a higher order than even that of Ariosto, is at this day scarcely known beyond the limits of the British Isles’. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols (London, 1876), III, p. 465. VII. 1-3, in Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, ed. by Marziano Guglielminetti, 2 vols (Milan: Garzanti, 2000). See Faerie Queene, Book III, Canto x. See Book VI, ll. 103-04, in William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995): ‘The hemisphere / Of magic fiction, verse of mine perhaps / May never tread’. The tendency to assimilate works that belong to different literary genres, as is the case with the Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata, is both attested and criticised by Ugo Foscolo in his important essay on the ‘Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians’, published in The Quarterly Review in 1819. Referring to Ariosto’s and Tasso’s masterpieces, Foscolo observes: ‘Romantic poetry is separated from heroic poetry by a boundary so definite and so clearly marked, that it is strange the distinction should hitherto have escaped observation’. See Ugo Foscolo, Opere, Tomo II, ed. by Franco Gavazzeni (Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1981), p. 1708.

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notorious observations on ‘the bondage of rhyme’.77 Rather than when he comments on Ariosto, in fact Wordsworth deserves more attention when – as a poet – he focuses on romance and tries to define his own role in modern times through his relashionship to it. I shall turn, therefore, to Peter Bell, the manifesto in verse in which Wordsworth offers a defence of his own commitment to everyday life and experience, significantly alluding to the past poetical tradition, and Ariostesque poetry in particular. Written in 1798, and revised several times before its publication in 1819, Peter Bell is a playful, almost derisive farewell to the poetry of romance uttered by a poet who situates himself on the divide between ‘the realm of fancy’ (l. 106) and ‘experience’ (l. 120), or, as otherwise indicated, the divide that separates two ages: the past, evoked as a time ‘when all mankind / Did listen with a faith sincere / To tuneful tongues in mystery versed’ (ll. 126-28), and the present, which the poet defines as ‘an age too late’ (l. 132). Hence, the almost unavoidable, though painful rejection of romance in favour of a commitment to prosaic reality and the commonplace: painful, at least, according to the account given by Wordsworth in The Prelude (Book V) where, recalling his early youthful love of romances, legends, fictions of love, and endless adventures,78 the poet sadly confesses his present inability to respond to those readings with the accustomed warmth and self-forgetfulness: I am sad At thought of raptures now for ever flown; Even unto tears I sometimes could be sad To think of, to read over, many a page, Poems withal of name, which at that time Did never fail to entrance me, and are now Dead in my eyes as is a theatre 79 Fresh emptied of spectators .

It would be tempting to detect in those ‘poems withal of name’ a specific, albeit tacit, reference to the work Wordsworth lovingly indicated as ‘my companions in the Alps’ and, therefore, take this passage, written in early 1804, as the final outcome of the process of human and personal growth which is described in Book V of The Prelude. The translation from Ariosto – possibly undertaken when ‘we begin to love what we have seen’80 – might As is well known, Milton reacts against ‘the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyme’, equating it with none other than a ‘hindrance and constraint [for poets] to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have expressed them’. Similarly, Wordsworth sees the stanza as a cumbersome contrivance, in so far as it leads the poet astray: ‘The sense required – he argues – cannot be included, in one given stanza, so that another whole stanza is added not infrequently for the sake of matter which would naturally include itself in a very few lines’. It has to be noticed though, that while Milton acknowledges that rhyming has been ‘graced indeed by the use of some famous modern poets’, Wordsworth applies his observations precisely to those works the author of Paradise Lost possibly had in mind. For Milton, see ‘The Verse’, in Paradise Lost, ed. by Scott Elledge (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 4. For Wordsworth, see The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1812-1820, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), III, p. 185. 78 The Prelude, Book V, ll. 521-26. 79 The Prelude, Book V, ll. 568-75. 80 The Prelude, Book V, l. 565. 77

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thus be viewed as encoding within its very texture the old as well as the new love, and its very existence, together with its many blemishes, regarded as evidence of the author’s divided allegiance. Book V, however, is important in another, less conjectural, sense, since it focuses on the transition upon which Peter Bell – and its prologue in particular – expands, mutating it into cultural history. The transition, that is, from the romance of pure fantasy to that of credible marvels, which Book V describes as the poet’s personal experience, relating how the enthusiasm once engendered in him by fantastic narratives has not died, but has rather undergone a process of transformation, yielding to more enduringly worthy objects of love and enthusiasm. Thus, in parallel to the historical perspective adopted in Peter Bell, the ‘romance of tradition’ becomes ‘the romance of the mind’; or, as Wordsworth states here, defining his own role as a modern poet, the ‘wonders fearlessly rehearsed’ in earlier times transmute into, and are superseded by the ‘nobler marvels than the mind / May in life’s daily prospect find – / May find or there create’.81 Even as the sense of the marvellous shifts from ‘the realm of faerie’ to ‘mother earth’ (ll. 106, 138), so the wish once nourished and gratified by ancient tales of adventure, becomes humanized: as the poet of The Prelude says, it remains a ‘wish for something loftier, more adorned, / Than is the common aspect, daily garb / Of human life’,82 but consciously inflected in the direction of what is familiar, visible, even undistinguished: Long have I loved what I behold – The night that calms, the day that cheers; The common growth of mother earth Suffices me – her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears. (ll. 136-40)

The flying canoe that, in the prologue to Peter Bell, literally carries the poet through the clouds to visit exotic and enchanted places, ‘bowers and ladies fair, / The shades of palaces and kings!’ (ll. 109-10) is consequently set aside. And, together with the little boat called the ‘Hippogriff’,83 another object drawn from the Ariostesque repertoire, ‘the magic ring’ (l. 141) too, is rejected. Or, at least, so the poet claims, though he does in fact appropriate and make use of its extraordinary revelatory power. For, as in Ariosto’s poem where Melissa’s ring – the symbol of reason – allows its bearer to see beyond deceitful appearances, so in Wordsworth’s poetics as in his poetry, the mind is endowed with the power to disclose what lies beyond what is commonly perceived: in other words, it is invested with the power to reveal the ‘wonders, of the world before us […] but for which […] we have eyes that see not’,84 as Coleridge famously wrote, commenting on the special imaginative quality of Wordsworth’s early production. Modern criticism has reconstructed the Romantic struggle with romance in terms of a dialectic, whose disjunctions and discontinuities are paradoxically functional to the ll. 148-50, in Peter Bell, in Selected Poems, ed. by Damian Walford Davies (London: J. M. Dent, 1994). Further references are in brackets after the text 82 The Prelude, Book V, ll. 599-601. 83 It is worth noticing that the word ‘hippogrif’ entered the English language towards the end of the seventeenth century in the wake of the popularity of Orlando Furioso. See Mario Praz, ‘L’Ariosto in Inghilterra’, p. 281. 84 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 169. 81

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resurrection and revitalization of the genre. In the Romantic age, according to Harold Bloom, romance becomes an internalized quest, having as its hero the poet himself, who, in a wholly naturalistic context, searches for what in religion is called salvation; and Geoffrey Hartman has argued, with particular reference to Wordsworth’s poetry, that the survival of romance was assured ‘by the very quality of his resistance to it’.85 Peter Bell was composed and revised over a period of twenty years (1798-1818), but the fact that its most arresting, revisionary declarations are at least posterior to 1806 should not be taken as proof of some kind of afterthought.86 On the contrary, the poem is remarkably coherent as a whole, as is testified even by its prefatory letter ‘To Robert Southey’, written as late as 1819. Here, Wordsworth expresses his enduring belief that ‘the Imagination not only does not require for its exercise the intervention of supernatural agency, but that [it] may be called forth […] for kindred results of pleasure, by incidents within the compass of poetic probability, in the humblest departments of daily life’.87 And, in fact, the inscription of the supernatural within the natural may be viewed as the most conspicuous and distinctive trait of Wordsworth’s poetry, so much so that if, on the one hand, it accounts for his reaction against the romance tradition, on the other, it also reveals the poet’s dependence on it. It is precisely this pattern of asserted discontinuities and unacknowledged continuities that emerges from the polemical allusions in the prologue to Peter Bell. Since it works in both directions, the intertextual structure created through allusion to the conventions of romance, and to Ariosto’s poem in particular, does in fact support Wordsworth’s claims of independence from past tradition, but, at the same time, reveal his indebtedness to it. Be it in the form of a magic ring or a hippogriff, that past resurfaces, together with its great masters, if only as a dimension to be rejected. Indeed, one might well argue that it is in the very moment of exorcizing his ghost, that Wordsworth marks out Ariosto as one of his predecessors. Aimed as they are at defining Wordsworth’s personal vision against the background of romance, the Ariostesque allusions in the prologue to Peter Bell may register, at a more subconscious level, anxiety and fear: the fear of an emancipation never to be attained, the ‘anxiety of influence’. They suggest, at least indirectly, the poet’s apprehension of being heir to that romance tradition he gleefully dismisses when asking the ‘Hippogriff’ leave to ‘Descend from this ethereal height’ (l. 157). Nor is this suspicion dispelled, but rather substantiated in this poetic manifesto by the poet’s declared intention to accommodate the machinery of romance to everyday life and experience (‘A potent wand doth sorrow wield; / What spell so strong as guilty fear? / Repentance is a tender sprite’, ll. 151-53), or, by his stated mission as a poet devoted to singing the ‘[nobler] marvels than the mind / May in life’s daily prospect find – / May find or there create’ (ll. 148-50). Certainly, the buoyant, jocose mood of Peter Bell hardly sets a dramatic stage for the confrontation between a

See Harold Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, The Yale Review, 58 (1969), 526-36, and Geoffrey Hartman, ‘False Themes and Gentle Minds’, in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 285. 86 For a different opinion, see John E. Jordan for whom ‘the famous lines taken as repudiation of the supernatural […] probably date from after 1812, and characterize a later Wordsworth’. ‘The Hewing of Peter Bell’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 7 (1967), p. 568. 87 ‘To Robert Southey’. See Peter Bell, in William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson, rev. by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 188. 85

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highly original poet and the threatening shadow of a precursor he dreads to acknowledge as such: a scene of desperate struggle and rivalry, as described by Harold Bloom, that sees the younger poet wrestling to achieve his own identity with every conceivable revisionary means, including that of perverse distortion and caricature.88 Nevertheless, it is this drama, acted out by a later poet who debases and belittles his ancestor’s poem, even at the cost of debasing and belittling his own poetical gifts, which might lie beneath the surface of Wordsworth’s translation of Ariosto. In no way indicative of either the translated poet’s or the translating poet’s poetical powers, but almost a mockery of both, Wordsworth’s fragment does in fact look like an unconscious act of artistic misreading, an almost selfdamaging parody of the original. Together with Wordsworth’s disconcerting comment ‘I can translate, and have translated, two books of Ariosto at the rate nearly of 100 lines a day’, it strikes us as a gesture inspired by hostility, by the urge to destroy the artistic value of the original text, rather than by the will to rescue Ariosto’s poetry from the distortions of current poetic fashion. Beneath it all is, perhaps, what finds expression in the prologue to Peter Bell: the urge for this modern poet to construct himself out of his involvement with Romance and, indeed, with Ariosto himself, whose legacy is significantly repudiated but not ignored. It is within this visionary cultural scene, dominated by the anxiety of influence, that Wordsworth’s mysteriously unsuccessful project to translate from the Orlando Furioso should perhaps be situated.

88

See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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APPENDIX William Wordsworth, Translation of Ariosto89 [Orlando Furioso, I. 5-14]

[5] Orlando who great length of time had been Enamour’d of the fair Angelica; And left for her beyond the Indian sea, In Media, Tartary and lands between Infinite trophies to endure for aye, Now to the west with her had bent his way Where, underneath the lofty Pyrenees, With might of French and Germans, Charlemagne Had pitch’d his tents upon the open plain, [6] To make Marsilius and king Agramant Each for his senseless daring smite his head, The one for having out of Afric led As many as could carry spear or lance, Th’other for pushing all Spain militant To overthrow the beauteous realm of France; Thus in fit time Orlando reach’d the tents But of his coming quickly he repents. [7] For there to him was his fair Lady lost, Taken away! How frail our judgments are She who from western unto eastern coast [...] with so long war Was taken from him now ‘mid such a band Of his own friends and in his native land, Nor one sword drawn to help the thing or bar! ’Twas the sage Emperor wishing much to slake A burning feud who did the Lady take. [8] For quarrels had sprung lately and yet were Twixt Count Orlando and Rinaldo: wroth Were the two kinsman, for that beauty rare With amorous desire had mov’d them both. The Emperor Charles who look’d with little favour On such contention, to make fast the aid The two Knights ow’d him, took away the Maid And to Duke Namo he in wardship gave her,

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The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), IV, pp. 367-69.

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[9] Promising her to him who of the two, During that contest on that mighty day, The greatest host of Infidels should slay And most excelling feats in battle do; But the baptiz’d, who look’d not for such fate, On that day’s conflict fled their foes before; The Duke a prisoner was with many more And the Pavillion was left desolate. [10] Wherein, the Lady (as it were in thrall Remaining there to be the Victor’s prize) Mounted, to meet such chance as might befall, Her courser, and at length away she flies. Presaging Fortune would the Christian faith Disown that day, into a wood she hies, Where she a knight on foot encountered hath Who was approaching in a narrow path. [11] Helmet on head and cuirass on his back, Sword by his side and on his arm his shield He ran more lightly on the forest track Than swain half naked racing in the field; Never did Sheperdess when she hath spied A snake turn round so quickly in her fear As drew Angelica the rein aside When she beheld the knight approaching near. [12] This was that doughty Paladin, the Son Of Amon Lord of Montalban in France, From whom his steed Bayardo, by strange chance, Had slipp’d not long before and loose had run. Soon as he to the lady turn’d his eyes, Though distant, he that mien angelical And that fair countenance did recognize, Whereby his knightly heart was held in thrall. [13] The affrighted Lady turn’d her Horse around And drove him with loose bridle through the wood, Nor e’er in rough ot smooth did she take thought If safer way or better might be found; 90 But pale, and trembling, taking heed of nought She left the horse to find what way he could, Now up now down along the forest fast She drove, and to a river came at last.

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This line has been amended following June Sturrock who convincingly proposes ‘heed’, where de Selincourt reads ‘her’. See June Sturrock, ‘Wordsworth’s Translations of Ariosto’, Notes and Queries (1979), 227.

Wordsworth’s Ariosto [14] There was Ferrano on the river brink All overspread with dust and faint with heat; Who thither from the fight had come to drink And to repose himself in this retreat; And there, though loth, he was compelled to stay; His helmet, while with thirst he drank amain, Had slipp’d into the river where it lay, Nor could he yet recover it again.

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LOOKING AT CONTEMPORARY ITALY: MAPPING THE PRESENT

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Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Università di Bologna)

Theatre and Theatricality in British Romantic Constructions of Italy

The Italian stage and the theatricality of Italian everyday culture are crucial features in Romantic-period descriptions and evaluations of Italy. What a country puts on stage in theatres large and small, as well as what it performs in its streets, places of worship, and parlours is part of its identity, customs, and beliefs. In addition, Romantic-period writers recognize and celebrate the contribution of the theatre to the creation of a national identity. Within the wider context of the Grand Tour, this essay discusses the theatre and theatricality of Italy as perceived, construed, and assessed by British travellers between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Through the travel accounts of Mrs Piozzi, Leigh Hunt, Lady Morgan, Lord Byron and many others, it demonstrates how, for Romantic-period commentators, Italian theatre and theatricality became a social and political arena which mattered not so much for the artistic quality of what was offered on stage, but rather as spaces on to which intellectuals could project their own preconceptions and preoccupations.

It is not easy today to talk about the Grand Tour because everything seems to have been said already, and there is always the fear of falling into the trap of banality. However, once you have accepted that you can, and must, still talk about it, then you discover that in effect the Grand Tour gives us the opportunity to re-read our own history. It helps us to decipher our past and reconsider a period in which Italy was becoming a nation and was beginning to take on the modern form that we know all too well, but with which we sometimes have difficulty identifying. This is particularly the case if, within the context of the Grand Tour, we speak of the theatre, and if, in addition, we believe theatre has played an important role in the formation of national consciousness. The British travellers of the Romantic period discovered this as well, yet they had been preceded by the great authors of classical Greece and Rome, the bold dramatists of the Italian Renaissance, and, most of all, William Shakespeare. In Great Britain alone, many authors and commentators took up the idea of the vital role played by theatre in shaping a nation: Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and then, later and with greater insistence, William Butler Yeats, all of whom were committed to building a national theatre that would be able to give a voice and an identity to their countries. After all, what a country puts on stage in theatres large and small, what it performs in its streets, places of worship, and parlours are its ‘habits’, both in the general sense of its customs and beliefs and in Bourdieu’s more specific sociological sense of habitus.1 On 1

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). On Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, see also Bridget Fowler, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (London: Sage, 1997), and Derek Robbins, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu: Recognizing Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991).

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these various stages, the hopes and fears of an entire nation are represented and dramatized, and the conflicts of class, race, and gender that animate it and divide it are focalized. This essay will examine the relationship between theatre, theatricality, and national habitus in the context of the Grand Tour in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, discussing the way in which Italians presented and represented themselves in the eyes of foreign traveller-spectators. The essay will focus on important areas of cultural interaction that are not always easy to decipher. This is particularly true when the travellers in question, men and women, wear the cloak of progressive, liberal thought, presenting themselves, at least in the expectations of their readers, as being more open towards a new and different national culture in a period – the post-Napoleonic and pre-Risorgimento era – which was crucial for the future identity of Italy as a nation. In order not to get lost in a mare magnum, I will focus my analysis on the testimonies of two chosen travellers, Leigh Hunt and Lady Morgan, and their permanence in Northern Italy, and will only occasionally digress to include other (not exclusively British) travellers. Byron wrote from Ravenna to John Murray on 8 October 1820, ‘Books of travels are expensive – and I don’t want them – having travelled already – besides they lie’.2 This statement about the unreliability of travel books is not merely the fruit of his usual irony, but rather the result of a personal experience that Byron was to reproduce skilfully in the adventures of two of the most famous ‘fictional’ characters in the history of poetry, Childe Harold and Don Juan. If the travellers lie, as Byron maintains, their lying takes a variety of forms, having the most diverse reasons and purposes. Susan Bassnett affirms that […] travel writings create their portraits explicitly for home consumption, thereby setting them up as the Other. While an account of a journey may seem to be innocent, there is always an ideological dimension, for the traveller is approaching his or her material from a particular perspective, the perspective of the outsider 3 writing for an inside group back home.

Therefore, according to Susan Bassnett, the account of the traveller may not be pure lies, but it certainly is a form of manipulation of the truth in the form of cultural transcodification. The traveller knows that the receiving culture, or audience, is not the culture that provides the material for the account, but the culture in which it has a value, namely the culture he or she left behind. For this reason traveller-spectators translate what they see and encounter into the codes and conventions they take with them. This is a process that inevitably involves a deformation, the transformation of the ‘target’ culture, the other, for the use and consumption of the ‘source’ culture, one’s own, and this relates in a significant way to the travellers of the Romantic period who arrive in Italy with a heavy burden of preconceptions and expectations. Hester Lynch Piozzi, one of the most famous among eighteenth-century English women travellers, in Padua gives us an early example of how the pre-codified images and inalienable codes, and specifically theatrical codes, of

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Letter to John Murray, 8bre, 1820, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973-94), VI, p. 200. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), p. 33.

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their own culture shape and modify the direct perception that travellers constructed of the reality they encountered: […] I went to the play with her [Countess Ferris], where I was unlucky enough to miss the representation of Romeo and Juliet, which was acted the night before with great applause, under the name of Tragedia Veronese. Monsieur de Voltaire was then premature in his declarations, that Shakespear was unknown, or known to be censured, except in his native country […] and I know not how it is, but to an English traveller each place presents ideas originally suggested by Shakespeare, of whom nature and truth are the perpetual mirrors […] When I first looked on the Rialto, with what immediate images did it supply me? Oh, the old long-cherished images of the pensive merchant, the generous friend, the gay companion, and their final 4 triumph over the practices of a cruel jew. Anthonio, Gratiano, met me at every turn […].

Piozzi candidly admits to her inability to see Italy, in this particular case the Rialto bridge, as it really is, unencumbered by the multitude of presences that her culture projected onto it through Shakespearean drama. Alongside Shakespeare, we might list John Webster’s nightmares or Ann Radcliffe’s fantasies, but the point is that each traveller operates such a projection on the basis of a cultural upbringing that is largely pre-established or precodified according to their national and social origins, although with individual motivations that are more strictly personal. Such motivations are often substantiated by functional scientific theories so that, for instance, in Italy Piozzi identifies ‘national characters’ on which to rely, observing, with some relief that ‘National character is a great matter: I did not know there had been such a difference in the ways of thinking, merely from custom and climate, as I see there is; though one has always read of it […]’.5 Lady Morgan was without doubt a ‘professional’ traveller. An affirmed writer and voyager, she went around Italy with a view to recounting a country that was highly expendable in a publishing market made voracious by the political mystery surrounding the nation following the recent opening of the frontiers, the fall of Napoleon, and the coming of the Restoration. As Hepworth Dixon states in Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Comparatively little was known of Italian society, or the condition of the country: Italy had just passed from the despotic but intelligent sway of Napoleon to the blessing of the ‘right divine to govern wrong’ of the Bourbons; and Lady Morgan’s work is full of eloquent lamentation and description of the change for the worse that had come over everything […] It is still the best description of the state of Italy, moral and 6 political, as it was at the period of the restoration of the Bourbons.

After a stay of a year in the country, on returning home to Ireland in 1820, Lady Morgan complained of the pressure that the public and the publisher Colburn were putting on her to finish writing the book or make public the information she had gathered: ‘I am now writing eight hours a day to get ready for publication by December, and endeavour to keep out of

4 5 6

Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, 2 vols (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1798) I, p. 225. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections, I, p. 105. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence, ed. by W. Hepworth Dixon, 2 vols (London: William H. Allen, 1862), II, p. 144.

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the world as well as I can, but invitations pour in. People are curious, I suppose, to hear some news from Rome, and I want to keep it for my book’.7 Just before she left for Italy, Lady Morgan had in fact seen the success of another travel book, France, which gave her the solid reputation of being one of the few liberal writers in the new Europe. France might have rendered her ‘undesirable’ to the French government, but opened the doors of the Italian salons to her, and also the hearts of the Italians, who, on the strength of her liberal ideas welcomed her with great trust and cordiality to the point that some of them, friendly quoted in Italy, were brutally persecuted after she left the country. What matters here, however, is that, as she herself admits, the lens through which she observes Italy in the course of her travels is ideologically oriented, intent as it is on showing what is left after the fall of the Cisalpine Republic, and on giving confirmation of how lack of freedom can destroy a nation: ‘In “France” and “Italy” I attempted to expose the evils of despotic governments, in opposition to the blessings and benefits of a representative government – to display the fatal effects of a powerful and intolerant superstition, as opposed to the enlightened doctrines of rational and revealed religion. I did this […] at all risks and at all sacrifices’.8 It is a fact that Italy opens with a ‘brief sketch of Italian story’, a historical outline on the development of the civil life and customs in the country occupying the entire first chapter of the book, and at the end of which Lady Morgan, aware of the many stereotypes that influenced British perceptions of Italy, states: ‘To trace the result of this European revolution in Italy, which broke up for ever the stale institutes of feudality, and the power of the Church, is the object of the following pages; to which the foregoing brief sketch of Italian story has been necessary. For while the classical annals of Italy, with all their vices and crimes, make a part of the established education of England, the far nobler history of the Italian Republics, “les siècles des mérites ignorés”, remains but little known, notwithstanding the analogy of their free political institutions to our own, and their early dissemination of knowledge through the rest of Europe’.9 Be that as it may, her Italy appeared in 1821 in three volumes, and it was not long before it was a best seller in Europe, and one of the travel books most loved and talked about by the Italians, who, however, found it immediately censured by the authorities. Its success was also acknowledged, among others, by Byron and Mary Shelley, and its influence widely recognized. The other traveller whose accounts I intend to examine is Leigh Hunt, a very special traveller on many counts. Geographically and physically, Hunt is to be considered the most static of the English Romantics – since he spent practically the whole of his existence in London – but intellectually he is the most fascinated by Italian literature and art, so much so that, as the founder of what was contemptuously called the ‘Cockney school’ of poetry, he had a decisive role in transmitting a love for Italy and the classics to writers like Percy Shelley, Byron, and up to a point Keats, all of whom chose it as the country they wanted to 7 8

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Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, II, p. 139. ‘Letter to the Reviewers of “Italy”; Including an Answer to a Pamphlet Entitled, “Observation upon the Calumnies and Misrepresentation in Lady Morgan’s Italy”’ by Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) (London: Henry Colburn, 1821), pp. 6-7, 8. Lady Morgan, Italy, 3 vols (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1821), I, p. 25.

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live in. Leigh Hunt arrived in Italy on the invitation of Shelley and Byron, not to travel but to live, the idea being to set up a colony of free thinkers between Pisa and Leghorn together with a group of young compatriots, and found a journal, The Liberal, that would be the printed ‘spokesman’ of their reformist thought. What remained of that utopian dream after the premature death of Shelley were four issues of The Liberal, where we find Leigh Hunt’s four articles on his Italian experience, ‘Letters from Abroad’, written for people back in England. The lens Hunt uses is panoramic, aimed at capturing everything his eye encompasses, but the abundance of images rests on an interpretation that in this case too is ideologically and culturally predetermined. In the articles and letters he writes for The Liberal the intended audience is clearly the English reader so that, as the subtitle of the journal implies – Verse and Prose from the South – the world it means to stage has to be characterized by a Mediterranean quality, albeit from a different, reformist perspective, and a reformist one, compared to the traditionally more conservative vision of Northern travellers in Italy. But in actual fact Italy becomes for Hunt too an enormous theatre, a massive spectacle, a performance in which religion and art, nature and politics are mixed together indistinctly. Right from his arrival in the port of Genoa, he sees the city as a grandiose amphitheatre: ‘Imagine a glorious amphitheatre of white houses, with mountains on each side and at the back. The base is composed of the city with its churches and shipping; the other houses are country seats, looking out, one above the other, up the hill’.10 In this theatrical space, men, women, and children become fictional, and are transformed unwittingly into actors and walk-on parts. They come alive and act a role they have not chosen, their lines written by an outsider to their community: ‘I had scarcely set foot in Genoa (which was the first time I had been in the South) when I encountered a religious procession. I found chairs brought out in one of the streets, and well-dressed company seated on each side, as in a music room. […] The reader must imagine a narrow street with the company, as above-mentioned, and an avenue left for the passage of the spectacle’.11 Hunt uses a simile that is unmistakably theatrical, as he describes the procession using terms such as ‘spectacle’ and ‘music room’; whereas the ‘chairs brought out’ and the ‘well-dressed company’ suggest an audience that participates and feels united, and from which the narrator distances himself, constructing a sophisticated system of metatheatricality and trompe l’oeil, of ‘spectacle’ (the procession) ‘within the spectacle’ (the audience that for the traveller becomes a large group of extras). Hunt then describes, not without great astonishment, the small but richly adorned statues of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist and the crowd following along behind made up of priests bearing lighted candles, each accompanied by one of the local people who, out of pure poverty, gather up the precious wax from the candles. It is a multi-coloured crowd that Hunt observes and describes, but in no way does he feel part of it; it is a community ‘whose appearance was singularly striking to a foreigner from a Protestant country’.12 This fact of a Protestant observer being captivated and incredulous before the popular religious processions and celebrations in Italy is something that repeats itself over and over again in the writings of ‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter II. – Genoa, in The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1978), no. 2, p. 269. 11 ‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter II. – Genoa, no. 2, pp. 277-78. 12 ‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter II. – Genoa, no. 2, pp. 277-78. 10

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Northern travellers. But the feeling of uneasiness is quickly re-elaborated and emptied of any kind of ideologically unacceptable or emotionally disruptive content, as is all too apparent as early as 1766, when Tobias Smollett records his amazement before a procession of Virgins and priests. This episode is to be found in Letter XXVII from Florence, in his Travels through France and Italy, where the embarrassment of the observer is in full sight, but is also rapidly mediated by an ‘educated’ scepticism which in the end demolishes the very authenticity of the vision. The dubious degree of participation the traveller notices, or thinks he notices, among the people present at the religious ceremony transforms it, in his eyes, into pure theatrical performance or, rather, into what Smollett calls ‘church pageantry’: Here is also a wretched troop of comedians for the bourgeois, and lower class of people: but what seems most to suit the taste of all ranks, is the exhibition of church pageantry. I had occasion to see a procession […] It was the anniversary of a charitable institution in favour of poor maidens […] Amidst all the scenery of the Roman catholic religion, I have never yet seen any of the spectators affected at heart, or discover the least sign of fanaticism. The very disciplinants, who scourge themselves in the holy-week, are generally peasants or 13 parties hired for the purpose […].

For the majority of austere travellers from the North, Italy inevitably takes on the features of otherness; in it they seek a sensuality they consider alien to their own cultures and a vitality they think they will not find in their own countries. It is no coincidence that in Robert Schumann, as Maurizio Giani writes in an interesting article on Schumann and Brahms, Italy, starting from its language, becomes a symphony. A symphony made up of sounds, colours, and smells in a synaesthetic triumph which eventually repulses the austere Johann Gottfried von Herder, who goes so far as to affirm: ‘where everything is sensual, one becomes insensitive’.14 If Italy presents itself as pure synaesthesia, the traveller sharpens his perceptions, and if the senses of smell and hearing play their part in satisfying his curiosity, it is the refining of the eye that knows no bounds. Italy becomes a living picture in which the colours inebriate the intellect. The landscapes and the people are captured in little sketches and pastoral scenes, or in panoramic canvasses by painters ranging from Salvator Rosa to Poussin, Turner and even Titian: ‘You learn for the first time in this climate, what colours really are’, writes Hunt, ‘No wonders it produces painters. An English artist of any enthusiasm might shed tears of vexation, to think of the dull medium through which blue and red come to him in his own atmosphere, compared with this. To-day we saw a boat pass us, which instantly reminded us of Titian […] and yet it contained nothing but an old boatman with a red cap, and some women with him in other colours, one of them in a bright yellow petticoat. […] The old boat-man, with his brown hue, his white shirt, and his read cap, made a complete picture; and so did the women and the yellow petticoat’.15

‘Letter XXVII from Florence’, in Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, ed. by Frank Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 220-21. 14 Maurizio Giani, ‘Schumann, Brahms e l’Italia’, in Atti dei Convegni Lincei, 165 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2001), p. 22 (my translation). 15 ‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter II. – Genoa, no. 2, p. 284. 13

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What the traveller sees, however, is only partially true and the images he gives us are in many cases much older than the moment he believes he has impressed them on his retina and on the page. They are stratified, pre-codified images mediated by innumerable readings and other worlds. This becomes clear as soon as the traveller/spectator Hunt stops responding ‘sensually’ and, in the guise of a true reformist intellectual, begins to produce theories on what he has seen. The process starts with that first small squad of men making their way towards him to guide the ship into port, and which he describes in detail, analyzing the vessel, the seamen’s clothes, and their expressions. But those men instil fear in him, unsettle him. They represent all that is disquieting, and his political and intellectual upbringing requires him to throw light on this disquiet. What disturbs him, he confesses, is the lack of harmony in their features, with the exception of one of them. And he goes back to this lack of harmony, making an astounding generalization about the reasons for the unattractive appearance of Genoese men. Hunt even puts forward a physiognomical theory, which – though not new in the ambit of theories on peoples and races that, from Johann Kaspar Lavater to Madame de Staël, had marked the previous century in various ways – leaves the modern reader more than a little perplexed. Hunt deduces that the ugliness of the men is an honour to them. It is not inborn, but is purely the consequence of disillusionment, a sort of collective political protest, a bodily rebellion against those, such as tyrants, who have ‘brutalised’ them, or literally, ‘made them like brutes’: ‘is it, after all, an honourable one to the Italians? Is it that the men, thinking of the moral and political situation of their country, and so long habituated to feel themselves degraded, acquire a certain instinctive carelessness and contempt of appearance’.16 Surprisingly, unlike their men, Genoese women have remained beautiful. In part, out of innate female narcissism and superficiality, in part, out of an instinctive sense of survival, the women ‘have retained a greater portion or their selfpossession and esteem’.17 The beauty of their looks is equalled by their gait. Their movements are graceful and elegant, simulating, with total naturalness, harmonious dance steps. If these opinions might make us smile, especially if we consider that they were uttered by a person who, in the early nineteenth century in England, had spent years in prison for having defended freedom of thought, of expression, and of the press, those expressed on the subject by Lady Morgan are no less amusing. For example, in Bologna, while she is struck by the urbanity and the degree of independence its citizens still enjoy after Napoleon’s fall, she is also overwhelmed by the paintings of Guido Reni and Raphael, which she interprets, as Percy and Mary Shelley did, as the result of the freedom the ancient Italian city-states enjoyed. Yet, only a little later, she discusses the portrait of Guido Reni by Simone da Pesaro, and what fills her with enthusiasm is not only the artistic value of the picture, but also Guido’s pure physical beauty: ‘What a race did the free States of Italy leave behind them! What noble countenance! What splendid forms! There are still fine heads in Italy; but nothing comparable to this! […] Energies developed, passion awakened, views ennobled by

16 17

‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter III Italy. – Genoa, no. 2, p. 53. ‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter III Italy. – Genoa, no. 2, p. 53.

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their objects, imaginations heated and exercised – these are the true sources of beauty’.18 And, by contrast, immediately afterwards she indulges in dismal reflections on the appearance of contemporary Italians. Thus the behaviourist arguments invoked by Thomas Paine and William Godwin to justify the political violence of the French revolutionary masses, a violence caused in their view by the long state of slavery in which the nation had been kept, and during which it had learnt from the tyrant violence and terror, are here translated into physiognomics. Not unlike Mary Shelley’s monstrous being, the Italians have been made ugly by the state of solitude and isolation in which they have been left by the rest of Europe, an ugliness made all the more evident by the disillusionment for the collapse of the old ideals. This is not to say that, for these wise and philanthropic travellers, the Italians do not present innate traits. Quite the opposite. For them, too, the Italians have a ‘natural’ bent for music, dance, and the theatre. These are natural talents or characteristics which, according to the circumstances, disturb or inspire the casual or deliberate observer, but which in any case make of the Italian a rhapsodist, a term Shelley was to use in The Defence of Poetry to define his poet, perhaps, as Paul Dawson suggests, precisely because he was influenced by Tommaso Sgricci, the most renowned of Italian improvvisatori, whom he never ceased to extol: ‘it can be argued that the example of Sgricci led Shelley to define the Imagination in terms of unconscious processes, and to claim in the Defence that ‘the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic’ of the arrival and departure of the essential creative inspiration.19 Shelley’s poet is, therefore, very Italian, and like Plato’s Ion, he improvises his verses as he dictates them, prey to a superior, divine, power, and driven by an uncontrollable visionary elation from which he awakens once the spell is broken, forgetting what it was that inspired it. In contrast, for Lady Morgan, the facility the Italians have for improvising conceals poverty of thought, and it is no coincidence, observes the Irish traveller, that improvisation has always been encouraged by the Church and governments: The peculiar feature of the Italian Academy is its intolerable flux of verse; a circumstance arising, in some measure, from the genius of the language, but still more favoured by that of the ecclesiastical and civil government of the country: which not only punishes the higher exertions of thought, but, by the education it enforces, incapacitates the subject for thinking. Smooth, harmonious, and sounding lines, readily cover poverty of ideas and inconclusive reasoning; and the incoherent rambling and misplaced expletives of the improvisatori […] Through the operation of these causes, every town in Italy is over-run with poetasters; and 20 births, deaths and marriages […]

Seemingly, the language of the country is improvisation, and it is natural for people to speak in verse, as the anonymous writer of the article ‘Improvisers’ in The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was to reiterate yet again in 1839,

Lady Morgan, Italy, II, pp. 29-30. P. M. S. Dawson, ‘Shelley and the Improvvisatore Sgricci: An Unpublished Review’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 32 (1993), p. 23. 20 Lady Morgan, Italy, II, pp. 240-41. 18 19

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where he even reports the story of the English general who when inspecting his troops comes across a little Italian drummer who can only answer his questions in ottava rima.21 The Northern travellers’ interpretation of Italian art as created out of spontaneity and natural inspiration, rather than out of intellectual energy and will-power, reminds us of the criticism generally directed at women’s literary and artistic production at the time, a criticism always extremely dismissive of their real value. It is a fact that spontaneity and naturalness prevent significance and, consequently, an art so conceived does not have to obey any rule or be included in any canon. Rather, it remains mere amusement. On the other hand, the diffusion of such hybrid figures as those of the improvvisatori was tolerated and even encouraged in Italy by institutions ruled by foreign and often dubiously democratic governments, since, as the expression of an ephemeral and transient form of art, it was thought to cause very little offence. In any case, those who ‘see’ and hear this language, such as the travellers, can do nothing to become part of the spectacle. They can only receive, and give nothing, spellbound by a piece of music or a dance that, because considered ‘natural’, arouse sensations similar to those produced by contact with the colours and scents of Italian nature. Leigh Hunt is also of the conviction that the Italians are natural artists. Writing from Pisa, he says: ‘Boys go about of an evening, and parties sit at their doors, singing popular airs, and hanging as long as possible on the last chord. It is not an uncommon thing for gentlemen to play their guitars as they go along to a party. I heard one evening a voice singing past a window, that would not have disgraced an opera’.22 Schumann, on the other hand, although in the inebriation of a memory, betrays the limits of comparing nature and art. On 6 November 1829, having just returned from Italy, he writes to Friedrich Wieck: ‘My goodness! You haven’t yet got your own opinion about Italian music, which has to be listened to under the sky that generated it – that is, the Italian sky [...] How I was enraptured by Rossini, or rather [Giuditta] Pasta’.23 Once again, if Italy as a ‘naturally’ artistic synaesthesia, so to speak, pleasurably strikes the spectator’s senses, it does not with the same force open up a passage into his critical intelligence or, rather, his aesthetic judgement. Even the greatest of Italian musicians, Rossini, about whom the Romantic travellers – Stendhal and Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley – wrote floods of words, ends up paying for his being Italian. In fact, it was Schumann who coined the metaphor describing the Italian composer’s fragility. In 1831, after listening to L’italiana in Algeri (at Leipzig), he noted in his diary: ‘Rossini – a butterfly! But if you take away that bit of coloured dust, all that’s left is a dull skeleton, without splendour’.24 Heine, who heard Rossini during his journey of 1828, sets himself up as his paladin, although he does not neglect to say how his genius is an exquisitely Italian phenomenon: Rossini, divino maestro, Helios of Italy, spreading your rays over the world! Forgive my poor compatriots, who mistreat you on their writing paper and on their blotting paper! But I rejoice listening to your golden

‘Improvvisatori’, in The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 452 (20 April 1839), p. 145. 22 ‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter III Italy. – Pisa, in The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, no. 2, pp. 118-19. 23 Quoted in ‘Schumann, Brahms e l’Italia’, p. 24 (my translation). 24 Quoted in ‘Schumann, Brahms e l’Italia’, p. 24 (my translation). 21

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sounds, your melodic lights, your splendorous butterfly dreams [...] In order to love Italian music you have to 25 have before your eyes the Italian people, its sky, its character, its faces, its sorrows and its joys [...].

And yet, only a few decades earlier – before the Revolution, Napoleon, and the Holy Alliance – Hester Piozzi, who seemed enthusiastic about Italian theatres and showed interest in the numerous improvisers she met in the course of her journey, nevertheless went on to state that improvisation was not an exclusively Italian characteristic. Smollett too, before Piozzi, had denied with great determination that the Italians had a natural talent for music, even if he did acknowledge that Italy possessed the merit of being the cradle of music: ‘Italy is certainly the native country of this art; and yet, I do not find the people in general either more musically inclined or better provided with ears than their neighbours’.26 So it is post-Napoleonic Italy, the Italy of the Restoration and political silence, that intrigues the reformist traveller; whereas it is contemporary Italian art, high art, that with a few exceptions – such as Alfieri, who met with general approval – is seen with diffidence or preconceived patronization. In effect, even the more favourable appraisals are tinged with a certain condescendence. After all, to the eye of the Northern traveller, the Italy of the early nineteenth century is weak and decadent, and its art, no less than its people, cannot but betray this frailty. Leigh Hunt, for example, tells of his experience at the opera with a touch of uneasiness. The experience, he confesses, left him indifferent, with the sole exception of Rossini, who had thrown Italy into a state of confusion and who, at least on this count, had to be mentioned: ‘The favourite composer here, and all over Italy, is Rossini; for which, as well as the utter neglect of Mozart, some national feelings may enter into others less pardonable. But Rossini is good enough to make us glad to see genius of any sort appreciated’.27 To quote Rossini was inevitable. All the travellers were stunned by the overwhelming praise the composer received wherever he went in Italy. The Shelleys, Leigh Hunt, Stendhal, Byron or Lady Morgan and many others, all reported their amazement. From Venice Byron gives John Cam Hobhouse an account of his own opera-going experience: There has been a splendid Opera lately at San Benedetto – by Rossini – who came in person to play the Harpsichord – the People followed him about – crowned him – cut off his hair ‘for memory’; he was Shouted and Sonnetted and feasted – and immortalized much more than either of the Emperors. In the words of my Romagnola […] ‘Ciò ti mostri una Quadri morale del’Paese; e ti basta’. – Think of a people frantic for a 28 fiddler – or at least an inspirer of fiddles. – I doubt if they will do much in the Liberty line.

Byron’s scepticism, but also his grim political reading of Rossini’s popularity, somehow go hand in hand with Leigh Hunt’s own ideological interpretation that saw Rossini as the Italian answer to the Austrian political leadership embodied by Mozart:

Quoted in ‘Schumann, Brahms e l’Italia’, p. 24 (my translation). ‘Letter XXVII from Florence’, in Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, p. 220. I am indebted to Lia Guerra for this indication. 27 ‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter II. – Genoa, no. 2, p. 283. 28 Letter to John Cam Hobhouse of 17 May 1819, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, VI, pp. 130-32. 25 26

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You ask me to tell you a world of things about Italian composers, singers, &c. Alas! […] that for music you must ‘look at home’ […] but I will tell you one thing […] that Mozart is nothing in Italy, and Rossini every thing. Nobody ever says any thing of Mozart, since Figaro (tell it not in Gothaland) was hissed at Florence. His name appears to be suppressed by agreement; while Rossini is talked of, written of, copied, sung, hummed, whistled, and demi-semi-quavered from morning to night. If there is a portrait in a shop-window, it is Rossini’s […] But Rossini is not Paesiello? True. He gives us a delightful air now and then; but in the hurry of his industry and his animal spirits, pours forth a torrent of common-places […] Nevertheless, he has animal spirits, – he runs merrily; his stream is for the most part native […]– Mozart was a German. I do not mean simply that he was a German in music; but he was German by birth. The Germans in Italy, the lorders over Italian freedom and the Italian soil, trumpet his superiority over Italian composers […] this is enough to make the Italians hate him […] and not even the non-chalance of his own conduct towards kings and composers (which was truly edifying) could reconcile them to the misery of preferring any thing German to the least 29 thing Italian.

It follows that on Rossini himself, on the quality of his own music and operatic production very little was said. It should not surprise us, however, that music, melodrama, pantomime and dance are still the most evident genres on the horizon of the theatrical production of Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however they may be judged. The so-called ‘spoken drama’ – or as the English called their theatre of the early part of that century, the ‘legitimate theatre’ – had no chance of surviving, being suffocated by censorship and by the disputes between intellectuals of the various literary movements, above all those between Classicists and Romanticists. What really put a brake on production and performance was the police control and government repression that fell like an axe on contemporary comedy and tragedy from one end of the country to the other. Byron and Hobhouse, during their stay in Milan in 1818 – as guests of the ‘Romantics’ Di Breme, Berchet, Borsieri, and Pellico, but also as frequenters of Monti and Acerbi – give testimony of the complexity of the picture regarding the production of drama, and more in general of literature, in Italy at the time.30 They also record – although they do not seem to understand his efforts entirely – the determination of Di Breme in his fight for a national theatre and literature. And it is not an uncommon idea, as Alessandro Manzoni was soon to show in his Conte di Carmagnola and later with I promessi sposi. It is not a coincidence that Byron and Hobhouse promise the young Silvio Pellico, under the impulse of Di Breme’s enthusiasm, that they would translate his Francesca da Rimini so that it could be known on the other side of the Channel and, in the hope of the author and in the promise of the two Englishmen, fill at least the London stages with Italianness. It took Hobhouse thirteen days to translate Pellico’s Francesca da Rimini from the receipt of the manuscript on 17 October, although part of the work had been done by Byron (the entry in Hobhouse’s diary for Tuesday 22 October 1816 testifies to this: ‘We drove back in cold weather to Milan – dined – at night Byron and I translated part of Francesca da Rimini – I till late’). Even though this joint venture was again recorded on Friday 25 October 1816, it was Hobhouse who carried it to fulfilment, as 29 30

‘Letters from Abroad’, Letter III Italy. – Genoa, no. 2, pp. 47-51. On this theme, see Nick Havely ‘“This Infernal Essay”: English Contexts for Foscolo’s Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, in Imagining Italy: Literary Itineraries in British Romanticism, ed. by Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Bologna: Clueb, 2002), pp. 233-50, and my essay ‘“An Infernal Triangle”: Foscolo, Hobhouse, Di Breme and the Italian Context of the Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, in Imagining Italy, pp. 251-85.

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he noted in his diary on Wednesday 30 October 1816: ‘Finished Francesca da Rimini’. Encouraged by Byron e Di Breme, Pellico had high expectations of the translation and returned the favour translating Byron’s Manfred into Italian.31 Yet, although Hobhouse’s diary from the Milan period records that the translation was completed, nothing remains to demonstrate that the promise was kept. What is known is that Pellico ended up in prison and his Francesca da Rimini had to wait a long time before it was put on stage. As far as the Italian playhouses is concerned, during his stay in Milan Hobhouse experienced a wide variety of them: from his favourite, La Scala, as a guest in Di Breme’s box – where he and Byron saw operas and spectacular ballets, and where they realized that the theatre had become for the Italians a place of political conspiracy and social gathering – to the puppet show at the Teatro Girolamo ‘where puppets acted a play called Prometheo’ which the two English travellers found to be professionally performed and which they took as evidence of the classical education that even the lower classes shared in Italy. Significantly, the same company and the same genre aroused the indignation of Lady Morgan, who discerned in it a way of distracting public opinion and the lower classes from political reality.32 Finally they much enjoyed a farce at the Teatro Re where, despite the poverty of the costumes, they appreciated the quality of the acting.33 What is altogether evident is that Hobhouse refuses to blame whatever faults or limits he saw in the contemporary Italian dramatic scene on the political situation in which the country was plunged: Italy was, and still is, famous for the magnificence of her theatre; and dramatic writing was, and still is, her comparatively inferior accomplishment. Her political condition has generally been adduced as the suffering cause of this deficiency – it appears to me without reason, for Corneille and Molière were not the citizens of a 34 free state, nor did our own greatest dramatists live under such institutions as we now enjoy.

Years later, nevertheless, Byron recounts a quite different dramatic experience. This took place at the Arena del Sole in Bologna where, as a spectator, he was bowled over with commotion on seeing Alfieri’s Mirra. It is a Carbonaro-like experience, because the performance was authorized just for one evening without being allowed to be publicized in the official programme, under penalty of imprisonment for the company and the theatre manager.35 Alfieri’s play had such a striking effect on Byron not only for its pathos, but 31 32 33 34 35

For all quotations, see The Diary of John Cam Hobhouse (edited from B.L. Add. Mss. 56537), ed. by Peter Cochran, at http://www.hobby-o.com/ [online]. Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 141. See The Diary of John Cam Hobhouse. Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits from 1816 to 1854, by the Right Hon. Lord Broughton, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1859), I, pp. 86-87. ‘Dear Sir – I do not Know how far I may be able to reply to your letter – for I am not very well today. – Last night I went to the representation of Alfieri’s Mirra – the two last acts of which drew me into convulsions. – I do not mean by that word – a lady’s hysterics – but the agony of reluctant tears – and the choaking shudder which I do not often undergo for fiction. – This is but the second time for anything under reality, the first was on seeing Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach. – The worst was that the ‘dama’ in whose box I was – went off in the same way – I really believe more for fight – than any other sympathy – at least with the players – but she has been ill – and I have been ill and we are all languid & pathetic this morning – with great expenditure of Sal Volatile […]’. Letter to John Murray of 12 August 1819, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, VI, p. 212.

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also for the political meaning that the ‘daring’ performance took on owing to the severe censorship that Alfieri’s work suffered all over Italy. Going back to Lady Morgan, we find confirmation of how so many texts of great dramatists of the past and of the present were cancelled, censured or obstructed in one way or another. Because of censorship, in her view, the Italian theatre was based so largely on the classics and mythology, which were the only subjects that were allowed to be dealt with: […] the genius of Italy was driven ‘into a servile imitation’ of the classic theatre [...] In this respect, what Italy then was, Italy still is; the tragedies of Alfieri are forbidden, the ‘Aristodemo’ of Monti rarely played; and the inimitable author of Polissena (G. Batista Niccolini), a tragedy which received the prize from the Accademia della Crusca, given by Napoleon in 1810, is, in 1820, obliged to publish in England, because no Italian press 36 dared give vent to a production, in which beautiful poetry is made the vehicle of liberal sentiments.

But for this traveller from Ireland, Italians should not lose hope because the country clearly had talents, thanks to which it would rise again, once freedom was regained: ‘At the present moment Italy abounds in poetical talent. The names of Monti, of Niccolini, of Pellico, of Foscolo, and Manzoni, all living dramatic writers of eminence, – 160 – evince that freedom alone is wanting (that element without which true poetry is rarely produced), to revive the stage, and to raise the Italian tragedy to a greater elevation’.37 The theatre, she concludes, would rise again with the country and, having thrown off the ‘servile imitation’ of the classic theatre, it would look with spontaneous sincerity at its own history. A ‘permanent’ or national theatre would be created and a national language would follow; then, both theatre and language would be engaged in the foundation of a free nation. To succeed, according to Lady Morgan, the Italians need to commit themselves to a common goal, overcoming dangerous sectarianisms and fruitless literary disputes. Morgan finally turns to Pellico who, by this time, was in prison: But how fares it with the young and amiable author of ‘Francesca da Rimini?’ Silvio Pellico, the eulogized of a loyal British Review, the ‘poet of ardent and unstudied feeling’, whose tragedy is considered as ‘one beautiful example to justify the opinion, that Italians should look at home for their tragic subjets?’ […] At this moment Silvio Pellico is incarcerated in the dungeons of the police of Milan, and buried in solitary 38 confinement.

As for the theatre as a physical space, the travellers consider most playhouses all over the country to be dark, neglected, and melancholic, if not totally abandoned places, while the companies appear pitiful and improvised. Notable exceptions are the Scala and the San Carlo in Naples, considered on a level with, if not superior to, the best London theatres for the magnificence of their stage-sets and the artistic ability of their companies, and travel writers such as Lady Morgan devote pages of uncharacteristic enthusiasm to them. In Pavia, Morgan associates the Church with the theatre on several occasions, because she deems both to be levelling instruments of the will of the citizens. Through them, 36 37 38

Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 159. Lady Morgan, Italy, I, pp. 159-60. Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 159.

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‘despotism has long worked its wheels’. Moreover, both are tourists destinations with a number of things in common: ‘[…] In the morning we had been struck by the light, gaudy, brilliant church of Saint Francis, which might well pass for a court theatre: in the evening we were still more surprised by the appearance of a theatre, that until the rising of the curtain we could scarcely believe we had not come to a vesper service, instead of a comedy’.39 The performance seen in the ‘melancholy marble theatre’ of Pavia was a sentimental comedy by Federici, L’orfanello, followed by a farce, Le Trenta e tre disgrazie di Menichino, by the French writer Jocris, but based on the commedia dell’arte. Here, Morgan cites Le Théatre Italien de Ghepardi, acknowledging the debt both French and English theatre owe to the Italian commedia dell’arte and the theatre of Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Tasso. But, notwithstanding the profusion of marble that makes the theatre look like a church and the laughter produced by the farce, the actors are dressed in ‘shreds and patches’.40 In Genoa, then, as Hunt had noted before her, the theatre and opera had so little appeal that the better Genoese families preferred to amuse themselves at home engaging in private conversation.41 Lastly, Lady Morgan speaks of the Farnese theatre in Parma, a majestic place that was closed to the public, and of the ‘little theatre where opera is performed’: ‘It was extremely small, mean, filthy, ill-lighted, and shaped like a double square’.42 She attends a performance of Paul and Virginia, with the beautiful music of Guglielmi; but a ‘scanty audience [was] accounted for by the wretchedness of the performance’.43 The choir was made up of ‘tradesmen’, who only put on their stage costumes in the evening. This was a practice in vogue, affirms Lady Morgan peremptorily, in all Italian theatres except, as we have seen, those of Milan and Naples. Very often, on visiting Italian theatres and churches, British travellers record impressions of darkness and melancholy. And images of darkness and temporary blindness, as Jane Stabler points out in Unfolding the South (2003), ‘recur in travel writing about Italy […]often symbolising the loss of clear vision, a relinquishment of the acquisitive tourist gaze’.44 However, even when the theatre was unexceptionably beautiful, as with the Scala in Milan, and the performance staged absolutely extraordinary, as in the ballet d’action by the great choreographer Salvatore Viganò,45 even then, the enthusiasm was tempered and mitigated in non-aesthetic observations which might do honour to the philanthropic and Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 307. Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 310. Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 375. Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 403. Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 403. Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers as Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 18. 45 On Salvatore Viganò and the determining influence of his choreo-drama on Percy B. Shelley’s poetic production, see my essay ‘Il viaggio olistico di Shelley in Italia: Milano, la Scala e l’incontro con l’arte di Salvatore Viganò’, in Traduzioni, echi, consonanze: dal Rinascimento al Romanticismo / Translations, Echoes and Consonances: From the Renaissance to the Romantic Era, ed. by Roberta Mullini and Romana Zacchi (Bologna: Clueb, 2002), 165-83. See also my ‘Shelley’s Perception of Italian Art’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 6 ( 2001), 139-52. 39 40 41 42 43 44

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reformist zeal of the person who uttered them, but which did not do justice to the artistic worth of what was on stage, the art itself. In this way, before the ‘choreo-drama’ of Viganò, Lady Morgan, despite being filled with admiration and commotion, considers that dance not an elaborate example (a laborious achievement, the result of an infinite number of hours of rehearsal, besides genius) of true artistic capability, but rather, like Hunt at Genoa, a spontaneous and natural physical reaction to the long years of censorship and enslavement that the Italians, in general, had been subjected to: The Italian ballet always differed from every other, and seems to have been the origin of the modern melodrame. It borrows its perfection from causes which may be said to be not only physical, but political. The mobility of the Italian muscle is well adapted to the language of gesture, which breaks through even their ordinary discourse; while a habit of distrust, impressed upon the people by a fearful system of espionage, 46 impels them to trust their thoughts rather to a look or an action, than to a word or a phrase.

It is no accident that the paradigm of this politicized, natural, and ‘anti-logocentric’ language of the body is Viganò’s Othello. This brief excursus may be concluded with one last testimony by a traveller from the North of Europe, Heinrich Heine, who, although adopting the same parameters of judgement as Lady Morgan and Leigh Hunt, reached deeper insights in his reading of contemporary Italian dramatic art and, at the same time, offered the reader an interpretation of Rossini’s opera buffa of great intensity. For Heine, the latter was transformed into living history, into pain and protest, in a colossal metaphor of the history of Pre-Risorgimento Italy: Poor enslaved Italy is forbidden to speak; she can communicate her feelings only through music. All the resentment against foreign dominion, the enthusiasm for freedom, the delirium at the sense of impotence, the melancholy at the memory of past splendours, the gentle hoping, the listening and longing for help, all this lies hidden in the melodies [of Rossini], which from the grotesque intoxication of life slip into elegiac tenderness, 47 and into those pantomimes in which the flattering caresses are all of a sudden turned into menacing rage.

To conclude this brief Italian excursion or excursus, while Italy, its theatre, and theatricality became the socio-political space on to which intellectuals from the North projected their own ideological preconceptions and personal preoccupations, Italian culture itself remained frozen in a perpetual palimpsestic layering of stereotyped otherness.

46 47

Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 147. Quoted in ‘Schumann, Brahms e l’Italia’, p. 25 (my translation).

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Gioia Angeletti (Università di Bologna)

‘I Feel the Improvisatore’: Byron, Improvisation, and Romantic Poetics

After a preliminary reconstruction of the impact and diffusion of poetic improvisation in British Romantic-period literature, this essay addresses the importance of the improvvisatore’s art in Byron’s poetical theory and practice. Although he did not devote any work to this figure, his letters and satirical writings, especially Beppo and Don Juan, present several references to it. His judgements on the Italian improvvisatori, especially the notorious Tommaso Sgricci, tend to be ambiguous, if not contradictory, as are the numerous remarks in his journals and correspondence. If, on the one hand, like Shelley, Byron celebrates the expressive force and genius of the improvising poet/actor, on the other, he criticizes the quality of the improvised texts. Many critics have employed the notion of ‘improvisation’ and its derivatives to illustrate Byron’s style, which the poet himself called his ‘desultory rhyme’ to describe his passion for digression, anti-climax, and quick tonal shifts. ‘Carelessly I sing’, Byron writes in Don Juan. Although we must bear in mind his constant tendency to self-irony, it is undeniable that the conversational quality of the comic poems he composed in Italy reveal Byron as a virtuoso of this seemingly improvised style which, as with the Italian improvvisatori of the Romantic period, aimed at involving the reader in a complex dialogic pact with the author.

In the Elizabethan age the freedom to adapt a text or change it in the course of a performance was often regarded as indecorous and inelegant, as is evinced by the speech Hamlet addresses to one of the players in Act III. 2: ‘let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them’.1 Here, Hamlet is acting as a spokesman for Shakespeare’s critique of over-enthusiastic improvisation which risked elevating the actors’ histrionic and interpretive skills over the author’s creative genius. Yet Shakespeare’s criticism only makes sense in a context where such ‘actorly’ improvisation was a frequent occurrence. In Britain the querelle between these two lines of thought – total fidelity to the text on the one hand, and freedom to stray from it, adapt it, indeed invent it on the other – continued until the nineteenth century, when the ideological and cultural implications of the phenomenon became a preoccupation in contemporary accounts of Italian drama, poetry, and culture, as well as a major concern for the most authoritative representatives of European Romantic literature. One of the peculiarities of the reception of Italian improvisatory art on the part of foreign writers and intellectuals is that a divided, even contradictory response, sometimes marked individual reactions to it. Thus, Lord Byron, as I will clarify later on, was both fascinated and alarmed by the practice of improvisation he personally witnessed during his Italian sojourn, with the result that his judgement oscillates between a liberal appreciation 1

III. 2. 38-39, Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 289.

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of its free expressions and a more conservative critique of the mediocrity of the recited texts. That Byron was not quite sure how to respond even to adaptations of pre-existing texts is evident in the following comment from a letter to Samuel Rogers of 3 March 1818 on the operatic version of Othello: ‘They have been crucifying Othello into an Opera (Otello by Rossini) – Music good but lugubrious – but as for the words! – all the real scenes with Iago cut out – & the greatest nonsense instead – the handkerchief turned into a billet doux, and the first Singer would not black his face […]’.2 In fact, Byron’s reaction was reiterated by other Romantic writers, including Germaine de Staël, who recognized the spectacular nature of some improvised performances but had reservations over their aesthetic quality and durable merits. Common opinions about the improvvisatori and improvvisatrici ranged from the high praise of those who regarded them as the most accomplished personifications of divinely inspired art and poetic genius (as Mary and Percy Shelley regarded the famous Tommaso Sgricci) to the utter dismissals of others who debunked their flair and reduced them to degraded artists or even frauds acting as if they were inventing on the spur of the moment under the pretence of a supernatural trance. In Italy, in particular, Pietro Giordani was among the detractors of extempore poetry, in particular when the sixteenthcentury theory of furor poëticus – inspiration, enthusiasm, and genius – was dissociated from the notions of wit and craft.3 Therefore, no consensus on the status of the improvvisatori and improvvisatrici emerged in the Romantic period and, despite the contemporary search for a poetic expression that would challenge the aesthetic and linguistic codifications of eighteenth-century literature, it would be another hundred years before such aesthetic developments as the Stanislavsky method, or the actor’s free exploration and spontaneous interpretation of a character, then further developed by Dada, Surrealism, and the ‘happening’, gave improvisation a more secure status. British Romantic theatre, in particular, with the exception of some ‘illegitimate’ forms such as the pantomime, the extravaganza, and the hippodrama, would not allow much space to improvisation, so that it was largely in the field of aesthetic theories and poetics that the Italian phenomenon exerted a strong influence. That it also became an object of lit2 3

Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973-94), VI, p. 18. Henceforth cited in parenthesis as BLJ. According to Giordani, however admirable some of the improvvisatori’s performances might have been, glorifying their poetry meant undermining two fundamental requirements of art, that is, wits and study, or labor limae: ‘Non v’è altro furore che l’ingegno; non altra ispirazione che dallo studio’ (‘Poetic frenzy is the same as talent; inspiration only comes from study’ (my translation). Pietro Giordani, ‘Dello Sgricci e degl’improvvisatori in Italia’, in Opere, a cura di A. Gussalli, 14 vols (Milan: Borroni e Scotti-Sanvito, 184562), X, p. 106. This essay is a reprinted version of an earlier one appeared in Biblioteca Italiana, year I, no. IV (October, November, and December 1816), pp. 365-75. In fact, other eminent Italian literary historians either overlooked or attacked the phenomenon of improvisatory poetry. For example, Walter Binni does not treat it at all in his study Preromanticismo italiano (1948), ignoring (whether on purpose we cannot know) the relation of improvisation to Romantic ideas of poetry. Benedetto Croce is another detractor, especially when he observes: ‘Intorno agli improvvisatori si è scritto abbastanza e, in verità, di essi non è da dir molto’ (‘Enough has been written on improvvisatori, and, in fact, there is not much to say about them’). See Benedetto Croce, ‘Gli improvvisatori’, in La letteratura italiana del settecento (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1949), p. 299. Croce’s critique is in antithesis to that of Carlo Ludovico Fernow in Über die Improvisatoren (1806), which is a defence of extempore art against excessive meditation. Finally, among the Italians, Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi were also very sceptical about the value of improvised verse.

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erary conversations and debates is confirmed by the following dialogue between ‘Byron’ and Odoherty (the fictional alter ego of the Irish writer William Maginn) from the Noctes Ambrosianae (no. 4, July 1822): BYRON. […] Pray, have you seen any of our Italian Improvisatores as yet? What do you think of their art? ODOHERTY. That I can beat it. BYRON. In English or Irish? 4 ODOHERTY. In any language I know—Latin or Greek, if you like them.

And this exchange is followed by Byron’s reading of a song by the antiquary Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), which Odoherty extemporizes in Latin with such skill as to provoke Byron’s exclamation ‘Bravo – bravissimo! – why, you would beat old Camillo Querno if you would only learn Italian’.5 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, British people’s knowledge of Italian improvisation, improvvisatori, and improvvisatrici relied mainly on two sources: the Grand Tour and the reporting of this exotic phenomenon in contemporary British newspapers. The aim of this essay is to analyze the effects of such ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ experiences of improvisation on British Romantic culture and literature and, in particular, in relation to the possible ideological implications it assumed in a climate of revolutionary ferment. Byron’s personality and work provide a significant example of the impact of improvisation on those British writers and literati who read Italian culture and history from the perspective of the exile advocating reform and seeking to infuse new vigour into their own native culture and literature. The term ‘improvisation’ is used in its etymological sense of an impromptu performance (from the Latin improvisus, ‘unexpected’, ‘unforeseen’), in which a poet/actor/musician creates an extempore composition in the presence of an audience who, when the recitation requires a subject, is often expected to propose it to the improvvisatore. Whether the performance takes place on a real or fictitious stage does not constitute a crucial distinctive criterion in this context, since in either case the proliferating influence of the phenomenon is interesting in relation to its theoretical import and application within Romantic poetics and aesthetics. This kind of approach requires the analysis of a whole series of pivotal issues that can be summed up as follows: first, the relationship between speaker and audience (author and reader, when improvisation is transposed into the written text); secondly, the unstable boundaries between inspiration and craft, spontaneity and effort, nature and art;

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The Noctes Ambrosianae are composed of seventy-one conversations published in Blackwood’s Magazine between March 1822 and February 1835. The series is named after the Yorkshireman William Ambrose, owner of the tavern and hotel where the conversations are set. They comprise two main parts: numbers 1 to 18 and number 20 were composed by different authors, mainly John Gibson Lockhart (Walter Scott’s son-inlaw), John Wilson (Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University), and William Maginn; numbers 19 and 21 to 71 were mostly written by Wilson. The protagonists often appear under fictional names: for example, Wilson becomes Christopher North, Maginn’s dramatis persona is Odoherty, and Hogg is the Shepherd. The quotation from the conversation between Byron and Maginn is from The Tavern Sages: Selections from the Noctes Ambrosianae, ed. by J. H. Alexander (Aberdeen: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1992), p. 35. Camillo Querno was a Neapolitan improvvisatore (1470-c.1528).

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thirdly, the dialectic between dramatic performance and authorial self-inscription; fourthly, the conflict between high and low art; and finally the question of gender in relation to genre and artistic form. In particular, the first four points will be argued in the second part of this essay, in which Byron is used as a case study of the conceivable impact of improvisation on Romantic poetry and poetics. In the history of literature and literary criticism, the origins and practice of improvisation are generally connected with Italian culture. Despite studying in detail the ‘spiritual significance’6 of improvisation in nineteenth-century Poland and Russia, Wiktor Weintraub, for example, acknowledges Italy’s pre-eminence in the evolution and diffusion of the practice. Admittedly, certain comic scenes of the English medieval Mystery plays relied on the actor’s impromptu performance, but the phenomenon thrived especially in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century with the Italian commedia dell'arte, reaching its apogee in Italy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and beginning its decline in the latter part of the nineteenth century.7 In Britain, it underwent a similar development, although it may be argued that in the Victorian age various forms of improvisation were subsumed into musichall fare and vaudeville performances. In various nineteenth-century anonymous articles published in such journals as The New Monthly Magazine, The Penny Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine, The Eclectic Magazine, and The Saturday Review the tradition and practice of improvisation were traced back to their causes and origins, with a view both to describing their development by going over the most significant dates and names, and, more interestingly, to pointing out their essential, durable features throughout the centuries up to the poetic and linguistic revolution of the Romantic period. Most of these nineteenth-century critics seem to agree that improvisation emerged in Italy in the thirteenth century as a source of amusement for all classes – before then it had simply been one aspect of popular comedy and pantomime.8 In the following century, classical tragedy based on traditional models dominated the Italian stage, while in the fifteenth century, comedy was revived thanks to the playwright and comic performer Flaminio Scala, who allowed actors minimal freedom to fill up their speeches with improvised parts. It was only later on, with eighteenth-century authors such as Pietro Trapassi Metastasio9 and Ber-

6 7

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Wiktor Weintraub, ‘The Problem of Improvisation in Romantic Literature’, Comparative Literature, 16 (1964), p. 124. See Anon, ‘The Improvvisatore’, The Saturday Review, 30 May 1885, 716-17. The downfall of the improvvisatore as a literary phenomenon and a myth is clearly evidenced by comments such as these: ‘[the Improvisatore] is a man who produces a torrent of unreasoned and badly-rhymed twaddle as if it were a work of art, though it has neither the substance nor the form of poetry […] His coat is seedy and his hair dejected. The quick eye at once recognizes in him all the tokens of a misunderstood and somewhat damaged genius […] The only art of which he is really a master is that of declaiming thoughts and rhymes in a way which makes them seem the creation of the moment’ (p. 717). ‘In process of time […] – that is to say, in the thirteenth century, – the custom of improvising arose; and then all classes of persons affected to discover in this mimicry ample source of amusement’. Anon, ‘The Drama of Italy’, The New Monthly Magazine, 53 (1838), 337-349. The anonymous critic of The New Monthly Magazine claims that Metastasio ‘possessed in an extraordinary degree the talent of improvising’ (‘The Drama of Italy’, p. 345), and sees this talent as an admirable expression of natural genius, in tune with contemporary Romantic ideas of artistic creation: ‘He seems to look at nature through the medium of a soul which lends its own pure and lofty and unsophisticated excellence to all

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nardino Perfetti,10 that improvisation became an art combining effort and spontaneity, an art inherited in the late eighteenth century by the almost legendary improvvisatrice Corilla Olimpica, immortalized by Mme de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807).11 Corilla was succeeded by the notorious improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci, who in the early nineteenth century trod the boards of many Italian cities and gave rise to the most controversial responses to extempore performances on the part of Italian and foreign spectators, including such illustrious men of letters as Pietro Giordani, Vincenzo Monti, Percy Shelley and, of course, Byron. One of the merits of the criticism on the improvvisatori in nineteenth-century magazines is that it provides a clear explanation of the hybrid nature of improvisational art by connecting it, on the one hand, with oral folk culture and popular minstrelsy, and, on the other, with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century upper-class habit of hosting improvvisatori and improvvisatrici in literary salons and in private or public theatres. Improvisation therefore involves both a social and aesthetic ambivalence, being differently described in the journals as the practice of rural songsters, street rhapsodists, ventriloquists, and circus freaks, as well as the work of gifted artists of highly original genius. Given this heterogeneous picture, it is not difficult to understand why the anonymous reviewers and, generally, the Romantic writers had mixed judgements on the Italian impromptu performers. The nineteenth-century magazines are also crucial in mentioning the ideological and political implications that Italian improvisation might assume within British Romanticism. First, the talent and enthusiasm of the improvvisatori is by some critics related to the Italian national character, indirectly contrasted with the British forma mentis and behaviour – a contrast that is quite common in Romantic writing, as, for example, in Byron’s poem Beppo, a Venetian Story (1818) and in his letters; secondly, others connect the free expression of this art with the Italians’ liberal politics and, in particular, their impelling desire to shake off the Austrian

with which is deals; he seems to set before us the reflection of nature as his own fancy has called it up’ (p. 346). 10 Perfetti’s talent is described in another anonymous article in the New Monthly Magazine. There is a strong resemblance between this portrait and that of Metastasio in ‘The Drama of Italy’: ‘During his recitals he seemed transported by a supernatural energy; his gesture was so violent and his agitation so strong, as to leave him in a state of languor and exhaustion, from which he was with difficulty recovered’. The New Monthly Magazine, 2 (1824), p. 200. The trance-like state of the improvvisatore during his performance was also underlined by the historian of extempore poetry, Adele Vitagliano in Storia della poesia estemporanea nella letteratura italiana dale origini ai giorni nostri (Orma: Ermanno Loescher, 1905). In England, Percy Shelley joined the debate siding with the defenders of improvvisatori in a review on Sgricci. By contrast, there were critics who made fun of the improvvisatore’s Prometheus- or even god-like posing, often by means of an ironic, high-sounding language, as in the following description: ‘While he waits for the afflatus divinus, and consults the muses – and in fact his eyes soon begin to betray possession – he passes his hand over his parturient forehead, while the os magno sonatorum is getting ready; the labour-pains are evidently on him; he hurls back his hair, and fixes his eyes upon the moon, (who has been looking at him for several minutes through the window opposite)’. Anon, ‘The Improvisatore’, Blackwood Magazine, 58 (1845), p. 626. 11 The entry for improvisatrice, -provvisatrice in the OED reports that Corilla is ‘An honorary name given to the poetess (improvisatrice) D. Maria Maddalena Morelli Fernandez’.

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yoke. In other words, Italian improvisatory poetry becomes for many British Romantic writers a symbolic vehicle conveying their own liberal ideology and radical beliefs.12 According to the OED, the first use of any English variant of the term improvvisazione dates back to 1765, the year when the novelist Tobias Smollett wrote Travels Through France and Italy (published the following year), in which he gives the following description of the Italian improvvisatore: One of the greatest curiosities you meet with in Italy, is the Improvisatore; such is the name given to certain individuals who have the surprising talent of reciting verse extempore, on any subject you propose […] The Italians are so fond of poetry, that many of them have the best parts of Ariosto, Tasso, and Petrarch, by heart; and these are the great sources from which the Improvisatori draw their rhimes, cadence, and turns of expres13 sion.

In fact, Erik Simpson has pointed out that a possible explanation of the term occurs in an earlier source: Joseph Warton’s 1753 rendering of The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, and specifically in a note in which he compares the ancient shepherds’ habit of reciting extempore verse to the modern practice of Italian poetic and theatrical improvisation.14 As for the feminine variant of the term (improvvisatrice in English usually spelt with one ‘v’ only, like improvvisatore), it appeared a few years later. Simpson suggests as a likely first source Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789), where the author refers to the triumphant Corilla Olimpica and the present-day improvvisatrice Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici.15 However, the OED overlooks Piozzi and indicates Matilda Betham as the first author to have mentioned the term in her Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804), once again in a reference to the legendary Corilla.

This is how the Eclectic Magazine links improvisation and Italian character: ‘Their [the Improvisatori’s] talent, their inspiration and the enthusiasm which they excite, are most illustrative of the national character. In them we perceive how truly poetry is the immediate language of the soul, and the imagination’. Anon., ‘The Improvisatrice; or the Italian Bandit’s Beautiful Daughter’, Eclectic Magazine, 45 (1858), p. 217. About the association between the improvvisatori and the Italian political situation, see Anon., ‘Italian Improvisatori’, The New Monthly Magazine, 2 (1824), p. 202: ‘Among the peasantry […] before the ravages of the late war and the brutifying influence of German dullness had destroyed the energies of that interesting people, Improvisatori of merit might frequently be met […] But now-a-days these enlivening historians, the very soul of whose poetry was a wildness like that of their mountain breezes, have been hushed by the Austrian authorities, who fear that in the fervour of their own emotions, they might be led to contrast the happiness which their traditionary tales pourtray with the oppression under which “Yoked with the brutes and fettered to the soil, they are condemned to consume”’. 13 Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (1765), ed. by Frank Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 222-23. 14 ‘This seventh eclogue […] seems to be an imitation of a custom among the shepherds of old, of vying together in extempore verse. At least ’tis very like the Improvisatori at present in Italy; who flourish now more perhaps than any other poets among them, particularly in Tuscany’. See Erik Simpson, ‘“The Minstrels of Modern Italy”: Improvisation Comes to Britain’, European Romantic Review, 14 (2003), p. 346. This article interestingly provides the history of the derivatives of ‘improvisation’ and of their modern usage and meaning in the English language. 15 See table 1 in Erik Simpson, ‘“The Minstrels of Modern Italy”’, p. 350. 12

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Therefore, it was only in the eighteenth century that the phenomenon of improvisation and the terms to designate it began to acquire a certain currency; at the same time, it did not take long for the figure of the improvvisatore to become a ‘quasi-myth’ in Romantic-period culture, as is attested by the plethora of works dedicated to it, referring to it, adapting it or turning it into a topos of creativity and disengagement free from codified rules, as well as from aesthetic and moral constraints. Suffice it here to name as examples some of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works where this intriguing character makes his or her appearance (either as symbolic icon or as protagonist): apart from Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy, Piozzi’s Observations and Reflections, and Betham’s Biographical Dictionary, it is worth mentioning Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Isaac D'Israeli’s The Carder and the Carrier (1803), Sydney Owenson’s The Novice of St. Dominick (1805), Percy Shelley’s Hellas (1821), Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s The Improvisatore, in Three Fyttes (1821), Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s The Improvisatrice (1824), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore, Or, John Anderson My Jo, John’ (1827),16 Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La vita mia (1850), and finally, to give some non-British examples, Mme de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Improvisatore; or, Life in Italy (1835). Byron is also, of course, part of this list with Beppo and Don Juan (1819-1824). For most of these authors – with the exception perhaps of Beddoes’s pseudoimprovvisatore, who, in fact, is a traditional minstrel –17 the figure of the improvvisatore or improvvisatrice is associated with Italy, sometimes even becoming a trope for Italian culture and mentality, a physical embodiment of the exotic value Italy assumed for the British, or a paradigm of Italian freedom and spontaneity opposed, directly or allusively, to their own culture. Indeed, Smollett defines the improvvisatore as a ‘curiosity’, a phenomenon peculiarly Italian and alien to British culture, and it is not at all fortuitous that the Scottish author James Hogg in his long poem The Queen’s Wake (1813) singles out Rizzo, the Italian bard, as the eccentric songster whose lay dies as soon as he stops performing, thus alluding, consciously or not, to that quality of transience that some nineteenth-century critics identified as one of the drawbacks and risks of extempore poetry. In particular, we owe especially to Mme de Staël the symbolic juxtaposition of improvisational art with a specific theory of history and poetic creation according to which, as Erik Simpson suggests, ‘the plan of a work – or a nation – could change as it was created’.18 In other words, contrary to It is interesting to notice that Coleridge’s poem establishes an indirect dialogue with Landon’s famous Improvisatrice, with the unexpressed aim of criticising the poetess’s representation of woman as the favourite victim of love and passion, a pessimistic vision to which Coleridge opposed the need to rediscover the joy deriving from the little moments of life when one perceives his true inner self. An illuminating article on the two poets is Anya Taylor, ‘Romantic Improvvisatori: Coleridge, L.E.L., and the Difficulties of Loving’, Philological Quarterly, 79 (2000), 501-22. 17 In fact, as H.W. Donner seems to suggest, the real improvvisatore of the whole poem is the young author himself, who here, more than in any other work, despite his immaturity and, at times careless style, shows his natural gift for versification and his poetical powers. See Chapter II, ‘The Improvisatore and Other Juvenilia’, in H. W. Donner, Thomas Lovell Beddoes: the Making of a Poet (Oxford: Blackwell, 1935), pp. 63-83. Some parts of the poem, for example the tale entitled ‘Alfarabi’, are imitative of Byron in their mocking tone and sarcastic digressions. 18 Erik Simpson, ‘“The Minstrels of Modern Italy”’, p. 349. 16

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British bardic traditions, which essentially draw upon materials from the historical past, Italian impromptu poetry becomes a figure for ‘improvisatory’ history, or a vision of history that abandons retrospective stances and takes into account the contingencies and contextual aspects of each cultural, political or literary moment. Of course, the risk is that, as a temporary creation, any improvised piece of art lives as long as it is performed and is destined finally to disappear into silence, like the improvvisatrice Corinne at the end of de Staël’s novel. On the other hand, the idea of impromptu formation presupposes an inprogress component, a mutability and perpetual openness that fit perfectly well the notion of the Romantic fragment, while, at the same time, it seems to look forward to the postmodern idea of an open text characterized by fluidity and indeterminacy. ‘This is’, as Caroline Gonda suggests, the final paradox in a figure which has contained so many paradoxes and tensions – true poet or mere versifier; divinely inspired or mercenary; spontaneous or mechanical; natural or artificial; authentic or fraudulent; impersonal or ‘personality’; possessed and transported or self-conscious; irrevocably absent or illusorily pre19 sent.

The impact of Italian improvisation, and its attendant paradoxes and tensions, achieve particular clarity in Byron’s poetics and writing, as they enable us to see how, despite his ambiguous judgement of the Italian improvvisatori, he can somehow be identified as one, ready to agree, that is, with the narrator of Don Juan when he says he can ‘feel the Improvisatore’. Much has been written about the presumed or assumed ‘carelessness’ of Byron's style,20 a view which involves two of the issues raised above: the blurred boundaries between inspiration and craft (or spontaneity and effort, nature and art), on the one hand, and the tension between high and low art, on the other. This so-called ‘carelessness’ emerges largely in Byron’s journals and letters and in the comic poems in which he adopts what has been variously defined as his ‘fortuitous’ or ‘episodic method’, ‘digressive and impromptu narration’, or ‘improvisational mode’.21 Although the first signs of this new stylistic manner appear in the final Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818),22 it is in Beppo and especially Don Juan that Byron takes off his ‘romantic’ costume to replace it with that of the

Caroline Gonda, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Improvisatore, 1753-1845’, Romanticism, 6 (2000), p. 208. See, for example, George M. Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), Chapter 5: ‘Carelessly I sing’, pp. 124-52; Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1961), Chapter VII: ‘Beppo’ and Chapter VIII: ‘The Composition of Don Juan’, pp. 10342; Jerome McGann, Don Juan in Context (London: John Murray, 1976), Chapter 5: ‘Don Juan: Style’ and Chapter 6: ‘Don Juan: Form’, pp. 68-131; Giorgio Melchiori, ‘Byron and Italy: Catalyst of the Risorgimento’, in Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. by Paul Graham Trueblood (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 108-21; Edwin Morgan, ‘Voice, Tone, and Transition in Don Juan’, in Byron: Wrath and Rhyme, ed. by Alan Bold (London: Vision, Barnes and Noble, 1983), pp. 5777; Zachary Leader, ‘Byron, Revision and the Stable Self’, in Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 78-120; Jane Stabler, ‘Introduction: Byron and the Poetics of Digression’, in Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1-17. 21 For the first three definitions see Jerome McGann, Don Juan in Context, pp. 102-04; for the fourth definition, see Zachary Leader, ‘Byron, Revision and the Stable Self’, p. 96. 22 McGann, Don Juan in Context, pp. 80-81. 19 20

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comic and satiric writer who adopts a manner and tone unparalleled by any of his contemporaries.23 Byron’s ‘careless style’ in his mature work is clearly confessed to by the narrator of Don Juan, who, despite the generally accepted ironic and dramatic distance he preserves, often turns into the spokesman for the author’s poetic and ideological principles: Reader! I have kept my word, – at least so far As the first Canto promised. You have now Had sketches of Love – Tempest – Travel – War, – All very accurate, you must allow, And Epic, if plain truth should prove no bar; For I have drawn much less with a long bow Than my forerunners. Carelessly I sing, 24 But Phoebus lends me now and then a string.

These lines are the best enunciation of Byron’s mixed style and tone in his comic writing, and of his insistence on his ability to combine high and low art by resorting to an informal and conversational manner (‘careless’), while at the same time never abandoning completely the more elaborate, rhetorical style of classical epic (‘Phoebus lends me now and then a string’). The ‘plain truth’ the poet intends to deal with mirrors his plain style, thus satisfying the need for accuracy expected by the reader even as the poet dissociates himself from the elaboration of the grand epic manner. In other passages of Don Juan Byron suggests ways of interpreting his style that makes it possible to associate it with the phenomenon of Italian improvisation. His chattiness is clearly admitted in lines such as these: ‘I rattle on exactly as I’d talk / With any body in a ride or walk’ (XV. 19. 7-8). And in the following stanza he provides us with a significant clue to understanding the ideological implications that improvised verse might assume for him and his writing: I don’t know that there may be much ability Shown in this sort of desultory rhyme, But there’s a conversational facility Which may round off an hour upon a time; Of this I’m sure – at least there’s no Servility In mine irregularity of Chime, Which rings what’s uppermost of new or hoary, Just as I feel the ‘Improvisatore.’ (XV. 20)

As always in Byron, the expression of individual freedom (personal and artistic) is a vehicle for defending a liberal ideology embracing all human life and experience; so the free chime For reasons of space, I will focus the present argument on Don Juan, although Beppo offers similar examples of what Rutherford called Byron’s ‘new style’, compared to his previous ‘Romantic’ production, a style reflecting the moral relativism in which he believed, that is to say, ‘casual, amusing, and irreverent’. See Andrew Rutherford, Byron. A Critical Study, p. 121. 24 VIII. 138, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-93), V, p. 407. All the quotations from Byron’s Don Juan refer to this edition and will be henceforth indicated in parenthesis in the text by canto and stanza. 23

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of the improvvisatore, which manages to combine ‘tradition and individual talent’, craft and inspiration, a well-established cultural heritage and original genius (the ‘new and hoary’), is the image of an art that, while acknowledging the value and influence of previous achievements, looks for new forms and styles capable of reflecting the specific needs of a precise cultural and historical context. The impromptu mode of the improvvisatori can therefore be associated with what Byron calls his poetic ‘irregularity’, in that both are linked to the contingent needs of creation, and to the poet’s particular intentions in a specific moment, including his constant awareness of the audience’s expectations. Such an emphasis on the improvisation of the moment, on the contingencies of poetic creation, often recurs in Byron’s letters and journals: ‘I am not a cautious letter-writer’, he admitted to Mary Shelley on 14 November 1822, ‘and generally say what comes uppermost at the moment’ (BLJ, X, p. 33). He even seemed willing to have other people believe that his writing occurred spontaneously, without previous planning, just as he, half-ironically, declares in Don Juan – ‘the fact is that I have nothing planned, / Unless it were to be a moment merry, / A novel word in my vocabulary’ (IV. 5. 6-8) – or, perhaps even more glamorously, in a letter to John Murray in which, with one of his usual histrionic poses, he confessed, ‘You ask for the plan of Donny Johnny – I have no plan – I had no plan – but I had or have materials – though if like Tony Lumpkin – I am “to be snubbed so when I am in spirits”25 the poem will be naught – and the poet turn serious again’ (BLJ, VI, p. 207). Unlike T. S. Eliot, Byron could not say he saw his end in his beginning, since, as we have seen, he often unequivocally refers to the extempore quality of his writing and to its degree of unpredictability. Don Juan, in particular, reads as if the narrative were taking shape at the very moment of composition, fraught with unplanned and unpredictable effects exactly like the impromptu performance of the improvvisatori he went to see in Italy. Byron saw the famous and notorious Italian improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci for the first time in Milan on 25 October 1816, definitely too late to substantiate the hypothesis that his ‘desultory rhyme’ might have been influenced by his performance.26 Nevertheless, he was touched by the experience, both positively and negatively, as is testified in various biographical sources recording the event, such as John Hobhouse’s diary, Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), and Byron’s letters.

Quotation from Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Act II, where Tony Lumpkin says: ‘I wish you’d let me and my good alone, then. Snubbing this way when I’m in spirits’. 26 Sgricci’s life was no less scandalous than Byron’s. He never concealed the truth about his homosexuality and thus was the most famous Italian ‘sodomite’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. From 1813 onwards he lived as a vagrant artist, treading the boards of several Italian theatres. In all his performances he was extremely flaunty and overdramatic, pretending sometimes to faint out of unquenchable passion. His performances (called accademie) consisted of three parts: one passage in blank verse; one in terza rima; and a complete tragedy. Sgricci’s art marked the apogee of a tradition which was slowly decaying, since improvised poetry became increasingly seen as mediocre art. Sgricci, however, had the talent of endowing it with a singular spectacular component and a virtuosity that nobody after him was able to imitate. His popularity spread even to France, so much so that at the time he was more famous than Foscolo and Manzoni. Undoubtedly, this popularity was also linked to his promiscuous private life, to the scandals that contributed to surround him with a sulphurous and fascinating aura. In 1819 he was even about to be crowned at the Capitol, but the Church forbade the celebration since he was accused of having criticised the Pope’s rule. His fame survived him after he died in 1836. 25

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Hobhouse’s tale of his and his friend’s first encounter with the charismatic Sgricci is a very important testimony to the strong effect he produced on both of them, despite their scepticism about the quality of his performances. Here is how he describes Sgricci’s first, quasi-Byronic, appearance on the stage of the Opera House in Milan: ‘At last Sgricci came in, with wild black hair, no cravat, blue coat, white waistcoat, white pantaloons, and yellow Turkish slippers. He was received with shouts of applause, and after a bow began with great action’.27 He admits that both he and Byron were amused by Sgricci’s performance, ‘but owned that speaking so rapidly was a strange talent’,28 and, above all, that he mainly recited commonplace classical texts with no outstanding originality. Indeed, after seeing Sgricci perform in Milan in 1816, Byron revealed similar reservations about the Italian artist in a letter to Thomas Moore: There was a famous improvvisatore who held forth while I was there [Milan]. His fluency astonished me; but, although I understand Italian, and speak it […] I could only carry off a few very common-place mythological images, and one line about Artemisia, and another about Algiers, with sixty words of an entire tragedy about Eteocles, Polycines. Some of the Italians liked him – others called him ‘seccatura’ (a devilish good word, by the way) and all Milan was in controversy about him. (BLJ, V, pp. 124-25)

Byron himself was certainly ‘in controversy’ if in a letter to Augusta Leigh written on the day after the event, he described Sgricci’s art (or ‘Sgricchi’, as he misspelled his name) as ‘not an amusing though a curious effort of human powers’ (BLJ, V, p. 119), a judgement which he was very likely to revise, if one considers that, a year later, he would write Beppo in two nights. Compared to Shelley’s, Byron’s opinion on Tommaso Sgricci and his colleagues was definitely more disparaging.29 Both were interested in the Italian art of improvisation, and, according to some critics, just as Don Juan’s ‘desultory’ style was partly modelled on that of the authors of poesia espontanea, so Shelley’s ‘Orpheus’ (1820) and Hellas (1822) may be considered as attempts to imitate Sgricci, in their blank verse and tragic mode respecThe Diary of John Cam Hobhouse (edited from B.L. Add. Mss. 56537), ed. by Peter Cochran, at http://www.hobby-o.com/ [online]. There is also a note by Hobhouse on the Italian improvvisatori for Childe Harold IV. 54. 7). ‘In the autumn of 1816, a celebrated improvisatore exhibited his talent at the opera-house of Milan. The reading of the theses handed in for the subjects of his poetry was received by a very numerous audience, for the most part in silence, or with laughter; but when the assistant, unfolding one of the papers, exclaimed, “The apotheosis of Victor Alfieri”, the whole theatre burst into a shout, and the applause was continued for some moments. The lot did not fall on Alfieri; and the Signor Sgricci had to pour forth his extemporary common-places on the bombardment of Algiers. The choice, indeed, is not left to accident quite so much as might be thought from a first view of the ceremony; and the police not only takes care to look at the papers beforehand, but, in case of any prudential after-thought, steps in to correct the blindness of chance. The proposal for deifying Alfieri was received with immediate enthusiasm, the rather because it was conjectured there would be no opportunity of carrying it into effect’ (Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, II, pp. 236-37). 28 The Diary of John Cam Hobhouse. 29 Byron eventually met Sgricci at Ravenna in 1820. From there he wrote to Hobhouse on 3 March 1820: ‘Sgricci is here improvising away with great success—he is also a celebrated Sodomite a character by no means so much respected in Italy as it should be; but they laugh instead of burning—and the Women talk of it as a pity in a man of talent—but with greater tolerance than could be expected—and only express their hopes that he may yet be converted to Adultery’ (BLJ, VII, pp. 51-52). December of the same year the Shelleys met him in Pisa, where they heard him recite Iphigenia in Tauris. 27

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tively. Furthermore, P.M.S. Dawson argues that the review of Sgricci’s performance of La Morte d’Ettore, written by Shelley in Italian in January 1821 but never published, ‘can be seen as a preliminary attempt to deal with issues that were to figure in the Defence of Poetry’ (1821).30 However, the Shelleys’ view of Sgricci as a divinely inspired artist whose high power of imagination and genius produced a magical effect on the audience was not one shared by Byron. Thomas Medwin recorded this clash of opinions in one of his Conversations. Parts of the dialogue between the two poets are worth quoting: ‘Why should we not be able to improvise in hexameters, as well as the Italians? […]’ ‘The greatest genius in that way that perhaps Italy ever produced’, said Shelley, ‘is Sgricci’. ‘There is a great deal of knack in these gentry’, replied Lord Byron; ‘their poetry is more mechanical than you suppose. More verses are written yearly in Italy, than millions of money are circulated. It is usual for every Italian gentleman to make sonnets to his mistress’s eyebrow before he is married – or the lady must be very uninspiring indeed. But Sgricci! To improvise a whole tragedy seems a miraculous gift […] I don’t know 31 how Sgricci’s tragedies may appear in print, but his printed poetry is tame stuff’. ‘The inspiration of the improviser is quite a separate talent: – a consciousness of his own powers, his own elocution – the wondering and applauding audience, – all conspire to give him confidence; but the deity for32 sakes him when he coldly sits down to think.’

Unlike Shelley, Byron does not seem to attribute great value to a short-lived art that is dictated by temporary inspiration and cannot survive on the printed page. However, one may perceive some kind of parallel between Sgricci’s extemporaneous verse and Byron’s easy, informal tone, conversational manner, and irregular rhyming, his abrupt tonal shifts, digressions and stylistic transitions – in short by a narrative and structural freedom summed up in those ‘free thoughts’ that the narrator of Don Juan says he ‘would not change […] for a throne’ (XI. 90. 8). Here freedom, or what Byron in some letters also called ‘license’, must be once again taken as all-embracing – sexual, compositional, ethical, and political – the same ideal of freedom and naturalness that Byron the exile, like many other writers from Northern Europe, projected on to the South and Italy, in particular,33 and that he lets shine through in his letters, Beppo, and Don Juan, where his writing reflects what his friend Lady Blessington called ‘the extreme mobilité of his nature, which yields to present impressions’.34 I therefore share Zachary Leader’s opinion that

30

31 32 33

34

As regards P. B. Shelley’s evaluation on Sgricci see H. Buxton Forman, ‘The Improvvisatore Sgricci in Relation to Shelley’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 246 (1880), 115-23, and P.M.S. Dawson, ‘Shelley and the Improvvisatore Sgricci: An Unpublished Review’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 32 (1981), 19-29, p. 21. Here Byron refers to Sgricci’s vers de societé. Several of his tragedies were taken down in shorthand and published in Paris. Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. by Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 137-38. ‘The Italians do not understand the English’, said Byron; ‘indeed, how can they? for they (the Italians) are frank, simple, and open in their natures, following the bent of their inclinations’; ‘Nature is all-powerful in Italy, and who is it that would not prefer the sins of her exuberance to the crimes of art’. A Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington, a new edition, revised and annotated (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1893), pp. 34, 167. A Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington, p. 95.

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‘Don Juan’s compositional license, its improvisational manner, is explicitly linked at several places in the poem both to Juan’s adult promiscuity and to political freedom […]’.35 Medwin observed that Byron was an improvvisatore since he was ‘able to resume the thread of his subject at all times, and to weave it of an equal texture’, moreover he ‘hardly ever alter[ed] a word for whole pages, and never correct[ed] a line in subsequent editions’, and, though he rarely read his works over after examining the proofs, ‘he remember[ed] every word of them, and every thing else worth remembering that he [had] ever known’.36 Several times in his letters Byron underlines his distaste for copying and proofreading,37 as if to insist that writing must be a spontaneous act immediately responding to the creative urge and overflowing imagination of the author.38 But this could equally well be no more than a gentlemanly pose. Art requires craft as well as inspiration, and similarly the spontaneity and naturalness that Byron shares with improvisatorial artists cannot be wholly dissociated from the demands of effort and art. His comic writing is most revealing in this sense, because it ideally combines the freedom and witty extemporization of low art with the formal refinement and care of high art – hence, his use of ottava rima or other fixed metres instead of blank verse, and in particular of the feminine-rhymed couplet at the end of each octave. Byron’s concept of poetry is dialogic like all his writing, in the sense that the Popean ideal of caustic satire and wit in refined verse is joined with the Romantic notion of poetry as self-expression and the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ or, in Shelley's version, the ‘undisciplined overflowing of the soul’. After all, even the Italian improvvisatore’s performances, in particular Sgricci’s accademie, implied the coalescence of natura and ars, genius and skill, since he was often asked to recite in blank verse, terza rima, and even to produce a whole tragedy, and his mnemonic ability was not enough for a successful exhibition. From Byron's ‘Dedication’ in Don Juan, his numerous digressions, and confidential letters, we gather that he could not tolerate a verse full of stylistic and formal flaws: as he states in the epigraph to Cantos I to V of Don Juan, ‘Difficile est proprie communia dicere’ (‘it is difficult to express common things appropriately’) – a quotation from Horace’s Ars poetica establishing the need for decorum and proper rhetoric even within the plain style appropriate to the ‘Domestica Facta’ mentioned in the original epigraph for Don Juan. To rebut William Wordsworth’s anti-Popean position as regards poetic diction, Byron intended to prove that naturalness of language does not clash with, but must rather be married to, proper art, and therefore that the classics (like Cicero in De officiis) and more traditional writers still had something important to teach the modern author.

Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, p. 81. Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron: noted during a residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822 (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), p. 333. 37 See, in particular, two letters to John Murray, dated 16 April 1820 (BLJ, VII, p. 77) and 22 August 1820 (BLJ, VII, p. 161) respectively. 38 In a letter to Murray he wrote. ‘I can’t furbish. – I am like a tyger (in poesy) if I miss my first spring I go growling back to my jungle. There is no second. – I can’t correct – I can’t – & I won’t. You must take my things as they happen to be …. I would rather give them away than hack and hew them’ (BLJ, XI, p. 168). 35 36

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Byron’s style is so composite because he could not conceive of natura as dissociated from ingenium, which of course is at the basis of his frequent tone shifts and stylistic transitions. This form of Romantic irony finds its most accomplished expression in Don Juan, since the Horatian gibes and good sense are now and then counterpointed by Juvenalian, high-style passages (like stanzas 11-14 of the ‘Dedication’ and other occasional passages – according to Jerome McGann, amounting to ten passages altogether). The possible incongruity deriving from the sudden, unexpected, improvisus shift from one style to the other never worried Byron, because, as the narrator of Don Juan says – here an obvious surrogate for the poet himself – ‘if a writer should be quite consistent, / How could he possibly show things existent?’ (xv. 87. 7-8). Contrary to Wordsworth and Coleridge, but in line with impromptu composition, Byron did not conceive organic unity and wholeness as the essential benchmarks and aims of poetic creation. He rather deemed the actual process of writing much more important, or the translation of existential multiplicity and contradictoriness into a meandering, inconsistent, digressive work which could mirror the fluctuations and sudden transitions of oral speech. This is one of the main achievements of his comic output, inspired as it was by the reading of John Hookham Frere’s Whistlecraft (1817) and, particularly, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore (1481). The latter had a crucial effect on Byron since, as Rutherford underlines, it showed him ‘how to express himself in verse with the same freedom, wit, urbanity and ease as he did in his letters and conversation’.39 Thus, however self-ironic he might have been when in Don Juan he wrote ‘I never know the word which will come next’ (IX. 41. 8), there is no denying the fact that the whole poem is fraught with coups de théâtre or, in McGann’s words, ‘unforeseen consequences’ which surprise both characters and readers.40 Byron could not, like Wordsworth, say ‘The road lies plain before me’ (The Prelude, 1850, I. 640), because both Beppo and Don Juan are celebrations of relativism over absolute systems, openness and unpredictability over closure and design, the experimental and fragmented over the teleological and organic whole. The blend of the fortuitous style with the rhetorical decorum particularly characterizing Byron’s satirical works is not just meaningful per se. As the improvvisatore must take into account his surroundings and contingencies – first of all, his audience – in order to guarantee a successful performance, similarly the writer, in Byron’s view, cannot do without his readers but must always keep them in mind, and, like a good orator, know and apply all the secrets of the art of persuasion, including a wise use of rhetorical strategies, strikingly never discordant in Byron thanks to his ‘conversational facility’. As a result, the last two important issues to be considered concerning Byron’s poetics and writing practice in relation to the theory and myth of improvisation are the relation between author and reader, on the one hand, and the dialectic of performance and poetic inscription, on the other. It has already been pointed out that it is unlikely that Sgricci had a direct influence on Byron’s style, but the fact that his was an oral and public art, an art of the voice and not of the pen, cannot be overlooked when Byron’s performative stance and theatricality are under Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study, p. 110. In 1820 Byron translated the first canto of Pulci’s mockepic. 40 Jerome McGann, Don Juan in Context, p. 101. As an example McGann gives stanza 99 in Canto XIV, which concludes: ‘It is not clear that Adeline and Juan / Will fall; but if they do, ’twill be their ruin’. 39

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discussion. One of Byron’s criticisms about the ‘Lakers’ was that they produced a poetry which was too private and disengaged from the audience, or, to borrow John Stuart Mill’s words, a poetry to be ‘overheard’ rather than ‘heard’, an introspective, self-reflective verse in which the reader could only play the part of the eavesdropper. Byron, at least from 1816 onwards, became a disciple of Horace’s concept of artistic form as ‘function’: form, for Byron, became less the organic articulation of authorial autonomy and romantic solitary genius, and more the expression of a republican ideology (literary and political) eschewing Pindaric flights into lyrical abstraction and embracing worldly experience instead. Thus, Byron’s performative stance enacts a position that John Keats, on the other hand, seemingly denied when he asserted that he ‘never wrote one single line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought’.41 In his letters and poems Byron shows his constant awareness of his audience, respondents, and readers by addressing them directly, requesting them to do things through a pragmatic language, confronting them with different hypotheses (as in Canto IX. 42-44, where the author asks the reader to ‘suppose’ different situations involving the hero), challenging them through narrative discontinuities and digressions, or more simply declaring of Don Juan: ‘If it don't take I will leave it off where it is with all due respect to the Public’ (BLJ, VI, p. 207). A peculiarly histrionic component and an audience-oriented attitude often articulated in a singularly colloquial mode frequently define the ‘truly’ Byronic style. However, as with any improvvisatore, Byron the author, like Byron the man, inscribes himself at the centre of the performance that is his writing. His friend Lady Blessington was right when she defined him as a ‘perfect chameleon’, similar to ‘some celebrated actor in his different characters’ whose ‘likeness is affected by the dress and the part he has to fill’.42 In short, Byron’s ‘performance’ is in dialogue with his self-inscription, as unpredictable as his personality, and as fluid, ever-changing, and kaleidoscopic as his writing. An articulation, therefore, of the formlessness of life and the instability of consciousness. A perfect image from Don Juan, which sums up the mutability of the author reflected in his creation is that of the rainbow in the shipwreck scene in Canto II. 91-93, that ‘celestial kaleidoscope’ (II. 93. 8): It changed, of course; a heavenly cameleon, The airy child of vapour and the sun, Brought forth in purple, cradled in vermillion, Baptized in molten gold, and swathed in dun, Glittering like crescents o’er a Turk’s pavilion, And blending every colour into one, Just like a black eye in a recent scuffle (For sometimes we must box without the muffle). (ii. 92)

The text is for Byron both a pragmatic act of communication and a means of selfexpression. He is inside it, but also peeps out from it to address his audience. In either case, author and text are symbiotically linked, as Edwin Morgan recognizes in his assessment of Don Juan as Byron’s greatest literary achievement: ‘the poem eventually becomes, whatever its organizing principles may once have been […] an accompaniment or doppelgänger 41 42

The Letters of John Keats, ed. by Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 131. A Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington, pp. 95, 98.

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of the poet himself, rising and falling with the fluctuations of the poet’s life, a work not so much unfinished but unfinishable’.43 Byron’s ‘desultory rhyme’, his digressiveness, his hyper-awareness of his audience and the stylistic medley of his writing, as well as constituting the essential marks of his poetic output, are crucial to his performative stance, his talent as an improvvisatore, in relation to his readers. In a sense, digressing is for Byron the only possible form of ‘revision’, one that occurs at the very moment of writing, an in-progress form of self-correction. As Jane Stabler has illuminatingly pointed out, ‘the materiality of Byronic digression […] created a form of theatre (somewhat different from the ‘mental theatre’ of Manfred, 1817) in which textual disruption was co-produced by poet and audience’.44 As improvisatory art asserts the relativity and circumstantial nature of any given historical and cultural phenomenon, therefore, to borrow Stabler’s words again, ‘Byron’s digressive poetics challenges us to rethink our assumptions about stability and change in literature and to be aware of the relative historical state of any critical position’.45 This emphasis on the contingencies and processes of creation, which of course includes the consciousness and involvement of an audience, rather than on the finished product, is perhaps what Byron’s poetics and the theory of improvisation have most in common. Zachary Leader is certainly right when he associates Byron’s writing with a life of pleasure and playing, which he saw ingrained in the act and process of creation itself – ‘’Tis to create, and in creating live / A being more intense than we endow / With form our fancy, gaining as we give / The life we image, even as I do now’, as he writes in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.46 It must have been this power of giving life to a piece of art (however debatable its quality) on the spur of the moment, spontaneously, and carelessly, that Byron found particularly fascinating in the improvvisatore’s performance, a pleasure comparable to his own delight in seeing his own creativity unfold in words he remained reluctant to unweave – as if all had been dashed off with effortless superiority. However, and fortunately, unlike the improvvisatore, Byron preferred those words to take shape on the page, allowing them to escape the inexorable, tragic extinction of all oral literature and attain instead the permanence of art.

43 44 45 46

Edwin Morgan, ‘Voice, Tone, and Transition in Don Juan’, p. 62. Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, p. 12. Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, p. 17. III. 6. 1-4, in The Complete Poetical Works, II, p. 78.

Serena Baiesi (Università di Bologna)

The Influence of the Italian Improvvisatrici on British Romantic Women Writers: Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Response

Embodying freedom of expression in art and life, the figure of the Italian improvvisatrice exerted an important influence on British women writers of the Romantic period. Extemporaneous authors such as Teresa Bandettini, Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici and her daughter Massimina, and Corilla Olimpica were celebrated in Italy, as well as in Britain, for their public performances and opened up new expressive possibilities for contemporary women writers. This essay examines the phenomenon of the Italian improvvisatrici as models for British women writers, and thus as an important source for the development of a female Romanticism in British literature. An initial reconstruction of the distinctive features of this popular figure in the Italian tradition provides an introduction to its diffusion in British culture, where it flourished in narrative and fictional forms, rather than in practice. The differences, as well as the contacts, between the Italian and British traditions will be highlighted through references to the figures of Corilla Olimpica, the inspiration for Madame de Staël’s Corinne, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who often represented improvvisatrici in her poems, and whose methods of composition were frequently compared with those of an extempore poet.

S’avvi chi porga al canto Facile un argomento, Ho il cantar talento Il canto scioglierò. Poiché render più grazie Sarebbe cosa dura; Dunque il pensier procura 1 Render altra mercé.

The Italian improvvisatrici had a great influence on British women writers between the end of eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries. They embodied female freedom of expression in art and life. They were acknowledged in Italy, as well as in Britain, for their public performances, and became the heroines of a new European Romantic literature, especially that produced by women writers.2 By examining the Italian improvvisatrici as models of inspiration for British women writers, this essay seeks to identify this phenom-

1

2

‘Come forth those who propose an easy topic for my song, I have the singing talent and so I will intone my song. Since it would be hard to give better thanks than these, so my thought will be left to a different mercy’. Teresa Bandettini, ‘Ringraziamento per un’Accademia datale’, in Alessandra Di Ricco, L’inutile e il meraviglioso mestiere: poeti improvvisatori di fine Settecento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990), p. 168 (all translations into Italian are mine, except where otherwise indicated). One of the first studies on the literary figure of the improvvisatrice is Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1976), which dedicates an entire chapter to the myth of Corinne.

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enon as one important source for the development of a female Romanticism. Its primary aim is to trace the characteristics of this popular artistic figure from Italy – the country where it originated – to Britain, where it flourished in narrative and fictional forms, rather than in practice. This comparison will be drawn by making reference to the figures of Corilla Olimpica, one of the best-known Italian improvvisatrici, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who represented improvvisatrici in her poems and performances, and embodied their spirit in her own life. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (1996) points out that, in Italy, during the Romantic period featured many women writers, although they were not considered to be on the same level as contemporary male authors, owing to the quality of their production and the genres they were related to: Women writers of the Romantic period in Italy excelled in areas marginal to the literary canon, like translation and letter writing. The presence among them of many extemporaneous poets and improvisers, like Teresa Bandettini (1763-1837), Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici (1755-1824) and her daughter Massimina (1788-1846), continuing a tradition well established at least since the seventeenth century but certainly with earlier roots, points to the preference given by women to the oral code, confirmed by the presence among them of storyteller (like Ernesta Monari and Anna Puoti) and in general by women’s dominant role in society as oral transmitters of culture. It comes therefore as no surprise when we are told that so many of them were friends, correspondents, hostesses, sometimes even lovers, of their more celebrated male counterparts […] [Romantic women’s writing in Italy] cannot be fully understood without studying literary salons such as those of Corne3 lia Rossi-Martinetti, Giustina Renier-Michiel, Clara Maffei and Maria Giuseppina Guacci.

Thus, an association was usually made between women poets and improvisation, which was considered as a kind of oral performance and only marginal to the predominant (male) literary production. However, this genre was important at a social level, since it had been practised for several centuries and was a means of transmitting cultural values. But, despite women’s performances being appreciated for their artistic and cultural merits, the improvvisatrici were only regarded as frames to their ‘more celebrated male counterparts’, and clearly did not fit the traditional high-level canon of printed literature. Nevertheless, in an article published in The New Monthly Magazine in 1824 – the same year as Lord Byron’s death and Letitia Landon’s publication of The Improvisatrice – and dedicated to the Italian improvvisatori, the anonymous author points out that there had been ‘several ladies distinguished for their talents in extemporaneous versification […] But the most celebrated of all the Improvisatrici was, Maria Maddalena Fernandez, a native of Pistoia, born in the year 1740’.4 The reviews of the period seem to reveal that the value attributed to the improvvisatrici was much higher than that awarded to them in the following centuries: their performances were enormously successful, and they were well known throughout literary circles and salons. The art of extempore composition had in fact a double component, which affected subsequent critical assessments.5 On the one hand, crit3 4 5

The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 404-05 (my italics). The New Monthly Magazine, 11 (1824), 193-202. Her biographer, Alessandro Amedollo, asserts that she was born in 1727, and not in 1740, and exactly on 17 March. See the article by Carlo Caruso, ‘Pietro Giordani e la poesia all’improvviso’, in Giordani Leopardi 1998, Convegno Nazionale di Studi, Piacenza, Palazzo Farnese, 2-4 aprile 1998, ed. by Roberto Tissoni (Piacenza:

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ics blamed the improvvisatori and improvvisatrici because their poems did not last long after the performance; on the other hand, improvisation was associated with extraordinary talent and genius. Invoking this second connotation, the New Monthly Magazine article goes on to illustrate the successful career of a talented and exceptional woman, Corilla Olimpica. It is noted that in infancy she already displayed ‘unequivocal marks of uncommon genius’, while in her youth her ‘acquirements in natural and moral philosophy were very extensive’, and she soon began ‘to display that talent for extempore composition, by which she afterwards acquired so much celebrity.’ Later on in her life she was invited to be poet-laureate at the Imperial Court in Vienna, and spent several years in that position.6 After that experience, she lived in Rome, where she became a member of the Accademia degli Arcadi and changed her name to the more famous Corilla Olimpica. The apotheosis of her poetical career was when she was crowned on the Capitol in 1776.7 The story of this woman’s artistic career became more popular at the time than her actual and subsequent poetical production. Even after her death in 1800, her influence on later women poets was not so much related to her improvisations or publications, as to the singularity and freedom of her personality, together with the extraordinary genius displayed in her public performances as an improvvisatrice. But her name was only one of a long list of improvvisatrici who lived in Italy between the end of eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century. Their influence on the contemporary social and artistic scene was regularly discussed in the chronicles of the time and, more significantly, in the writings of various European poets and novelists. Interestingly, it was not the poetry but the image of the Italian improvvisatrici that influenced English women writers and their poetical subjects, so much so that they became mythical characters in the literary production of a whole generation. In addition, it was not only the Italian improvvisatrice’s character that impressed women writers, but also her style and genius, especially because the notion of genius had always been associated with men’s writing. As for the art of improvisation, one of Corilla’s biographers asserts: ‘quest’arte dell’improvviso, nella quale Corilla fu insuperabile e insuperata, cominciò ad esser degna del nome di divina nella bocca di Corilla’.8 This quotation highlights the association between improvisation and divine inspiration, which is even more explicit when the author

6 7

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Tip.Le.Co., 2000), pp. 161-83. Here, the critic distinguishes three kinds of extempore composition: ‘1) l’improvvisazione di tipo popolare e canterino; 2) l’improvvisazione d’accademia, coltivata, in particolar modo di Arcadia quale reviviscenza delle mitiche competizioni pastorali; 3) l’improvvisazione come frutto d’ispirazione quasi sovraumana, dettata dall’estro del momento’ (p. 164). (‘1) Popular and singing improvisation; 2) Learned improvisation from the Academy, especially from the Arcadia Academy, as the result of mythical pastoral competitions; 3) improvisation as a superhuman inspiration, affected by the impulse of the moment’). The Austrian Empress requested the improvvisatrice’s presence at her Court in Vienna after the publication of Corilla’s Canto (Bologna, 1764) in her honour. ‘Verso la metà del secolo Corilla era passata allo stato di leggenda’ (‘Around the middle of the century, Corilla had already acquired the status of a legend’). Quotation from the poet’s biography, Corilla Olimpica, ed. by Alessandro Ademollo (Florence: C. Ademollo e C. Editori, 1887). (‘This art of improvisation, in which Corilla was insuperable and unsurpassed, came to deserve the title of “divine” from Corilla’s mouth’). Corilla Olimpica, p. xi.

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describes how poetry comes to the improvvisatori’s minds after the public’s request of a poem on a given subject: ‘da principio un caos informe e confuso, un incendio di tutta l’anima senza ordine e legge gli dimora […] Pieni d’un Dio si sentono, ispirati, illuminati dall’alto, trasportati fuori di sé per forza occulta di un Nume prepotente’.9 Similar descriptions also referred to women, as if they were endowed with prophetic powers.10 Such powers could even lead to a sort of madness, an overwhelming force taking possession of the poet and forcing her into frantic actions: as it is said of the famous poetess Teresa Gualandi, she ‘improvvisando da sola in sua casa, correva come forsennata nella stanza, gestendo e urtando nelle pareti, e gridando a piena gola’.11 In a study entirely dedicated to improvisation as ‘l’inutile e merviglioso mestiere’ (‘the useless and wonderful occupation’), Alessadra Di Ricco recalls a sentence from the poet improvvisatore Pietro Metastasio: L’improvvisatore, che è poeta di mestiere, abile artefice – nel proprio senso – della parola, e di una parola logorata dalla facilità delle forme cantabili e dei contenuti già detti, incarna anche il mito del divino invasamento. Lo rende, anzi, credibile, e lo consegna all’epoca romantica, che provvederà a caricarlo dei propri valori, simboleggiandovi la privilegiata individualità e irripetibilità dell’esperienza poetica. Per il poeta estemporaneo del Settecento, invece, il privilegio dell’ispirazione consiste ancora nella capacità straordinaria 12 di attingere al codice culturale comune, di farsene specchio e ripetitore nei confronti delle udienze.

Once again these words stress the singular union between genius and cultural value which was consistently associated with improvisation. Yet, it is worth noting that these poets were highly cultivated intellectuals, a fact which no doubt contributed (along with the gift of a superior intellect) to their skill in improvisation. Indeed, they had to produce immediate poems on subjects requested by the public, and so they used characters, situations, and plots taken from history and mythology that would be easily recognized by an audience: Il mestiere dell’improvvisatore richiedeva dunque un buon livello di professionalità, e il possesso di una vasta erudizione era subito colto dagli ascoltatori più attenti […] Stile tratto ad imitazione dei migliori classici, le

(‘From the start it is a shapeless and confused chaos, a fire in the soul without order or law, which dwells upon it […] Full of a God, they feel as if they were inspired, enlightened from above, carried away from themselves, following a concealed force of powerful divinity’). Corilla Olimpica, p. xviii. 10 See also Carlo Caruso’s description of the typical ‘symptoms’ of the extempore poet in action: ‘pupilla accesa, occhio dilatato, voce sonora, squillante; le vene del volto, del collo e del petto straordinariamente enfiate, e un fremito, una vibrazione per tutta la persona’. (‘Flushed pupil, expanded eye, resounding and shrill voice, the face, neck, and chest’s veins extraordinarily puffed up, and a shiver all over the person’). Carlo Caruso, ‘Pietro Giordani e la poesia all’improvviso’, p. 172. 11 (‘Improvising alone in her house, she run, out of her mind, around her room, gesticulating and bumping into the walls, and screaming at the top of her voice’). Carlo Caruso, ‘Pietro Giordani e la poesia all’improvviso’, p. 172. 12 (‘The improvvisatore, a professional poet, is a skilful craftsman – in its original meaning – of the word, and of a word that is worn out because of the fluency of the “singable” forms and the already familiar contents, and embodies the myth of divine excitement. Indeed, this gives him credibility and hands him over to the Romantic period, which will entrust him with its own values symbolizing the privileged individuality and uniqueness of the poetical experience. For the extempore poet of the eighteenth century, on the contrary, the privilege of inspiration is still based on an extraordinary capacity of drawing on shared cultural codes, being their mirror and “repeater” for a wider audience’). Alessandra Di Ricco, L’inutile e il meraviglioso mestiere, p. 17. 9

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sue vaste cognizioni dei migliori autori di ogni età poeti sì greci che latini, italiani, inglesi, e francesi, e la sua padronanza della istoria antica e moderna della mitologia, della morale, della fisica, e metafisica ancora. Ma la 13 professionalità implica anche, da parte della poetessa, un più sfumato e sottile senso del pubblico.

The audience played an essential role for the improvvisatore, as well as for the improvvisatrice. All the most famous improvvisatrici – and Corilla was one of them – were welleducated ladies and were able to enjoy the freedom of displaying their knowledge in public. At the same time, they were also keen not to expose themselves excessively, and their performances were mostly intended for a close circle of friends and literati. They expressly avoided performing at theatres or piazzas, which were generally considered unsuitable places for a lady. Contrary to what is described in Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1807) – where her improvvisatrice regularly performs in public spaces – poets such as Teresa Bandettini and Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici would refuse to perform in such venues, preferring private houses and literary circles. It is also interesting to note that sometimes they would perform together, in a duet, challenging their skills in turns. This well-established ritual was particularly appreciated by audiences because it was practiced only by women poets, as is attested by a contemporary document: ‘Eccole tutte e due a sedere dirimpetto. Credi lo spettacolo era interessante al sommo. Veder due donne che interessavano un pubblico intero. Era il trionfo del bel sesso’.14 As asserted by Benedetto Croce in his La letteratura italiana del Settecento (1949): ‘gli improvvisatori italiani destarono maggiore maraviglia e attenzione, e maggiore lode, presso i forestieri che non presso gli italiani ed è il rapporto tra la loro fortuna e il risalto che ricevevano certi aspetti del concetto di poesia nelle ricerche e dispute sulla poesia, l’arte, il bello, il gusto e il genio, che cominciarono a dirsi di estetica’.15 In particular, poetry derived from improvisation was considered as ‘una caratteristica intrinseca della natura e del genio italiano, e quasi una promessa di riscatto per le sue sorti non più felicissime’.16 Improvisation – like the melodramma – was becoming a real attraction for foreign admirers: ‘Agli stranieri che venivano in Italia per il Grand Tour, l’improvvisazione si presentava non già come l’evento eccezionale di una soirée teatrale, ma come un fatto talmente frequente e

(‘The career of the improviser needed a good standard of professionalism, and the public immediately perceived the performer’s wide erudition […] The style imitates the best classics, [and the improvvisatrice] had a wide knowledge of the best writers from every period: Greek and Latin poets, and also Italian, English, and French writers; she also mastered ancient and modern history, mythology, moral studies, physics, and also metaphysic. But professionalism also implied, for a woman poet, a more variegated and refined awareness of the audience’). Alessandra Di Ricco, L’inutile e il meraviglioso mestiere, pp. 31-32. 14 (‘Here they are, both of them, seated one in front of the other. You must believe me, the spectacle was really interesting: two women involving a whole audience. It was the triumph of the gentle sex’). Alessandra Di Ricco, L’Inutile e il Meraviglioso Mestiere, p. 18. 15 (‘Italian improvisers aroused more wonder and attention, as well as more praise, among foreigners than among Italians; and it is the relation between their success and the prominence given to some aspects of the concept of poetry in researches and discussions on poetry, art, the beautiful, taste and genius, that started to be called aesthetics’). Benedetto Croce, La letteratura italiana del Settecento: note critiche (Bari: Laterza, 1949), p. 299. In particular, see the chapter entitled ‘Gl’Improvvisatori’ (pp. 299-311). 16 (‘An intrinsic characteristics of Italian nature and genius, and almost a promise of redemption for its fate, which was no longer a happy one’). Carlo Caruso, ‘Pietro Giordani e la poesia all’improvviso’, p. 175. 13

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naturale da animare ogni angolo di strada o quasi’.17 Consequently, people from the North of Europe tended to imagine that extempore composition was the expression of a peculiarly Italian genius. English women writers of the Romantic age came to know the Italian improvvisatrici in different ways: either because they read about them in the press and literature, or because they travelled to Italy, and thus had a chance to meet them or attend one of their performances. Nevertheless, the best-known poems dedicated to the figure of the Italian improvvisatrice were written by women who had never personally met one of them. And opinions about these improvvisatrici were extremely diverse. Many writers simply acknowledged their existence; some were interested in the performance and the style of improvisation notwithstanding the performer’s sex; and others criticized the improvvisatrice’s personal exposure and the public fame she thereby gained.18 Hester Lynch Piozzi (preceding Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, and Mme De Staël) was the first to mention Corilla’s powers of improvisation and her fame and coronation at the Capitol, in her 1789 travel book Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany. While in Italy, Piozzi had attended one of the performances of Mrs Fantastici, whom she describes as ‘the fair Fantastici, a young woman who makes improviso verses, and signs them, with infinite learning and taste’.19 In fact, Fortunata Sulgher Fantastici was one of Corilla’s successors. Although it was still renowned throughout the peninsula and attracted many visitors to her private salon, the latter’s talent was beginning to wane: ‘Fantastici is the successor to the celebrated Corilla, who no longer exhibits the power she once held without a rival; yet to her conversations everyone still strives for admittance, though she is now ill and old and hoarse with repeated colds’.20 Piozzi then describes Corilla’s fame and talent for extempore composition as follows: Corilla is gay by nature, and witty, if I may say so, by habit; replete with fancy, and powerful to combine images apparently distant. Mankind is at last more just to people of talents than is universally allowed, I think […] Corilla, without pretensions either to immaculate character (in the English sense), deep erudition, or high 21 birth, has so made her way into the world.

More than the poetry itself, what struck an English woman traveller was the fame, the genius, and the spontaneity of the performance, together with the pride of a woman whose artistic career was acknowledged by a large number of people of different backgrounds, both within Italy and abroad.

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(‘Foreign people coming to Italy on the Grand Tour considered improvisation not as an exceptional event for a theatrical soirée, but as a frequent and natural occurrence animating almost every street corner’). Carlo Caruso, ‘Pietro Giordani e la poesia all’improvviso’, p. 176. This last case is that of Jane Taylor who disapproved of Mme De Staël’s novel for its sexual immorality. Caroline Gonda, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Improvvisatrice, 1753-1845’, Romanticism, 6 (2000), p. 199. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Glimpses of the Italian Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Seeley and Co., 1892), p. 173. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Glimpses of the Italian Society, pp. 173-74. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Glimpses of the Italian Society, p. 174.

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Later on, in 1797, Ann Radcliffe described an improvvisatore in her novel The Italian,22 and Matilda Betham mentioned Corilla Olimpica in her Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804). One year later, Lady Morgan, another famous traveller in Italy, exploited the figure of the improvvisatrice as a character in her novel The Novice of St. Dominick (1805). Here Morgan portrays the improvvisatrice as ‘animated by applause, stimulated by success, her genius seemed almost to rise above itself; the happiest, the most original poetic flights soon obtained her a distinguished rank among the first improvisatori of fashion’.23 In 1807, the best-known improvvisatrice was born from the pen of Mme de Staël in her novel Corinne, ou l’Italie. Clearly inspired by Corilla Olimpica, this improvvisatrice acquired mythical proportions and changed the vision of the woman-artist in Romantic literature throughout Europe. In Britain, Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote a poem entirely inspired by Corinne. Published in 1821, Corinna describes the eponymous character as an angelic woman whose songs are inspired by a divine power capable of enchanting the public. In 1830 Felicia Hemans published her version of this improvvisatrice in Corinne at the Capitol, evoking a woman of genius who is indissolubly linked with Italy and freedom.24 Neither Landon nor Hemans questioned the public fame of their improvvisatrici. Both stressed the moment of Corinne’s coronation at the Capitol, remarking on the change of colour in Corinna’s countenance as soon as the wreath was placed on her head, as if linking the physical act of public recognition with a consequent physical reaction.25 Neither poet questioned female genius and fame. Instead, they doubted that this fame could bring real happiness to woman, as it obviously clashed with her conventional domestic role and family duties. Letitia Elizabeth Landon portrayed another female extempore poet in her long poem The Improvisatrice (1824). In the advertisement the author explains that: The Improvisatrice is an attempt to illustrate that species of inspiration common in Italy, where the mind is warmed from earliest childhood by all that is beautiful in Nature and glorious in Art. The character depicted is

‘On one spot the outré humour of a zanni provoked the never-failing laugh of the Italian rabble, in another the improvisatore, by the pathos of his story, and the persuasive sensibility of his strains, was holding the attention of his auditors, as in the bands of magic’. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, ed. by Chloe Chard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 273. 23 See Erik Simpson, ‘“The Minstrels of Modern Italy”: Improvisation comes to Britain’, European Romantic Review, 14 (2000), 345-367. 24 Felicia Hemans was deeply influenced by Mme de Staël’s Corinne, and in the margin of her copy revealingly wrote ‘c’est moi’. This is stressed by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler in their introduction to Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers as Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Here they add that ‘The novel exerted a powerful hold on nineteenth-century women writers whether they travelled to Italy, or like Hemans, only imagined it. De Staël asked her readers to re-think their preconceptions about women, art and the Italian peninsula’ (p. 1). 25 See Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s ‘Corinna’: ‘She stood, like some fair creature of the skies, / In mild unconscious beauty, and her eyes / Sunk to their timid station on the ground: / Her cheek was delicately pale; but when / They placed the laurel crown upon her brow, / Her face was mantled by a burning blush’; and Felicia Hemans, ‘Corinne at the Capitol’: ‘All the spirit of thy sky / Now hath lit thy large dark eye, / And thy cheek a flush hath caught / From the joy of kindled thought’. Antologia delle poetesse romantiche inglesi, ed. by Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Rome: Carocci, 2003), pp. 928 and 868. 22

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entirely Italian, – a young female with all the loveliness, vivid feeling, and genius of her own impassioned 26 land.

This description echoes the portrayals of the Italian improvvisatrici given in contemporary newspapers. Furthermore, Landon’s character is divinely inspired in her performance, and her destiny is already determined by a supernatural force beyond her will, which sounds as an expedient to arouse the public’s admiration for this uniquely gifted woman. This is also reiterated in her poem when the improvvisatrice talks about her audience and the relation between them and her power of improvisation: ‘They stole me from my lulling dream, / And said they knew that such an hour / Had ever influence on my soul, / And raised my sweetest minstrel power’.27 The association between Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the art of improvisation was noted by the critics of her time, as it still is today. Jonathan Wordsworth, for example, in his introduction to the reprint of The Improvisatrice, stresses the mixture of poetry and painting in Landon’s artistic ability: ‘An improvisatrice is one who composes extempore. L.E.L.’s “soul of romance” unites the roles, and the sensuous worlds, of poet and painter’.28 He also points out that Landon’s skill has its source not in her life but in her studies and imaginative power: ‘Verse comes naturally to her. She can work in the Wordsworthian mode, as she can work in the Byronic. In each case she writes from books and from heightened imagination, seldom from experience’.29 This was also true of the Italian improvvisatrici: they showed not only a natural talent for versifying, but also displayed a thorough knowledge of ancient and modern literature. Corilla Olimpica and Letitia Landon were not literary phenomena detached from their societies, but were observant of, and largely influenced by, the literature and events of their time. As Landon writes in the opening of The Improvisatrice: ‘My power was but a woman’s power; / Yet, in that great and glorious dower / Which Genius gives, I had my part’.30 Thus, poetical power is also associated with woman’s will and capabilities. Particularly for Landon, the matter of publication was very important, poetry being her main source of income. On this matter, her biographer Laman Blanchard remarks: ‘she never waited for the “poetic fit”, the “happy moment”, but sat down to her desk in any mood, careless or solemn’.31 Letitia Elizabeth Landon was thus an improvvisatrice whose compositions were dictated by an active imagination, which we can define as natural genius, stimulated not only from above but, more often, by her own will. Mary Robinson was another famous poet whose works were influenced by the technique of improvisation. Experimenting with improvisation for the first time, she immediately received appreciation from her public, and so felt stimulated to cultivate this practice further: This improvisatore produced in her auditor not less surprise than admiration, when solemnly assured by its author that this was the first time of its being repeated […] Mrs. Robinson had afterwards the gratification of 26 27 28 29 30 31

‘Advertisement’, The Improvisatrice (London: Hurst, Robinson and Co., 1825), p. v. ll. 207-10, in The Improvisatrice; and Other Poems by L.E.L. (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1825), p. 13. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Improvisatrice, 1825 (Poole, New York: Woodstock Books, 1996), p. iii. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Improvisatrice, 1825, p. vii. ll. 25-27, in The Improvisatrice; and Other Poems by L.E.L., p. 6. Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., ed. by Laman Blanchard, 2 vols (London: Colburn, 1876), I, p. 71.

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finding this offspring of her genius inserted in the Annual Register, with flattering encomium from the pen of 32 the eloquent and ingenious editor.

This successful trial subsequently led the poet to let her imagination free to follow her inspiration for further compositions: The spirit of inspiration was not to be subdued, and she repeated throughout the admirable poem The Maniac, much faster than it could be committed to paper. She lay, while dictating, with her eyes closed, apparently in the stupor which opium frequently produces, repeating like a person talking in her sleep. This affecting performance, produced in circumstances so singular, does no less credit to the genius than to the heart of the au33 thor.

Letitia Landon was always associated with her own fictional improvvisatrici, both because of their poetical styles and for their sudden deaths. Her biographer wrote that ‘the assertion that many of L.E.L.’s songs were simply ‘improvisings’, may almost be taken in a literal sense’, and that ‘the ease with which her fancy applied itself to any subject, and of the rapidity with which she embodied her ideas in verse were the same as an improvisatrice’. Landon was so fast in writing down her poems (and, in this, she resembled Byron) that ‘in a space of time that seemed scarcely sufficient for transcribing the lines legibly, that beautiful set of pictures was produced. Her thoughts always flowed faster than she could put them upon paper’. The drawback, however, was that sometimes the rapidity of composition compromised the quality of her poems: ‘the injury that resulted from the rule of rapidity – breathless and reckless rapidity – is shown throughout the various poems that compose the overwrought richness, the beautiful excess, the melodious confusion of the Improvisatrice’.34 Many critics, therefore, accused Letitia Landon of a lack of reflection and meditation in her compositions. Nonetheless, her ‘literary patron’, William Jerdan, was ready to excuse her faults in composing The Improvisatrice, acknowledging her display of genius in his review: We doubt not the ability to discover some of the faults of youthful composition in her strains; but we would most sincerely pity the person who could notice them amid the transcendant [sic] beauties of thought, expres35 sion, imagery and fervent genius, with the blaze of which they are surrounded and illuminated.

The same flaws were remarked upon in the poems performed by real improvvisatrici: since their inspiration was immediate, their delivery spontaneous and astonishingly delivered, the magical effect of improvisation would not last long after the performance. As extemporaneous poets, they depended on the oral code, and were consequently excluded from the literary canon.36 And Mary Shelley was aware of this limitation, as is revealed in her essay ‘The English in Italy’ of 1826. Here, she acknowledges the genius of the improvvisatore, while expressing some doubts about his future celebrity: ‘The Italian improvisatori 32 33 34 35 36

Memoirs of Mary Robinson ‘Perdita’, with introduction and notes by J. Fitzgerald Molloy (London: Gibbings and Co., 1895), p. 212. Memoirs of Mary Robinson, p. 219. Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., I, pp. 41-42. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Improvisatrice, 1825, p. i. See Caroline Gonda, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Improvvisatrice, 1753-1845’.

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pour out, as a cataract does water, poetic imagery and language; but except that the genial moisture somewhat fertilizes the near bordering banks, it reaches the ocean of oblivion, leaving no trace behind’.37 Even so, Mary Shelley was a great admirer of Tommaso Sgricci, and openly praised the art of improvisation in her letters, where she stressed the supernatural appearance of the inspired speaker.38 Thanks to her direct experience of this phenomenon – between December and January 1821, Mary and Percy Shelley attended many performances of this kind – she successfully portrays the improvvisatore’s effect on the audience: This attractive art renders the person who exercises it the object of so much interest and admiration, that it is to be wondered that any one who has once practised it, can ever give it up. The act of reciting the poetry that flows immediately to the lips is peculiarly animating: the declaimer warms, as he proceeds, with his own success; while the throng of words and ideas that present themselves, light up the eyes, and give an air of almost supernatural intelligence and fire to the countenance and person. The audience – at first curious, then pleased, and, at last, carried away by enthusiastic delight – feel an admiration, and bestow plaudits, which, perhaps, no 39 other display of human talent is capable of exciting.

In her late long poem A History of the Lyre (1829), Letitia Landon portrays another Italian improvvisatrice and gives full expression to the discourse of improvisation in relation to gender, although this time she assumes a different attitude towards her character.40 Indeed, Landon shows to be perfectly aware that, in improvising, a poet must be careful not to become too artificial and repetitive. She starts by contrasting natural genius and artificial composition, comparing a ‘fine mind [that] wastes itself away’ to a ‘noble stream which, unconfined / Makes fertile its rich banks, and glades the face / Of nature round; but not so when its wave / Is lost in artificial waterfalls’. She then moves on to discuss the shortness of a woman’s poetical career: ‘Your songs sink on the ear, and there they die, /A flower’s sweetness, but a flower’s life. / An evening’s homage is your only fame’. On the subject of the consequences of fame for women poets, she emphasizes that they will always be lonely, because they are different from other people: ‘And know how different I am from all / I once dream’d I could be. Fame! Stirring fame / I work no longer miracles for thee’. Naturally, Landon concludes by dissociating female identity and celebrity: ‘I am a woman’, she writes, ‘Tell me not of fame’. Further on, Landon describes the process of poetical composition, or how the improvvisatrice receives her inspiration. Starting from the assumption that she ‘did not choose’ her ‘gift’, thus underlining its divine source, the protagonist explains that ‘Shadows and floating visions grew to thoughts, / And thoughts found words, the passionate words of song, / And all to me was poetry / All was association with some link / Whose fine electric throb was in the mind’. The main component of improvisation is memory, as well as the recollec-

Mary Shelley ‘The English in Italy’ (1826), in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. by Betty Bennett and Charles Robinson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 352. 38 See note ‘c’ in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, gen. editor Nora Crook, 4 vols, vol. I: Italian Lives, ed. by Tilar Mazzeo (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002). 39 Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, I, pp. 186-87. 40 All quotations from this poem are from The Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, ed. by William Scott (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1873), pp. 223-31. 37

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tion of past history and its value in the poet’s contemporary world. ‘Remembrance’, she writes, ‘makes the poet: ‘[…] ’tis the past / Lingering within him, with a keener sense / Than is upon the thoughts of common men’. As Percy Shelley argued before Landon, the poet elevates himself from the status of common man to become a prophet for humankind. But Landon had to face the burden of being not only a poet-prophet, but also a woman. Thus, in A History of the Lyre, this task occasionally becomes so difficult that the protagonist is inclined to abandon her poetic vocation: ‘Yet sometimes I look round with vain regret, / And think I will rest my lute, and nerve / My woman’s hand for nobler enterprise; / But the day never comes’. In conclusion, it is worth stressing the great impact that the Italian improvvisatori and improvvisatrici had on the style and procedures of poetical composition of several Romantic-period authors in Britain. Concepts of genius, inspiration, and poetic function were also crucially linked to the discourse of improvisation, both for male and female writers. It was the woman writer, however, who more often identified herself with the improvvisatrice and the related conflict between public exposure and poetical genius. If, as Angela Leighton asserts, the cult of sensibility gave women poets the possibility of expressing themselves in public spaces, since it was a ‘mode of display’, a performance of extreme emotions on the stage of the body’, then ‘sensibility would seem to express above all the inner selfalienation of female subjectivity’.41 Thus, improvisation is the link between the natural poet and the professional one, ‘whose improvisational methods needed no training or harnessing, and whose facility of writing long, perfectly metrical poems was of itself a sufficient cause of wonder’.42 Invoking the Italian model of the improvvisatrice was a means for Letitia Landon, as well as for Felicia Hemans, of ‘recovering a lost self’ and returning ‘to the body’ as an active subject rather than a passive object’, for, ‘in poems whose language sounds improvised, and whose very structureless length mimes the notion of woman’s unstoppable flow of creativity’,43 a woman could conciliate body and soul, public and private spheres. The art of improvisation had different implications for the poet and for the public. It could be seen either as an expression of natural art, or as a divine gift; either as an oral performance with a short-lived success, or as something that would consecrate a poet to everlasting fame; either as a symbol of free expression, or as a limitation in the choice of the subject discussed. It could last as long as an oral performance, or it could be written down for future recollection. However mediocre the quality of real improvvisatori’s verses may be, what deserves attention is their symbolic value and ideological significance both for an eccentric poet in love with freedom such as Byron, and for a woman poet battling for public recognition such as Letitia Landon.

Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 58. 42 Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 46. Glennis Stephenson also draws our attention to the ‘notion of female intuition and female improvisation which naturalises the poetess and marks the work as the spontaneous, confessional outpouring of emotion’. Letitia Landon: The Woman behind L.E.L. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 11. 43 Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 58. 41

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Mauro Pala (Università di Cagliari)

Facets of the Risorgimento: The Debate on the Classical Heritage from Byron’s Childe Harold to Leopardi’s Canzone ad Angelo Mai

Lord Byron, Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi present thematic convergences that may be ultimately grouped under the common heading of the Italian Risorgimento. The complex issues in Foscolo’s and Leopardi’s reflections have a direct counterpart in the topographies of Canto IV of Byron’s Childe Harold. Meditations over ruins and the attendant assessments of their import link Byron and Foscolo, whilst also transforming their standpoints and conclusions. In the case of the British poet, the visit to, and description of, the classical Roman landscapes coincide with a reflection on liberty as an absolute value which, however, is soon reintegrated within a fundamentally private sphere. Foscolo’s Sepolcri, by contrast, insist on the possibility of action in the present, although the poem also works from within the context of recurrent interpretations of the glorious memories of Italy. Similarly, the ruins in Leopardi’s canzoni (‘All’Italia’ and ‘Ad Angelo Mai’) inspire direct political action. Not only does Leopardi’s retrospective view eschew elegiac intentions, but it also constitutes an essential prelude to his Discorso sopra lo Stato presente del costume degli Italiani. Elaborating the same topoi, Byron, Foscolo, and Leopardi reveal the different discourses at the basis of their works through profoundly dissimilar results.

Byron’s lines on the Roman Colosseum and Forum in Childe Harold, probably among the most famous expressions of the sentiment of ruins in British literature, not only convey a profound willingness, in his own words, to ‘meditate amongst decay’ and ‘stand a ruin amidst ruins’,1 but also pay tribute, albeit indirectly, to the theme of Italian irredentism. At approximately the same time, Ugo Foscolo’s and Giacomo Leopardi’s poems served to establish the decisive precedent of politicizing Italy’s monuments as icons of the Risorgimento movement, transforming places and buildings into symbolic props and images of a national identity without which political unity would be meaningless. If, for Byron, a ruin is primarily a vehicle for meditation, one that foregrounds his poetic imagination, for Foscolo a sepulchre is the final stage of poetry and the teleological sense of human history, both at an individual and at a collective level. Similarly, Leopardi invokes that specific language of the Risorgimento encoded by ruins as he laments Italy’s inability to grow into a mature European nation. Unlike Byron, both Leopardi and Foscolo project the classical past on to a shared public dimension, to which Leopardi, with his Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli Italiani, adds a specifically anthropological perspective, in order to promote the nationalist movement.

1

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV. 25. 1-2, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-93), II, p. 132. Henceforth cited in parenthesis in the text as CH.

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In contrast, Byron interiorizes the classical Roman landscape, reading it as a cypher of his own spiritual condition. He seems to have first discovered Italy through the translation of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, with whose male protagonist, a young Scottish nobleman who leaves his native land to visit Italy, he identified himself. But Corinne was, first and foremost, a guide for the reader through the treasures of Rome, capable of awakening the spirit of the past present in the ancient monuments: A ruin – yet what ruin! from its mass Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been reared; Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass And marvel where the spoil could have appeared. Hath it indeed been plundered, or but cleared? Alas! developed, opens the decay, When the colossal fabric’s form is neared: It will not bear the brightness of the day, Which streams too much on all years, man, have reft away. (CH IV. 143)

In this respect, Peter Vassallo remarks that ‘As Corinne guides Oswald around St Peter’s she confesses that the architectural design gives her a sense of composure and that: “La vue d’un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée, qui vous attend pour vous faire du bien quand vous vous en approchez”. The gigantic elegance of St Peter’s produces much the same effect on Byron of a “Vastness which grows, but grows to harmonize – All musical in its immensities”. Following Madame De Staël, Byron equates architectural symmetry with musical harmony. The overall impact on Corinne of this grandiose architectural achievement was that of the insignificance of man when confronted with the immortality of art’.2 Following the same thought processes, the fallen columns are, for Byron, mainly the field of his intimate struggle to build a poem more lasting than marble or bronze. For him, Italian irredentism per se, as we will see, is increasingly irrelevant in its outcome. In his treatment of these themes Byron ‘alternated – often in the same poem, sometimes in the adjacent lines – between Orientalizing Italy in the manner of an arch-imperialist and Occidentalizing it in the style of a liberal nationalist’.3 Both attitudes are represented in the following lines from Childe Harold IV: Italia! Oh Italia! thou who hast The fatal gift of beauty, which became A funeral dower of present woes and past, On thy sweet brow is sorrow plough’d by shame, And annals graved in characters of flame. Oh God! that thou wert in thy nakedness Less lovely or more powerful [...] (CH IV. 42. 1-7)

2 3

Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp.16-17. Daryl S. Ogden, ‘Byron, Italy, and the Poetics of Liberal Imperialism’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 49 (2000), p. 115.

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Connoting Italy as feminine and ‘lovely’, Byron employs a politically charged denomination familiar to those Western ‘masculine’ powers willing to dominate the Orient. At the same time, he resorts to the language of the Risorgimento lamenting Italy’s inability to ward off Continental powers such as France and Austria. In particular, Byron’s Venetian poems are a series of meditations on the theme of the extinction of the republic: ‘They are both an attempt to understand the significations of the decline and fall of the Venetian empire, and a series of explorations of the way history is understood and constructed through the archeology of knowledge and the making of interpretative texts’.4 From this standpoint, the palace and the prison opening Childe Harold IV link the tyranny of the ancien régime with the spiritual imprisonment of the rulers, with the result that there is no apparent existential liberty for the pilgrim who represents the poet’s alter ego: I loved her from my boyhood; she to me Was a fairy city of the heart, rising like water columns from the sea, Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart; And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare’s art, Had stamp’d her image in me, and even so, Although I found her thus, we did not part; Perchance even dearer in her days of woe, Than when she was a boast, a marvel and a show. (CH IV. 18)

Byron totally dematerializes, and thus dehistoricizes, Venice and Italy. The city on the lagoon is ‘enchanted’ and, by this token, stamped in the endless intertextuality of previous writings, so that it is difficult to disentangle its image from contemporary reality: ‘Canto IV is centrally concerned with ruin and decay: or rather in the absence of a centre it hovers restlessly and obsessively around ruin and ruination’.5 It is so because ‘the taste of ruins [...] is contemporary with the emergence of republicanism, a connection drawn at the time by the Marquis de Sade who saw in the tale of terror an indirect reaction to political upheaval [...] Once Bastille and Palace had fallen, the smashed architecture of feudalism and the aristocratic order [...] began through broken windows to emit mysterious and multiple significations, being charmingly picturesque in decay, a focus for nostalgia and conservative resentment, hauntings, but also new order and the promise of material change’.6 And Rome? Invoking Time, ‘the beautifier of the dead, / Adorner of the ruin’ (CH IV. 130. 1-2), Byron offers up his own ruins of years, ‘though few, yet full of fate’ (IV. 131. 4), and, contemplating the Forum, declares: ‘When the light shines serene but doth not glare / Then in this magic circle raise the dead: / Heroes have trod this spot – ’tis on their dust ye tread’ (CH IV. 144. 7-9). Nothing here refers to the contemporary scenario of post Napoleonic Italy, and the ‘phantoms of the past’ just mentioned are not ancient nor modern Ro-

4

5 6

Malcolm Kelsall, ‘“Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee...”: Byron’s Venice and Oriental Empire’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. by Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 248. Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 27. Geoffrey Ward, ‘Byron’s Artistry in Deep and Layered Space’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. by Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1988), p.194.

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mans, but the shapes of the poet’s own troubled life. Time, then, is not the adversary of empire, but the ally of the poet, as ‘Beautifier of the dead’ and ‘adorner of the ruin’, by which the artist creates a consoling refuge from the poverty of the present.7 In Venice and Rome, Byron becomes a witness to the process whereby nature reworks ruins and various remains from the past into new forms, creating what Georg Simmel in Die Ruine would later theorize as entirely meaningful and comprehensible, but only for the artistic gaze. Endowed with such a gaze, Byron depicts ruins in a state of equipoise between nature and culture, but with little apparent connection with the state of present Italy. Rome and Venice in the full flower of their glory, that is, in their state of ruination, are transformed into pure representations, the decay of which is the core of their artistic essence. Walking among the ruins, Byron does not feel the terror of the sublime, but is instead swept along by nature’s capacity to integrate different stages of historical development into a coherent whole. This process is related to the sense of longing – as an inner form of the perception of reality that saturates Romanticism: There are explicit formulas, and many of them, such as Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Sehnsucht nach dem Unendlichen’ longing for the infinite; such as Schleiermacher’s ‘Gefühl einer unbefriedigten Sehnsucht’ – feeling of an unsatisfied longing. There are symbols, and many of them, of that which is longed for, such as Novalis’s ‘blaue Blume’ or Goethe’s ‘Land wo die Zitronen blühn’. The land where the lemon trees bloom is congruent with Brown’s ‘country that is always distant’ (and both to the ‘kingdom which has no end’ so ardently sought by Augustine [De Civitate Dei XXII.30]. The longing for and quest for such a realm are the very stuff of Romanticism. Shelley’s Alastor leaves his ‘alienated home / To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands’. The questing voyages of the fictional Childe Harold parallel the questing voyages of the actual Byron. The Ancient Mariner, the Wandering Jew, Cain – the restless and unsatisfied wanderings of these mythic Romantic figures find counterparts in the actual journeyings of figures such as Chateaubriand, Lenau, Nerval. And Rimbaud and 8 Wordsworth’s Wanderer have at least homelessness in common.

Beside this multifaceted motif of the journey, there are further reasons to believe that Byron’s position with regard to Risorgimento Italy was ambiguous, since as Daryl Ogden, quoting Nigel Leask, contends, even though Byron was ‘more distrustful of imperialism than many of his contemporaries, his personal experience of Italy was initially bound up in an imperialist paradigm of exploitation’.9

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‘There is given / Unto the things of earth, which time hath bent, / A spirit’s feeling, and where he hath leant / His hand, but broke his schythe, there is a power, / And magic in the ruined battlement, / For which the palace of the present hour / Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are in its dower’ (CH IV. 129. 3-9). Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 7. ‘As far as Byron was concerned, England’s own imperial identity became implicated in Austria’s Italian rule; at the same time, England’s identification with liberalism – and identity that he in many ways personified – also became enmeshed in Italy’s desire for national liberty, as Whigs such as Byron called for at least limited diplomatic and military intervention on behalf of the Carbonari. That Byron considered his own identity to be coincident with Italy’s is not difficult to imagine, especially when we take into consideration Jerome McGann’s observations on Canto IV of Childe Harold; McGann argues that Byron’s representation of Italian history – full of ruins and rebirths – in many ways paralleled the poet’s understanding of his own life at the time of the canto’s composition’. Daryl S. Ogden, ‘Byron, Italy, and the Poetics of Liberal Imperialism’, p. 121.

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At any rate, in his endless movement, the chief characteristic of which lies in the fact that it cannot ever be completed, Byron does not really address the issue of historical Italy: ‘Jerome McGann, in his important work on the Canto, rightly points out that it is, in fact, curious that so notorious a revolutionary poem should be so lacking in vision of a transformed political order in Italy. The climatic statement of human creative capabilities set forth at St Peter’s and the Vatican Gallery is totally without political reference. Rather, it is the dramatization of an act of individual consciousness’.10 If Byron’s tendency is to turn the classical landscape into a private stage, Italian political poetry projects the same monuments into a common public dimension. Ruins in this context are seen and depicted as a genuinely political arena. While Byron is clearly seeking a languid and decaying Italy, for eighteenth-century Italian poets and intellectuals the systems of thought revolving around the idea of classicism began gradually to assume a central role in the crucial fight over Italy’s political future. For the popes, for instance, ruins proved not only the magnificence of ancient Rome, but their continuity with the might of the papacy and its indestructible legacy. The Colosseum thus became central to the political iconography of both the Church and the Risorgimento.11 In the Vatican tradition of converting classical monuments into Christian symbols, the popes consecrated it to the Christian martyrs, and considered the site worth the pilgrims’ devotion: ‘For the democratic imagination it served instead as a sign of the survival of pre-Christian Rome, and the promise that the ancient republic would one day be restored’.12 Garibaldi, for example, wrote a novel in which the Colosseum serves as a locus of democratic opposition and proposed to divert the Tiber from the centre of Rome to excavate and rediscover a passeggiata archeologica that would have had a clearly didactic function.13 Within this explicitly political iconography, Vincenzo Monti’s poetry, for instance, celebrated a political continuity not only between pagan and Christian Rome, but between papal Rome and classical Athens. In point of fact, his lines provide a code for reading the vestiges of ancient Greece as harbingers of Rome’s future greatness. Pericles himself was therefore enrolled by Monti among the ‘mille volti argolici’ (‘the thousand Greek faces’) in the lines apologetic of the papal court. Accordingly, if Greece was conquered, its ruins were nevertheless made splendid by the Romans, and Rome is to be credited for allowing Greek art to continue to flourish in its new home. Bypassing the Renaissance as the period most keen on antiquity, Monti fosters the view that a real Renaissance is just beginning in contemporary Rome. The same places and the same topoi – ruins, material and spiritual vestiges of an ancient glory – had been employed by Ugo Foscolo in 1807, but with a noticeable difference. He resorted to these themes dear to neoclassicism to place them in the service of Italian nation-

Tony Tanner, Venice Desired, p. 34. On the Colosseum and the lure of Roman classical ruins see, among others, Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), and Michela di Macco, Il colosseo: funzione simbolica, storica, urbana (Rome: Bulzoni, 1971). 12 Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 10. 13 Giuseppe Garibaldi, Clelia: il governo del monaco (Milan: Rechiedei, 1870). 10 11

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alism. The motif of national independence always represented the hub around which Foscolo’s philosophical speculation revolved: already in the first edition of the Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, in 1798, the heroic and nihilistic character of Jacopo Ortis shows autobiographical traits that are congruent with Foscolo’s complex political attitude. After Napoleon struck a deal with Austria with the Campoformio treaty, thus betraying the hopes of the patrioti, Foscolo articulated a double opposition against the hegemonic powers: the first of the two, France, ‘cheated us with the enthusiasm of freedom’, while the second Austria, ‘persecutes us with religious fanaticism’.14 Foscolo basically relies on themes imitative of the classical style to express his opposition. As it is already clear in the political stalemate represented by his ‘Orazione a Bonaparte’ (1802), he is incapable of defining a middle point, and rather constructs his hero on a classical model indebted to Seneca or, more recently, Parini. When the stoic Ortis chooses death to proclaim his relentless opposition to foreign domination, we should bear in mind that this character did not correspond to the real Foscolo, who actually collaborated with the French forces of occupation, but rather represents a narrative strategy on the part of the author who was well aware that his audience, grown in the neoclassical rhetorical tradition, would have properly interpreted Ortis’s example and his implied nationalistic exhortation. The Italian Risorgimento relies heavily on motifs and topoi that belong to classicism: ruins, tombs, and suicide are all endowed with a codified significance and are read accordingly. Challenging the elegiac tradition of representation in the sepulchral writings of Harvey, Young, and Gray, and investing its object with a new political significance, Foscolo reclaimed the Italian landscape from the tyranny of the picturesque and made it a part of an organic project of civic emancipation. In Dei Sepolcri (1807) sepulchre and ruin tend to overlap: through a rhetorical question, in the opening lines the poet wonders if man, in a hypothetical ultramundane existence, can seek solace in the existence of his own sepulchre. This first question already contains images and concepts recurring throughout the entire poem, followed by the parallel between Nature, creator, and destroyer, and the tree growing by the sepulchre. The civil society that succeeds in perpetuating with funeral honours the existence of the dead performs the same holy rituals consecrated by the cinerary urn and the funeral wail. Re-establishing this lost correspondence between the present and the classics, Dei Sepolcri suggests that the safest way to reinvent a political idiom is through the archeological appeal to Italian origins, a lesson that later proved central to the cultural politics of the Risorgimento. Politics, although always present in literature, is here expressed through rhetorical means and rhetoric, and provides access to the complex interplay between classical heritage and emerging nationalistic consciousness. For Foscolo, as for Gioberti after him, ruins represent an archive that encourages both spiritual and political developments. The image of the past had to be made vivid to young Italians to inspire them to fight for political emancipation. In fact poetry and archeology have much in common, since they are both pillars and means of a theleological interpretation of nations as living beings, where nations rely on verse and ruins for their spiritual survival and perpetuation. In addition, all this was

14

Part I, letter of 28 October, in Ugo Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Florence: Giunti, 1997), p. 14 (my translation).

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bound to have practical consequences: Bettoni, Foscolo’s publisher, for instance, capitalized on the success of the Sepolcri by issuing a series of iconographical catalogues inspired by the Santa Croce section of the poem. These volumes made accessible a gallery of images that would assume increasing political significance in the decades to come. It must be stressed, however, that Foscolo’s considerations on the nature and function of tombs were neither original nor distinctively Italian, since they appealed to Vico’s theory of history and reflected the contemporary debate in France. The rhetorical function of the Sepolcri is to represent a militant literary genre, the poema civile, which is, in turn, a structural descendant of the exhortatory oration, the classical genus deliberativum. All the themes present in the Sepolcri place the composition squarely in the tradition of the Italian poesia civile, inaugurated by Petrarch’s canzone ‘Italia mia’. Foscolo is thus making a concrete attempt to inaugurate a modern school of political poetry, whilst relying on Petrarch’s illustrious legacy. The entire section culminating in the battle of Marathon can be described as follows: representation of ancient and primitive ages, when humans, thanks to the birth and later diffusion of civil institutions and burying rituals, abandoned their primitive, wild behaviour. A radical critique of the images related to Catholicism follows, in which Foscolo bypasses Christianity to draw on heterodox and pagan models. In his view, these ancient pagan sites, as well as modern English cemeteries, express a natural and serene acceptance of death. Surprisingly, to this praise of a pre-eminently Anglo-Saxon sensibility, Foscolo adds an paean to Horatio Nelson as the quintessentially anti-tyrannical hero, a role in which he sees an implicit parallel between the freedom fighter and the poet who stoically oppose their servile contemporary society. Tombs of great men inspire the great spirits of the present to emulate the deeds of their predecessors, and this enterprise is particularly glorious if aimed at the rebirth of one’s country. Another example of a contemporary hero is represented by Alfieri, who, according to Foscolo, drew inspiration from the past, hoped in the future, but scorned the present. Alfieri’s claim to greatness rests, therefore, not so much on his poetical achievements, as on the fact that he became a martyr to his high principles. Alfieri’s nihilistic attitude finds a counterpart in the Greeks who fought and died at Marathon, and whose stoic ideals are revived in the present in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, seen as the tangible shrine of national identity. Foscolo himself, born on a Greek island and later forced to abandon his birthplace to wander in exile, considers his destiny as similar to that of Ajax, the Homeric hero who had been unjustly treated in life and lived relying on posthumous glory. In the poem, the Muses guarding the sepulchres keep on chanting even when the tombs are destroyed by Time. Analogously, the poet’s duty is to continue his song, like the Muses, reminding his contemporaries of the civic function of great Italians. Significantly, the remains of these characters are buried not in Rome, the seat of the Vatican and the Church, but in Florence, the living monument of the lay Renaissance. Those who accuse me of a timid silence and impute to me the most base and self-interested motifs, are certainly ignorant how often I think of the philosopher Bayle, whose writings in Holland against the despotism of Louis the Fourteenth caused his own brother to die in prison; but my own philosophy is not so highminded as

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to make me think that I ought to sacrifice my dearest affections to the very improbable liberty of the italian 15 slaves.

Within Foscolo’s carefully constructed discourse centred on the classics, Santa Croce becomes the locus of Italian glory and the obvious expression of the nation’s history: a solid symbol that reminds us of the nineteenth-century context of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831). Here, Hugo describes the cathedral as a ‘chronicle in stone’,16 a tangible collective representation of national history to be read in its three dimensions. Not content with that, Hugo draws a parallel between great Gothic cathedrals and geological formations in order to illustrate the process through which a national consciousness develops. In spite of the limits imposed by the genre (a poem is not a novel), Foscolo nevertheless manages to dramatize the need to guard the monuments from Napoleon’s law, since Santa Croce is not merely a church. First and foremost, it represents the brimming cup of all individual destinies who sacrificed themselves for Italian greatness. Both Byron and Foscolo convey a substantially lay perspective on history, but while the British exile’s conclusions border on solipsism, it is a glorious collective identity that provides Foscolo with the strongest motivation to write poetry. Also the re-enactment of the battle of Marathon is dictated by the need to find a glorious event in which the Italian Risorgimento may be rooted. This is a poetry and also a topography of exile. And here, too, we are faced with a tomb, and this time the sepulchre belongs to a Greek hero. As the long series of classical allusions ends with the tomb of Hector and with the funeral honours granted to him, Foscolo reaches the end of the symbolic autobiographical odyssey centred on the figure of the poet haunting the Sepolcri. In clarifying the political import of the poem, Foscolo employs and accepts the metaphor of the voyage, not as an image of evasion or digression, but as a necessary exile and a quest for a political poetry adequate to Italy’s historical circumstances. While for his critics – among whom the Monsieur Guillon, addressee of Foscolo’s Lettera a Monsieur Guillon sulla sua incompetenza a giudicare i poeti italiani, was the most prominent – a voyage signified poetic deviance, for Foscolo it provides the basis on which to set up an innovative elegiac tradition that will have a lasting impact on future Romantic productions: If one is to find fault with the means of a book one must first understand its end. Young and Harvey meditated on sepulchres as Christians: the object of their books is resignation in the face of death and the reassurance of another life: Protestant preachers, therefore, were content to reflect on protestant tombs. Gray wrote as a philosopher: the object of his elegy is to persuade us of the obscurity of life and tranquillity of death: hence he is satisfied with a country churchyard. The author (Foscolo himself) considers sepulchres politically: and intends to animate the political emulation of Italians with the examples of nations who honour the memory and sepulchres of great men: therefore he has had to travel farther than Young, Harvey and Gray, and preach not the 17 resurrection of bodies but that of virtues.

E. Levi, ‘Alcune lettere inedite di Ugo Foscolo’, Nuova Antologia (febbraio 1902), in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, 27 vols (Florence: Le Monnier, 1951- ), p. xcviii (my translation). 16 Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness, p. 125. 17 Ugo Foscolo, Lettera a Monsieur Guillon sulla sua incompetenza a giudicare i poeti italiani [1807], in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, vol. 6: Scritti letterari e politici dal 1796 al 1808, p. 518, quoted in Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness, p. 123 (my translation). 15

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At the time of writing the Sepolcri Foscolo considers his exile a rational political choice which will enable him to represent the Italian people more effectively, and therefore will be compensated by posthumous fame. His appeal to individual heroism is motivated by an immediate political concern: ‘Pur nuova legge impone oggi i sepolcri / Fuor de guardi pietosi e il nome a morti’ (‘yet a new law bans tombs from the eyes of mourners, and denies the dead their name’).18 The dispersal of bodies in unmarked communal graves reflected Italy’s own geographical and political dismemberment, its loss of an identity and a name. Since Italy itself was exiled and dispersed, a writer could no longer lead a safe, sheltered life, but rather had to risk a journey in search of exemplary historical and mythical sites long consecrated to a community and guarded with the final pietas that Italy had forgotten. It is thus that Foscolo’s search for the Sepolcri becomes an archeological itinerary.19 In his imaginative response to the real constraints of contemporary Italy, the fugitive poet reaches back into a heroic and mythical past, hoping to demonstrate its essential truth and validity for the present. If the setting of the poem shifts rapidly, it is because the moral basis on which Italy rests is itself continuously changing, and the poet must look farther to find a stable and secure ground for his composition, a plot of pious earth designated as sacred, long cultivated as a shrine, and now perhaps overgrown. The Risorgimento in Foscolo is thus also a physical landscape. In the process of becoming a prototypical symbol of the sublime in European Romanticism, the Alps retain a distinct political connotation in Italian literature. Since Petrarch’s canzone ‘Italia mia’ their majestic profile had become a topos of the Petrarchan tradition, and Foscolo is well aware that the political significance of this privileged landscape is never lost. The condensation of so many contradictory themes was considered by Foscolo as essential to the attainment of a genealogy in which he could trace the Italians’ legendary ancestry. As with Achilles’ armour, the memory of Troy outlasts all historical vicissitudes, emerging intact in Homer and the literary tradition he inaugurates. Similarly, even though virtuous men are persecuted in life, their memory lives on immortal in the lines of sympathetic writers. The ironic fact in Foscolo’s relationship to the Risorgimento alluded to in Dei Sepolcri is that, by wishing to preserve what has been valued by the past, Foscolo found himself valuing what had been preserved. The result was that, increasingly, the notion of value and the attendant political project became the exclusive province of the past, while the present was transformed into something resembling a vast graveyard. Italian history, in Foscolo’s conception, has been the record of events, res gestae, things done and not of states of being. And yet, it is in the latter psychic or spiritual situations that he believes – as a poet, and also, surreptitiously, as a national bard – to be crucial for the emergence of a national canon, and thus can and ought to be individuated. Acting as a poet and not as a historian, Foscolo also moves beyond the mere fact of a lasting foreign domination, and evokes the mysterious nature of human will and imagination traceable in ruins and sepulchres in order 18 19

Ugo Foscolo, Opere (Turin: Einaudi Gallimard, 1994), p. 24 (my translation). ‘The brother of Ruin’, according to Thomas Warton in The Pleasures of Melancholy (1747), is Horror, a term which, although devoid of precise meaning in our time, was perfectly understood by the Romantics who were Foscolo’s and Byron’s contemporaries.

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to locate in these topoi the factors that intervene in the process of physical actuality, and thus ‘invent’ the primarily cultural process of the Risorgimento. Within the iconography of the Risorgimento, Leopardi’s patriotic canzone ‘All’Italia’20 was conceived in imitation of Foscolo and, exactly like his illustrious predecessor, Leopardi excluded any reference to Rome, projecting the reader into a philological fantasy of Greece, the objective of which was to exhort that culture in order to revive the ruined landscape of Italy. The connection between his poetics and the political discourse of the Risorgimento is clear. It was largely thanks to the efforts of Giuseppe Mazzini and Gioberti that Rome moved into the foreground of Italian nationalist discourse by the mid-nineteenth century, displacing the rival iconographies of Florence and Greece. Ruins represent an important aspect of Leopardi’s theory and can be used, as in the case of Foscolo, to understand the Italian Risorgimento, even if they do not exhaust the subject, but rather supplement it. The symbolism of ruins in Leopardi finds a parallel in the physiognomy operating in Ortis and the Sepolcri. There is an important difference, however, since the image of the ruin in Leopardi has a materialistic quality together with a strong grip on reality, despite the individualistic, melancholic mood it expresses. Whereas Foscolo, in contemplating a ruin, exalts his own ego to epic heights within nationalistic discourse, Leopardi takes a different stand towards political freedom. He tends to be much more sceptical about the possible outcome of the Risorgimento, as he writes after the failure of the early risings in 1821. Consequently, freedom becomes for him a cosmic rather than a contingent issue. In such a perspective, ruins retain a political, even if mediated significance, not directly affecting the course of events in pre-Risorgimento Italy. Ruins as topoi bear witness to the fact that Leopardi, despite his Enlightenment philo-classicist background, shows a genuinely Romantic trait in his profound fascination for the archaic. The political outcome of all this probably lies in Leopardi’s admiration for France as a solid example of civic virtue. According to the poet, the reason of the strength of the national feeling in France owes much to the fact that the French were ready to make sacrifices to maintain a sense of nation and not be dependent on a foreign power. Leopardi stresses that this strong sense of nationality is the reason why France did not decay, as nations tend to do, and as happened in Italy right after the glorious times of the Renaissance, when they reach a stage of extreme sophistication. This, in fact, would have been the perspective taken by the literary and cultural historian Francesco de Sanctis, related to Edward Gibbon’s interpretation of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. According to Walter Binni, Leopardi’s best poetry is not the result of a serene and yet passive contemplation, as de Sanctis and Croce first claimed, but rather the expression of a strong political commitment.21

‘O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi / E le colonne e i simulacri e l’erme / Torri degli avi nostri, / Ma la gloria non vedo / Non vedo il lauro e il ferro / Ond’eran carchi / I nostri padri antichi. Or fatta inerme, / Nuda la fronte e nudo il petto mostri. / Oimè quante ferite, / Che lividor, che sangue! oh qual ti veggio, / Formosissima donna! Io chiedo al cielo / E al mondo: dite dite; / Chi la ridusse a tale? E questo è peggio, / Che di catene ha carche ambe le braccia; / Sì che sparte le chiome e senza velo / Siede in terra negletta e sconsolata, / Nascondendo la faccia / tra le ginocchia e piange. / Piangi, che ben hai donde, Italia mia, / Le genti a vincer nata / E nella fausta sorte e nella ria’. Giacomo Leopardi, Canzoni (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), p. 16. 21 See Walter Binni, La protesta di Leopardi (Florence: Sansoni, 1973). 20

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In the political climate of the Restoration, Leopardi’s anthropological perspective aims at recovering the defining features of Italian society in history. In particular, he is looking for a shared identity in a nation facing the crisis of modernity. In this respect, his analysis begins with a comparison between Italy and the major contemporary European societies. Leopardi, unlike Byron, does not dwell on the success or failure of the bourgeois revolt against the foreign occupants, but is concerned with the foundation of the future State that should be born out of the Risorgimento.22 This search for a ‘new covenant’ among Italians explains why he focuses on a hypothetical, new form of relation of man to society, after the collapse of the model of the absolute monarchy brought about by the French Revolution. How is it possible to establish a new social contract now that the old traditional values are on the wane? And what is going to happen to the very idea of tradition? The costumi, the customs he evaluates, are supposed to provide the basis for this new social contract. Leopardi focuses on the role of the ‘società strette’, the ‘narrow societies’ or élites, which in the bourgeois world somehow define the rules of socially approved behaviour. These élites affect the rest of society through a process of mutual recognition – thus relying on that class prestige on which Antonio Gramsci will later dwell – within which the urban habit of conversation (conversazione) should play a pivotal role, since it confirms motives and themes leading to a new form of communal life. The educated members of the élite define the general interests of the members of this society, and the society, in turn, accepts and adopts a just order from which everybody will benefit. According to Leopardi, the pursuit of moral courage, the definition of virtue, that corresponds to reason converted into passion, will become passion again, and thus the entire process should appear natural.23 Reason mitigated by nature produces civic virtue, and that is the cornerstone of a democratic nation. Through such reasoning, Leopardi firmly remains in the wake of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment tradition, at least as far as the issues of public interest and communal/national utility are concerned. He maintains that utility only exists in the public sphere, otherwise it turns into its opposite, the ‘system of egoism’ which is ‘barbarism, greed, and excess of reason’.24 The comparison with the mythical past is then enacted in Leopardi. For Foscolo, there is still a communal and univocal heritage to deal with, and under such respect he does not depart from the tradition shared, among the others, by Saverio Bettinelli and Monti; for Leopardi, by contrast, the relationship with the classics becomes much more complex and has to be analysed within different stages. The pre-assumption of his discourse is, as in Foscolo’s Ortis and Sepolcri, a materialist one, and yet his response does not correspond to Foscolo’s egotistic, almost solipsistic solution to the political hardships of the present. Leopardi’s attitude towards the past has none of the Titanic overtones typical of so much

See Cesare Luporini, Leopardi progressivo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980), and also his Filosofi vecchi e nuovi (Florence: Sansoni, 1947), Walter Binni, La nuova poetica leopardiana (Florence: Sansoni, 1947) and La protesta di Leopardi, and Sebastiano Timpanaro, Antileopardiani e neomoderati nella sinistra italiana (Pisa: ETS, 1982). 23 See Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli italiani [1824] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991). 24 See Salvatore Veca’s introduction to Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli italiani, p. 5 (my translation). 22

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Romantic poetry, Foscolo’s included. It is, on the contrary, characterized by a deeper consciousness of the intrinsic limits and constraints of Nature. While Foscolo considered nature a substantially harmonious whole, and referred that truth especially to the classics, Leopardi, as is well known, judged man’s relationship to nature as eminently problematic, regardless of the historical period implied. Thus, memories of the past incarnated in ruins are no exception to his scepticism, and it is fair to say that ruins as inexhaustible sources of poetical and moral inspiration cease to function as unequivocal topoi with Alfieri, becoming increasingly problematic signs to be read against the background of a specifically Romantic sensibility. As a typical Enlightenment thinker, Leopardi relied on rationality, and yet considered the perception of the indefinite as the fountainhead of pleasure, placing that at the core of his aesthetic theory.25 The ancient is a foremost ingredient of sublime sensations whether they be material, as is a perspective or a Romantic view, or whether they be simply interior and spiritual. Why is this so? Because of mankind’s inclination to the infinite. The ancient is not eternal, hence it is not indefinite, but the soul’s conception of a span of several centuries produces a sensation of indefiniteness and thus the idea of time as being indeterminate, where the soul loses itself, and despite the fact that limits do exist, the soul fails to recognize them, no matter what they are. The same does not hold for modern things, for the soul can no longer lose itself therein, and immediately contemplates the extent of time and can reach the end of an epoch. It is indeed remarkable that the soul, in one of those ecstasies, observing for example a modern tower, and not knowing when it was built, and another ancient tower yet knowing the precise date of its construction, is, however, moved much more by 26 the former than by the latter.

Ruins retain a special importance in Leopardi’s aesthetic theory and, at the same time, perform a commemorative function that is also corroborated by political theory. With regard to images of ruins, Leopardi was an expert in the field of the figurative arts where ruins played a central role as a topos. On the basis of Montesquieu’s essays on taste, Leopardi sketched a Sistema di belle arti where he exalted movement over tranquillity, in contrast with Madame de Staël, or even naturalness over affectation as in the pictures by Canaletto, Dürer, and Dionigi. On this latter aspect, Leopardi drew a careful comparison between the poetic and the figurative techniques. His attitude towards Roman ruins is, however, marked by a certain degree of hostility towards the Roman clergy and aristocracy and, in fact, as critics such as Francesco Flora and de Sanctis have remarked, there is no trace in his personal correspondence of those arcs and columns he had evoked in his Canzone ‘All’Italia’. His relying on the classical element differs substantially from Byron’s and Ma-

25 26

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, in Tutte le Opere (Florence: Sansoni, 1983), pp.1429-30. ‘L’antico è un principalissimo ingrediente delle sublimi sensazioni, siano materiali, come una prospettiva, una veduta romantica o solamente spirituali e interiori. Perché ciò? per la tendenza dell’uomo all’infinito. L’antico non è eterno, e quindi non è indefinito, ma il concepire che fa l’anima uno spazio di molti secoli, produce una sensazione indefinita, l’idea di un tempo indeterminato, dove l’anima si perde, e sebben sa che vi sono confini, non li discerne, e non sa quali sieno. Non così nella cose moderne, perch’ella non vi si può perdere, e vede chiaramente tutta la stesa del tempo, e giunge subito all’epoca, al termine, ecc. Anzi è notabile che l’anima in una delle dette estasi, vedendo, per esempio, una torre moderna, ma che non sappia quando fabbricata, e un’altra antica della quale sappia l’epoca precisa, tuttavia è molto più commosso da questa che da quella’ (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, pp.1429-30, my translation).

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dame de Staël’s: while, for the latter, the description of ruins is simultaneous to versification, for Leopardi ruins become the essential premise of a complex process of recollection. The portentous solidity of our ancient fabrics that still live while our contemporary buildings, even the public ones, will not be seen by our posterity for much longer: pyramids, obelisks, the arches of triumph, the deep imprint of ancient coins and medals [...] All these and other similar things are the work, the effects and the signs of ancient illusions and of the ancient power and rule of imagination [...] in the middle stages between ancient and modern times, observing the material monuments that remain, we find evident signs both of illusions and of the onset of disillusionment [...] in Rome, where there are monuments of every age from the Egyptian to the present, it is possible to contemplate in these first the peak, then the decadence, and finally the destruction of human imagination and illusions [...] we can start with the obelisk in Piazza del Popolo and fin27 ish, not far from the first, in Palazzo Lucernari that is still under construction.

The reflection on antiquity is condensed in the judgement according to which ‘the ancient build everything for the eternity, while the moderns for the moment’. Ruins therefore confirm what is assessed throughout the Zibaldone: the transitoriness of things human. The same point is stressed in the Operette morali, where it is maintained that ‘it seems that the essence of things have for their own and only purpose death’.28 Ruins then provide the most incontrovertible evidence of the universal decadence of things. To them, and to their implicit warning, a civic solidarity must be opposed. Far from acquiring intimistic connotations, this attention to an interiority that must be civic characterizes the clarity of philosophical reasoning. In the canzone ‘All’Italia’ this inner vision of the classical world represented by ruins is related to a new form of self-awareness. A paradoxical balance of internalization and distancing is offered in the consciousness of being absorbed by a whole – the new concept of nation – on which the entire community should be focused: ‘O Patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi / e le colonne e i simulacri e l’erme / torri dei nostri avi, / ma la gloria non vedo’.29 The awakening of this civic virtue is also at the core of Leopardi’s other famous canzone ‘Ad Angelo Mai’. Mai, an antiquarian and librarian in the Vatican Library, had rediscovered Cicero’s De republica:

‘La portentosa solidità delle nostre antiche fabbriche, fabbriche che ancor vivono, mentre le nostre, anche pubbliche, non saranno certo vedute da posteri molto lontani; le piramidi, gli obelischi, gli archi di trionfo, la profondissima impronta delle antiche medaglie e monete [...] tutte queste e tant’altre simili cose sono opere, effetti e segni delle antiche illusioni e dell’antica forza e dominio dell’immaginazione [...] nei tempi intermedi fra l’antico e il moderno, osservando i monumenti materiali che n’avanzano, si trovano evidenti segni e delle antiche illusioni e del sopravvegnente disinganno [...] In Roma, dove v’ha monumenti d’ogni età dalle egiziane alla presente, si può in questi considerare la sommità, la decadenza, il distruggimento dell’umana immaginazione e illusioni [...] Si può cominciare dall’obelisco di Piazza del Popolo, e finire, tornando poco distante da quello, nel Palazzo Lucernari che ancor si fabbrica’. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, pp. 3436-39 (15 settembre 1823, 14 settembre 1823, my translation). 28 ‘Gli antichi facevano ogni cosa per l’eternità, i moderni pel momento’, and ‘pare che l’essere delle cose abbia per suo proprio e unico obiettivo il morire’. Giacomo Leopardi, Cantico del gallo silvestre [November 1824], in Operette morali (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), p. 204 (my translation). 29 ‘Oh, my Country, I can see the Walls and the arches, / The colums and simulacra and the lonely towers / Of our forefathers / But I do not see the glory’. Giacomo Leopardi, Canzoni, p. 16 (my translation). 27

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Italo ardito a che giammai non posi Di svegliar dalle tombe I nostri padri ed a parlar gli meni A questo secol morto, al quale incombe tanta nebbia di tedio? E come or vieni 30 Sì forte a nostri orecchi e sì frequente

In the end, the Risorgimento should have as its paramount purpose the realization of a common interest. Forces such as memory and rationality, underestimated and played down in Byron, are present and at work in Leopardi. Recommended by the authorities, the study of the Middle Ages turned against those who encouraged it since the patrioti looked for traditions and roots of their nationality, not for signs of power emanating either from the Emperor or the Church. Garibaldi’s defence of Rome from the Janiculum, Vincenzo Cuoco’s Platone in Italia (1804-06) and Giuseppe Micali’s L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani (1810), all attest to a polemic revival of interest in pre-Roman civilizations. Later, the novelist and historian Paolo Treves argued in his novel La terza Roma (1909) that the salutary development of an innovative idea of nation had to be evoked in order to create a ‘third Rome’, a modern Italian state that would obliterate the previous capital of the Romans and the Popes. The notion, already dear to Mazzini, of the reconstruction of a sense of the past found a literary counterpart in the birth of the modern Romantic lyric by Ludovico di Breme and the rediscovery of the past via the newly created romanzo storico. Mazzini, however, was aware of the dangers of encouraging any inquiry into the past that was not directed by, and anchored to, an immediate and pragmatic concern for the future. Unlike his Italian counterparts, Byron remains the bard of a classical – and, in his case, very much idealized – civilization, mournful about the fact that imperial power could not perpetually sweep over nations, inspiring noble aspirations and heroic action to achieve freedom. However, neither the Athenian Empire, nor Eden, nor Arcadia was Byron’s perpetual and most cherished myth. When he praises other imperial civilizations – Naples, Rome, Venice – he has in mind that legendary land of lost gods and godlike men. This partly explains why Byron almost always exposed the illusion of new beginnings as tragic, futile or stupid, even though people like himself often chose to die for that illusion. Like Shelley, he tends to depict England as the fallen form of ‘Jupiter Lucetius’, as a place of corruption, needing and yet suppressing new light from its rebellious spirit. Therefore England is another ‘Sea Sodom’, like Venice in Marino Faliero, which a providential act of history may soon humble and reform.31

Giacomo Leopardi, Canzone ad Angelo Mai [1820], in Canzoni, p. 48. ‘Courageous Italian, who never ceased to awaken / From their tombs our fathers / And keep on talking to this dead century, / On which such a veil of boredom hovers / And how is it that we listen to your voice so frequently, strong and clear?’ (my translation). 31 ‘[…] a key text behind the Weltschmerz of Childe Harold – Volney’s Ruins…of Empires (1791) – in its opposition to imperial “superstition” and “tyranny” is, paradoxically, directly derived from classical and imperial sources. Likewise, in the “empire of liberty” of the Unites States of America, Hamilton and Madison derived the anti-imperial arguments of The Federalist from Greek and Roman examples – but, for the Federalist administration, Volney was persona non grata’. Malcolm Kelsall, ‘“Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee...”: Byron’s Venice and Oriental Empire’, in Romanticism and Colonialism, p. 247. 30

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The extinction of the Venetian Republic in 1797 marked the transition of a former imperial power to colonial status, imposed by the hand of the new Tamerlane, as Byron called Napoleon. Within this nexus, Byron’s Venetian poems are a series of meditations on the extinction of the Republic. They are both an attempt to understand the significance of the decline and fall of the Venetian empire and, at the same time, a thorough exploration of the way history is understood and constructed through the archaeology of knowledge and the making of interpretative texts. The palace and the prison opening Childe Harold IV need little elucidation as Romantic signifiers, whether one thinks of the historical use of the Bastille as the sign for the tyranny of the old order in Europe, or the mental prison of the mind-forged manacles of Blake’s spiritual history. Here, the palace and the prison are made one by grammatical symbiosis. Thus, the imperial glory of the lion of St Mark is intrinsically one with the incarceration of others and the imprisonment of the self. It is a trope as old as Stoicism, where emperors are slaves and only the sapientes are free, but Byron’s reworking of the motif leaves the human subject bridging the palace/prison without a way out. The dichotomy between free and subject, although less complex than the opening of Childe Harold IV, still remains paradoxical, for to be princely and free is to hold someone else subject. Throughout his Italian exile Byron is seeking the means to influence the world away from barbarism and towards liberty, or a new beginning outside the dilemma of the old imperial order. Despite the fact that the imperialist side of Byron’s personality was intensely drawn to this Orientalized version of Italy, while he remained in his adopted country, he strongly wished that Italy would undergo a definitive Occidental (that is, deeper than ‘Western’) transformation. Nonetheless, the more actively Byron worked to achieve Italian nationhood, the more the Italians convinced him of their irredeemable Oriental nature. And for an illustration of Byron’s ultimately Oriental view of the Italians one need look no further than his response to the unsuccessful Neapolitan uprising of 1820-21, an event which signalled the conclusion of the first, impotent phase of Risorgimento nationalism. Commenting on the rebellion that never was, Byron complained in a letter to Thomas Moore: ‘I have no news. A very pretty woman said to me a few night ago, with the tears in her eyes, as she sat at the harpsichord, “Alas! the Italians must now return to making operas I fear that and maccaroni are their forte and motley their only wear”’.32

32

Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973-94), VIII, p. 105.

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Cecilia Pietropoli (Università di Bologna)

The Tale of the Two Foscaris from the Chronicles to the Historical Drama: Mary Mitford’s Foscari and Lord Byron’s The Two Foscari

According to the documents held in the archives of the Venetian ‘Council of Ten’, the story of Jacopo Foscari was no more than a further instance of the duplicity and corruption typical of medieval Italian politics. Yet, already in late fifteenth century, the Venetian chroniclers began to transform Jacopo into a patriot and a hero who, exiled to Candia for no apparent reason, feigned an alliance with the Duke of Milan in order to be brought back to Venice, even though as a traitor to his own country. The figure of the Venetian Doge forced to condemn his own son to death attracted Romantic historians, J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi above all, as well as playwrights. In 1821 Lord Byron was in Ravenna, where he came in contact with, and was strongly attracted by, the Carboneria and the Italian Risorgimento. Here, he wrote his second historical tragedy, The Two Foscari. In the same year, in England, Mary Russell Mitford drew on the same subject for her own historical drama, Foscari, which was to be performed in London in 1826. The two plays will be compared with their sources in order to determine to what extent, and for what purpose, the two playwrights re-wrote this well-known Italian tale with clearly divergent results. Finally, the plays will also be analyzed as instances of their authors’ theoretical approaches to Romantic historical drama.

The way an early nineteenth-century British writer made use of a historical-literary source from the late Italian Middle Ages to turn it into the plot of a tragedy with a historical background, first of all encapsulates his or her own personal reflection on the nature of the historical process. Secondly, nineteenth-century historical dramas paved the way for a wider debate on the function of the tragic theatre in the modern world. In 1821, and seemingly unaware of each other’s activities, Mary Russell Mitford and Lord Byron drew inspiration from an event which had been recorded in the archives of the Venetian ‘Council of Ten’ and reported by numerous fifteenth-century Chronicles. Their methods and aims were, nonetheless, quite different. The story of the Doge Francesco Foscari, who according to the tradition was obliged to bear witness to the sentencing and the torture of his own son Jacopo, ‘grecista e raccoglitore di manoscritti greci e latini’,1 and read out the sentence of condemnation, attracted the Romantic literati as it merged an event of historical consequence with an event of a private nature bearing strongly emotional connotations. In the re-writing process, the story underwent many variations, thus lending itself to different interpretations. According to Francesco Berlan, who in 1852 with his I Due Foscari: Memorie storico-critiche con Documenti 1

Francesco Berlan, I Due Foscari: Memorie storico-critiche con Documenti Inediti tratti dagli archivi segreti del Consiglio dei Dieci, dei Pregadi e del Maggior Consiglio (Turin: Tipografia G. Favale e Comp., 1852), p. 62 (‘a Hellenist and collector of Greek and Latin manuscripts’, my translation). All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

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Inediti tratti dagli archivi segreti del Consiglio dei Dieci, dei Pregadi e del Maggior Consiglio, attempted to demolish the version of the tale fabricated by the literati in order to take it back to the original historical facts, the story had already undergone a variety of manipulations dating back to the fifteenth century, as it was transferred from the archival documents (Berlan resorts to the Manuscripts of the General Archive of the Frari of Venice and the Mixed Registers of the Council of Ten) to the Chronicles. Indeed, as Berlan writes, ‘Le cronache e le tradizioni non sono buone che appena per fare dei drammi, e non mai per iscrivere una storia’.2 Such Chronicle-based versions may sound rather slanderous in regard to the Republic of Venice, in that ‘prosatori, poeti, romanzieri e pittori si fecero paladini della innocenza e della virtù di quei due antichi, gridando contro l’ingiustizia del Consiglio dei Dieci, che depose il primo dal soglio ducale nel 1457, e condannò ben tre volte il secondo all’esilio’.3 The Barba Chronicle, contained in the Biblioteca Marciana, reports that in 1445 Jacopo reached an agreement, upon payment in money and jewels, with Jacopo degli Scrovegni with a view to stirring up the rebellion of Padua against Venice in favour of Milan. One of Scrovegni’s letters ended up in the hands of the Councillors, and Jacopo, seeing that the plot had been discovered, sought refuge in Trieste. But the truth advanced in the documents is quite different: Berlan ensured that the Registers of the Council of 1444 and 1445 made no mention of any connection between Jacopo Scrovegni and Jacopo Foscari,4 but went no further than to record that on the 17 February 1445 the Council of Ten heard that Jacopo Foscari had received gifts from foreign princes. Seeing that Jacopo was in Trieste, the Council of Ten asked his father the Doge to invite him to appear before the Council so that he could plead his innocence. As Jacopo failed to return to Venice, an order for his arrest was issued. In the meantime, he was tried in absentia and condemned to exile in Romania. Thus the Doge could not have pronounced, as popular belief has it, the sentence before his son, and it would seem equally unlikely that Jacopo had embarked upon his exile directly from Venice. Upon his father’s request, the sentence was then commuted and the younger Foscari was condemned to living in Treviso. Again upon his father’s request, he was eventually granted a pardon and returned to Venice.5 The second accusation fell upon Jacopo in 1450; that episode is referred to in the Contarini Chronicle,6 but erroneously also in this case. On 6 November 1450 the nobleman Almorò Donato was murdered. The Ten immediately put a price on his assassin’s head, but charges against Foscari reached the Council only in January. Jacopo was captured and tortured and, although he had not made any confession even under torture, on 26 March 1451 he was sentenced to perpetual exile in Candia. This is essentially the shape that the tale had acquired as early as the fifteenth century. Other chroniclers added the detail, unrecorded in any of the archival documents, according to which some time thereafter the noble Nicolò

2 3

4 5 6

Francesco Berlan, I Due Foscari, p. 1 (‘The Chronicles and the traditions serve only to make plays, and never to write a story’). Francesco Berlan, I Due Foscari, p. 1 (‘prose-writers, poets, novelists and painters championed the innocence and the virtues of those two ancients, raising their voices against the injustice of the Council of Ten, which had deposed the former from the ducal seat in 1457, and condemned the latter to exile up to three times’). Francesco Berlan, I Due Foscari, p. 5. Francesco Berlan, I Due Foscari, p. 15. Francesco Berlan, I Due Foscari, p. 20.

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Erizzo confessed on his deathbed to having murdered Donato, thus turning Jacopo into the innocent victim of a blind and cruel justice system. Yet, in actual fact, no document speaks of torture, even if, in order to avoid the family’s rancour and vendettas against the judges, it was decreed that neither the Doge nor the other Senators could sit in the Councils when issues concerning the relatives of the Councillors were being discussed. Before leaving once again, anyone wishing to bid Jacopo farewell was allowed to pay him a visit in gaol. The third charge and the third sentence date back to 1456. Marino Sanudo, in Vite de’ Dogi di Venezia (1474-94), which would be included in the twelfth tome of the work by Ludovico Muratori Rerum Italicarum scriptores (24 vols, 1723-38) and would thus become the privileged source for the successive historical and literary rewritings, recounts that at the beginning of June 1456 Jacopo had written to the Duke of Milan asking him to intervene so that he might be allowed to return from exile, only to leave the letter deliberately in sight, so that it would end up in the hands of the Ten. Taken back to Venice, Jacopo confessed to having written the letter in order to be able to embrace his family once more. Submitted to the judgement of the Senate, he was sentenced to return to Candia and was given thirty lashes. The Doge and his spouse, Jacopo’s wife and children were allowed to visit him in gaol and, seeing his miserable conditions, requested that he should be taken to the ducal palace to heal his wounds. But when Jacopo begged his father to intervene to let him stay in Venice, the Doge invited him to respect the Council’s Edict: from this submission to the dictates of power, there emerges the figure of a father who, seemingly unperturbed, witnesses his son’s torture and pronounces his sentence. Finally, it is in Marco Antonio Sabellico’s Historie vinitiane, translated into Italian and published in 1544, that we find a clear declaration of the younger Foscari’s complete innocence, and therefore the transformation of the figure of a conventional mercenary leader ready to switch sides for personal advantage into a hero who stoically confronts the cruelty of an obtuse government. It is quite evident that even the earliest Chronicles tapped into the emotional potential of such a story, focusing especially on the relationship between the venerable Francesco and his son who, from being an avid and restless youth forging alliances with his country’s enemies, was gradually transformed, from one re-writing to the next, into the unwitting and innocent victim of a jealous and cruel oligarchic power. The story had all the necessary ingredients to come back into favour between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: it was indeed revived by some Italian as well as foreign historians, nearly all of whom adopted Sanudo’s version, to which, however, according to Berlan, they added one mistake after another: while Ignazio Neumann de Rizzi, in Il palazzo Foscari (1847), argued that Jacopo was not innocent but admitted and acknowledged his error before the Ten, Léon Galibert in Histoire de la république de Venise (1847) added the blood-curdling detail that, when he was shown to the family after the torture, Jacopo was on the verge of dying. But the re-workings that are most relevant to our topic are those of J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi in Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Age (1809-18), and of Pierre Daru in Histoire de la république de Venise (1819), as Byron reports them in the appendix to the text of The Two Foscari as his main sources. Except for some minor details, the two accounts provide versions that are substantially identical in terms of story. Both recount how Jacopo had turned to Filippo Visconti, knowing that such an apparent gesture of betrayal would have had the effect of having him taken back to his homeland. And both accounts

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report the sentence and the torture. However, only Daru, who, apart from the Chronicles also used Venetian archive material brought to Paris during the Napoleonic era, reports the news according to which Jacopo heard his own sentence ‘de la bouche de son père’.7 Both sources, moreover, emphasized the Doge’s firmness in inviting Jacopo to accept the Senate’s decision, but, whereas Sismondi (who cites Sanudo as his own source) suggests the image of the old Doge shocked by the events and crippled by pain, Daru shows as much horror as admiration for Foscari’s firmness, in the same way as he does not completely condemn the politics of the Venetian government, even though he calls it a ‘tyrannie’8 for the rigour with which it prevented its own citizens from appealing to outside interventions. It is once again Daru who recounts the detail, later dramatized by Byron, of how the Doge, deposed from the Council, refused to leave the palace by a side exit. Finally, both Sismondi and Daru narrate that Foscari died of a broken heart upon hearing the bells of St. Mark’s announcing the election of his successor. These are the versions upon which Byron constructed his own historical drama, which he proposed to his publisher John Murray as being ‘strictly historical’.9 The poet thus adopts the version in which Jacopo’s nostalgia for his country is so strong that it makes him write the letter addressed to the enemy as an expedient to force the Senate to bring him back to his homeland. Also, in Byron, the old Doge silently witnesses his son’s sentence and torture. But the most significant variation in his plot is that, at the end of the trial, Jacopo does not go back into exile but dies straight after the sentence, followed soon afterwards by his father, in the meantime deposed by the Council of Ten.10 If it is true, as C. P. Brand argues, that in the Romantic era ‘Italian scenery, more than any other in Europe, was found to be wild and romantic’, so that ‘early Italian history provided just the settings and characters which delighted contemporary poets and novelists’,11 this is certainly not the case for Byron who, while writing The Two Foscari, between 12 June and 9 July 1821, was in Ravenna where, through Teresa Guiccioli’s father and brother, he had come into contact with the Carboneria and early Risorgimento revolutionary activists. Mediterranean Europe was not for him a place of the imagination upon which to project British issues and conflicts in order to locate them at a safe distance, but rather a place that was geographically and politically real. As one of the few British travellers or residents in Italy who ‘pressed home on their readers the injustice of the Austrian rule, and made way for a more liberal attitude towards Italy’,12 he had an eager interest in reconstructing the Extrait de l’Histoire de la république de Venise par P. Daru de l’Academie française, tom. II, Appendix to The Two Foscari, in Lord Byron, Three Plays: Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, Cain (Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1990), p. 306. The text is the facsimile of the 1821 London publication by John Murray. All quotations from Byron’s play, in brackets after the text, are from this edition. 8 Extrait de l’Histoire de la république de Venise par P. Daru, p. 310. 9 Note to The Two Foscari, in The Works of Lord Byron, Complete in One Volume, with Notes by Thomas Moore, Esq., Lord Jeffrey, Sir Walter Scott, Bishop Heber, Samuel Roger, Esq., professor Wilson, J. G. Lockhart, Esq., George Ellis, Esq., Thomas Campbell, Esq., rev. H.H. Milman (London: John Murray,1837), p. 277. 10 In the Register of the Ten, in a footnote, it is said that the young Foscari died in exile on 12 January 1456. 11 C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 3. 12 C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, p. 21. 7

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ancient history of Italy, fully aware of the need to create a nationalist conscience in a people for whom foreign domination was not a metaphor but a state of being.13 He had moreover assimilated Ludovico Muratori’s philosophy of history, directing the search for the origins of modern Italy no longer in Roman civilization but in medieval history. During his stay in Romagna, Byron also had the chance to appreciate the neoclassical style and the strongly political and educational poetics of the Italian tragic writers.14 In the classical drama, a specific and apparently unusual episode assumes an eternal and universal value and becomes a model of human life in general, which allows the playwright to juxtapose past and present history, since what happened in the past will also be repeated in the future. In such a dramaturgy, characters invariably endowed with a profound historical awareness have the dual role of representatives as well as critics of the times. The conflict between Jacopo Foscari and the ruthless Council of Ten is seen by Byron as a young aristocrat’s act of rebellion against a ferocious tyranny; the younger Foscari, imprisoned in the dungeons of the ducal palace, is the interpreter and judge, on behalf of his people, of his times, and seeks to define his own role within the historical process by retracing on the walls of his cell the names of the prisoners who, before him and in the same place, had been subjected to the cruelty of the Venetian tyranny: JACOPO FOSCARI: My name: look, ’tis there – recorded next The name of him who here preceded me, – If dungeon dates say true. ………………………………………….. […] All then shall speak of me: The tyranny of silence is not lasting, And, though events be hidden, just men’s groans Will burst all cerement, even a living grave’s! I do not doubt my memory, but my life; And neither do I fear. (Act III, Scene 1)

The Byronic drama, situated in the late Middle Ages in Italy, thus aimed at a first level of juxtaposition, urging the people of Ravenna not to lapse into inertia after the failure of the February uprising and, more in general, the oppressed peoples of Southern Europe not to accept foreign dominations passively. Certainly, Byron could not ignore that the performance of the play would have encouraged the transmission of such a purpose.15 Yet, he preferred to entrust his text to John Murray, declaring in his preface to the 1821 edition that it had not been written for the stage but for reading and study, this being a position that ostensibly contradict the Romantic awareness of the political function of the historical tragedy which, by its very nature, was opposed to the ideology of the dominant class, concealing radical issues beneath the guise of the past and relying upon the audience’s capacity to actualize its setting. The Two Foscari would thus rather respond to the philosophy of history I agree with John Spalding Gatton when he argues that the aim of Byron’s ‘Italian’ dramas was pre-eminently political and implied an invitation to Italy not to submit to a foreign yoke. See John Spalding Gatton, ‘“Put into Scenery”: Theatrical Space in Byron’s Closet Dramas’, in Themes in Drama IX, The Theatrical Space, ed. by James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 146. 14 Anna Pudbres, ‘Lord Byron, The Admirer and Imitator of Alfieri’, Englische Studien, 33 (1904), 40-83. 15 John Spalding Gatton, ‘“Put into Scenery”: Theatrical Space in Byron’s Closet Dramas’, p. 147. 13

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that Byron entrusted to the preface of Marino Faliero, according to which the public events always spring from private facts, as even the greatest men are conditioned by domestic factors or the power of sentiments.16 Historical tragedies would thus aim at dramatizing the psychological and private dimensions of characters belonging to the public sphere in order to underline how the overlapping of these two aspects has inescapably catastrophic effects.17 No narrative seems to be more attuned to this theory than that of the older Foscari, who, wholly subjected to the workings of power, completely identifies his own person with the ‘body politic’,18 forsaking the distinction between the role of the Doge and that of the father. Indeed, he appears unmoving in the belief that the power of the Venetian state is something abstract and mysterious, which goes beyond an individual’s understanding. A diffuse critical reception, and one still current today, stresses how Byron’s attitude appears to be ambiguous in regard to the theatre. Equally ambivalent seems his political position, torn between aristocratic fear and a subtle spitefulness towards the people, on the one hand, and an impassioned participation in the popular uprisings in Southern Europe, on the other. A reflection on the ways in which Byron employed his historical sources, without claiming to resolve the ambiguities, may add further material to the discussion. The Two Foscari displays a structure of a rigorously neoclassical type, in response to the need Byron himself had expressed as regards Marino Faliero: ‘the desire of preserving, though still too remote, a nearer approach to unity than the irregularity, which is the reproach of the English theatrical compositions, permits’.19 Whenever possible the dictates of the three unities are adhered to: the action takes place entirely inside the ducal palace, initially in the Grand Hall of the Senate, afterwards in one of the gaols, and lastly in the Doge’s private apartments. In compliance with the unities of time and action, the text concentrates the climax of the long narrative in a single scene where the dramatic time coincides with that of the action, which is encompassed within a day and circumscribed to the sole event of the conflict between Jacopo and the Senate, and to which the final scene of the confrontation between the old Doge and the Council is connected by analogy. This implies that, at the beginning of the play, the battle against tyranny has already been fought and lost. Jacopo Foscari has already challenged the Senate, has been tortured, and now awaits his final sentence. The secondary characters – who are nevertheless very few in number, in that the classical scene, unlike the Elizabethan one, does not admit crowds – summarize for the audience what has already occurred. In the first scene, Loredano and Barbarigo (who in the accounts of Sismondi and Daru only appear after Jacopo’s departure into exile to enforce the Doge’s deposal) comment upon the trial and the torture of the younger Foscari, actually suggesting, even before his appearance, a specific reading of the event aimed at encapsulating its double-edged function as an expression of a private experience and a response to a specific socio-political context: Julie Ann Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 182. 17 Thomas C. Crochunis, ‘Byronic Heroes and Acting: The Embodiment of Mental Theater’, in Contemporary Studies in Lord Byron, ed. William D. Brewer (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), p. 79. 18 Michael Simpson, Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley (Stanford: California University Press, 1998), p. 360. 19 The Works of Lord Byron, p. 197. 16

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BARBARIGO: I yield not to you in love of justice, Or hate of the ambitious Foscari, Father and son, and all their noxious race; But the poor wretch has suffered beyond Nature’s Most stoical endurance. LOREDANO: Without owning His crime? BARBARIGO: Perhaps without committing any. But he avowed the letter to the Duke Of Milan, and his sufferings half atone for Such weakness. LOREDANO: We shall see. BARBARIGO: You, Loredano, Pursue hereditary hate too far. LOREDANO: How far? BARBARIGO: To extermination. LOREDANO: When they are Extinct, you may say this. – Let’s in to council. BARBARIGO: Yet pause – the number of our colleagues is not Complete yet; two are wanting ere we can Proceed. LOREDANO: And the chief judge, the Doge? BARBARIGO: No – he, With more than Roman fortitude, is ever First at the board in this unhappy process Against his last and only son. (Act I, Scene 1)

The comment on the action, as a meta-theatrical locus in which the transition from the historical fact of the past to the present takes place, is entrusted to Jacopo’s wife, Marina, who plays the role of the chorus.20 From the tragedy’s very first appearance, critical opinion has seen Jacopo as a poorly effective political figure, its weakness a consequence of main motivation of the action: his burning nostalgia for Venice that lead him to set up a fake betrayal and accept all the injustice that the powers-that-be decide to subject him to. A note to the 1837 edition of Byron’s works mentions some of the most significant remarks made by the earliest commentators on The Two Foscari. As for Jacopo, Bishop Reginald Heber wrote: ‘And the hero himself, what is he? If there ever existed in nature a case so extraordinary as that of a man who gravely preferred tortures and a dungeon at home, to a temporary residence in a beautiful island and a fine climate, at the distance of three days’ sail, it is what few can be made to believe, and still fewer to sympathise with; and which is, therefore, no very promising subject for dramatic representation’.21 Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review echoed these feelings: ‘The younger Foscari undergoes the rack twice (once in the hearing of the audience), merely because he has chosen to feign himself a traitor, that he might be brought back from undeserved banishment, and dies at last of pure dotage on this sentiment’.22 In actual historical fact, Marina Nani was the wife of Francesco Foscari, while Jacopo’s wife was the daughter of Leonardo Contarini. 21 Quoted in The Works of Lord Byron, p. 279. 22 Quoted in The Works of Lord Byron, p. 284. 20

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Mary Mitford herself, apparently terribly anxious at the idea of having to measure up to the fame and greatness of Lord Byron, remarked in a private letter to William Elford: ‘young Foscari notwithstanding good speeches, is utterly imbecile – an ultra-sentimentalist, who clings, no one knows why or wherefore, with a love-like dotage, to the country which has disgraced and exiled and tortured, and finishes by killing him’.23 If Jacopo is not effective in the role of the hero, this is not so much due to an intrinsic weakness of the character, as to a lack of depth in the context surrounding him. Historical drama requires, even more than a hero, well-rounded, convincing secondary characters, bearing forth the political message. In The Two Foscari, by contrast, secondary characters do not have enough energy to embody the tyranny of the Venetian republic. If the protagonist’s nostalgia is excessive and solipsistic, then Loredano, the villain of the piece, is in turn driven exclusively by personal sentiments of jealousy and rivalry towards the Doge. The older Foscari, once he has discovered that the Senate has decided to depose him, abandons his passive submission to oligarchic power and takes on a defiant attitude, demanding, as Pierre Daru has said, to leave the ducal palace from the main entrance so that the people of Venice might immediately be aware of the misdeed perpetrated in the halls of power. His reaction, nonetheless, seems to be determined more by the personal offence he had suffered, rather than by a concern for the future of Venice itself. Both Jacopo and Francis Foscari are too alienated from the culture of their people and their city to volunteer as classical scapegoats and sacrifice themselves for a noble cause. Weakened to the point of appearing effeminate, they are unable to put up any sort of resistance against the destiny that overwhelms them. The drama’s political message is therefore entrusted to Marina, who takes on an active role in the struggle against the Senate, whose crimes she denounces, revealing the weaknesses of established power.24 She tries vainly to gather up the loose strands of the plot and make the political message just as explicit as the aesthetic and dramatic message of the tragedy, highlighting the paradox implied in the Doge’s dual role, as father and governor at the same time: DOGE: Daughter! MARINA. Hold thy peace, old man! I am no daughter now – thou hast no son. (Act IV, Scene 1)

Marina’s defeat also reveals the difficulties that the classical theatrical and dramatic model faces in representing the contemporary world, and especially the situation of medieval Italy as a metaphoric reference to the contemporary historical and political situation, in a drama in which the hero’s personal feelings of solitude and isolation override the political motive. Neoclassical choices also determine the conception of history underlying Byron’s theatre. It is true that the tradition of reading the Middle Ages as a precise historic phase that precedes the modern age allows Byron to avoid any attitude of romantic nostalgia towards a presumed golden age situated in an indefinite past, in favour of a conception of history as a linear and irreversible path that can only be halted by a tyrannical power, so that the past is no more than the recording of a series of conflicts between prejudice and reason, or between government and individual rationality. Yet, while Romantic-period his23 24

Quoted in Vera Watson, Mary Russell Mitford (London: Evans Brothers, 1949), p. 149. Julie Ann Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, p. 179.

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toricism proposes historically determined events and characters which appear as direct consequences of the chosen era and as expressions of a political and socio-economic construct, neoclassicism tends to deny the apparent location of the event within a historically defined past in order to select characters with inalienable and universal traits. Despite the final defeat of the rebels and victory of tyranny, the portrayal of medieval Italy should suggest that, if the Italians of the past had succeeded in becoming enfranchised, then their children will also be able to do so in the near future. But, if history is a never-ending conflict between libertarian ideals and tyrannies, the recurrence of similar and overlapping historical moments is an obstacle to progress, and the sense of irreversibility and the inalienable linearity of the historical process deny the individual any chance to act. Therefore, the adoption of the classical model contributes to transpose the narration of the actions of the two unfortunate heroes into an abstract dimension, removed from the sphere of modernity, in order to avoid an over-simplistic reading of the work as a mirror of contemporary reality to the detriment of its universal dimension. Nevertheless this inhibits the necessary process of mediation between the story depicted and the reader’s/spectator’s historical period. Richard Lansdown argues that, in spite of the author’s ideological declarations, Byron’s historical plays seem more Shakespearian than neoclassical.25 As a consequence, even his characters draw inspiration from figures of Shakespeare, although not so much from the Shakespeare of the history plays, but that of Hamlet. In The Two Foscari the heroes are not active leaders, but alienated and melancholic intellectuals, and thus extremely modern, as well as anti-tragic, characters. As romantic heroes, divided between their own free will and overbearing, external forces, they must admit their own defeat in a drama that expresses all its weaknesses and does not allow any final tragic catharsis to emerge, for its heroes appear to be incapable of challenging the dominant moral order. The Two Foscari, then, is not so much effective as a political text, but rather as a theoretical case, experimental and innovative, of the validity of tragedy as a modern genre.26 It is thus possible that it was indeed an awareness of the diversity of his works as compared with legitimate contemporary British theatre that had made Byron desist from staging his plays in the London playhouses. The note that introduces the 1821 edition of The Two Foscari would appear to confirm this hypothesis: ‘The Venetian Story […] is strictly historical. I am much mortified that Gifford doesn’t take to my new dramas. To be sure, they are so opposite to the English drama as one thing can be to another; but I have a notion that, if understood, they will in time, find favour (though not on the stage) with the reader. The simplicity of the plot is intentional, and the avoidance of rant also, as also the compression of the speeches in the more severe situations. What I seek to show in “the Foscaris” is the suppressed passions rather than the rant of the present day’.27 By adopting an idea of history that draws together neoclassical theories and Romantic conceptions, and by overcoming the traditional boundaries between genres in order to combine classical tragedy with historical

Richard Lansdown, Byron’s Historical Dramas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 199. The first critic to underline the modernity of Byron’s historical theatre was Giorgio Melchiori in ‘The Dramas of Byron’, in The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. by Richard Allen Cave (Totowa: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986), pp. 47-60. See also Lansdown, Byron’s Historical Dramas, p. 1. 27 Quoted in The Works of Lord Byron, p. 277. 25 26

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drama and romantic comedy, Byron turns the historical drama into a new form of tragedy aimed at conveying the impotence, the ambiguity, and anti-heroics of the modern man. Again in 1821, one of the major British female poets and playwrights, Mary Russell Mitford, chose the same plot as a subject for a historical drama with a strongly radical import, which she entitled Foscari. In her Dramatic Works of 1851 she introduced Foscari as follows: ‘The subject of the following Play is taken from a domestic tragedy in the history of Venice, and was suggested to the Authoress by an interesting narrative of that event in Dr. Moore’s Travels’.28 She thus alludes to a work of 1780 that was evidently rather well known in the early nineteenth century, A View of Society and Manners in Italy; with anecdotes relating to some eminent characters. Dr Moore’s attitude towards Italy is that of a late eighteenth-century traveller, for whom the Grand Tour is no longer a journey into the culture of another country, but rather a journey in search of pleasure and curiosity.29 Moore places the story of Jacopo Foscari in the fourteenth letter of the twenty-two he dedicates to Venice, and assimilates it to another event the protagonist of which was Antonio Venier, with a view to demonstrating how an automatic and uncritical enforcement of the laws is no proof of moral rigour and an inalienable sense of justice, but rather of mere cruelty: ‘But the most affecting instance of the odious inflexibility of Venetian courts’, he writes, ‘appears in the case of Foscari, son of the Doge of that name’.30 The centre of the episode, or anecdote, told by Moore is the great love of the younger Foscari for Venice. The old Doge barely appears in it at all, in the company of his wife, to give a last farewell to his son and urge him to accept the sentence of the Council. Other relatives do not appear, and the two protagonists are never called by their Christian names. It is likely that Mary Mitford, fascinated by the story, had sought other sources, since she reports details that are not in Moore, even if she confuses the proper names and calls the son Francesco instead of the father. For example, the annotation that Jacopo had been used as an instrument to damage his father, as well as the false allegation of an alliance with the Milanese, belong to the tradition that, through Sismondi and Muratori, goes back to Sanudo. Mary Mitford draws inspiration from Moore’s report, but transforms the event into a romantic story. She herself admits that she is interested in it as a ‘domestic tragedy’. As with neoclassical tragedy, the aim of domestic tragedy was also to reconstruct a political and moral order, but from a different angle and with different methods. This leads Mitford’s heroes to measure up more with the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, than with fate or a supernatural order. From this intricate story the author selects the episode of the false allegations for Donato’s murder: the action is triggered off by a typical ‘villain’ of Jacobean design, the noble Venetian Erizzo, who engineers a plot so that the younger Foscari will be charged and sentenced for a murder he never committed in order to oblige the Senate to depose the old Doge, whom he considers over-democratic and more responsive to the needs of the people than to the interests of the aristocracy:

Mary Russell Mitford, Dramatic Works (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1854), p. 83. All quotations from Mitford’s play, in brackets after the text, are from this edition. 29 C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, p. 8. 30 John Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy; with anecdotes relating to some eminent characters (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1790), pp. 161-62. 28

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COUNT ERIZZO: We must unthrone the Doge Ere this news reach the city; for the people Adore the Foscari. Faugh! I am weary Of this good Doge, this venerable Doge, This popular Doge, this Doge who courts and woos The noisy rabble, whilst the Senators He elbows from their seats. And for the son, With his hot valour and proud lack of pride – I hate them both. (Act I, Scene 1)

Mary Mitford’s notion of the theatre is different from Byron’s, and she makes use of a different dramatic language, selecting the Shakespearian scene as her own space. Her perception of history, and consequently her use of historical and literary sources, are also very different. The characterization of the younger Foscari derives from Moore’s version: even if the Venetian government, stubborn and triumphant in the certainty of its own power, does not pick up the signs of Erizzo’s plot, Francesco’s moral rigour is such that he refuses to save his own life at the price of a harmless lie. As is customary with Romantic heroes, Francesco is a victim more than a judge of his own context. However, with his sacrifice, he ends up revealing the workings of tyranny, thus paving the way for the transformation and changes that underpin the historical process. In Mitford’s text, as may be generally seen in historical drama with a political aim, the plot is mainly entrusted to the secondary characters. From the very first dialogue between Count Erizzo and Donato, we can foresee that Erizzo will play the part of the villain and that Donato is destined to become his first victim. In a play which offers itself as the mirror of contemporary Britain, Mitford creates a dynamic and articulated dramatic action, in which the interactions between present and past, and between the Italian and the British situations, are clear.31 At the same time, however, a female playwright has the chance to employ her works in order to enact and discuss the relationship between the public male domain and the domestic female sphere.32 Her Francesco Foscari has a fiancée, Camilla, a character invented by Mitford, who appears at the beginning of the action while, protected by the walls of her own room, she speaks in a colloquial and rather superficial way of her love for Foscari. But when Francesco is being tried, she abandons the domestic scene to appear on the public stage. After removing the veil that protects her, she bows before the Doge and pleads with him to take action on behalf of Francesco: CAMILLA: Ah! Art thou there? Release him! Set him free! Thou art the Doge, the mighty Doge of Venice, Thou hast the power to free him. Save him now From my hard kinsman! Save him! I remember, When I was but a little child, I craved The grace of a poor galley-slave, and thou Didst pardon him and set him free as air;-

Katherine Newey, ‘Women and History in the Romantic Stage: More, Yearsley, Burney, and Mitford’, in Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840, ed. by Catherine Burroughs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 79. 32 See Katherine Newey, ‘Women and History in the Romantic Stage’, p. 80. 31

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Then, when she has clear evidence of the failure of the old system in the doge’s incapacity to resolve the problem, Camilla refuses to obey her brother and decides to follow the younger Foscari, who represents the new moral and social order to which she has dedicated herself, into exile: CAMILLA: We were betroth’d; he goes a sentenc’d wretch – But innocent, most innocent! He goes To scorn, to exile, and to misery, And I – I came to say farewell to thee, My brother – I go with him. (Act V, Scene 1)

In Mitford’s tragedy, however, love cannot triumph. While Moore reported how the younger Foscari had gone back into exile and had died far away just as his father was about to obtain a pardon for him, in Foscari, the son dies before leaving Venice. Yet, his death is not in vain, as it coincides with the discovery of Erizzo’s plot and the arrest of the guilty party. The hero’s sacrifice is thus functional to the discovery of the truth and the harbinger of peace and democracy. Acting within a political system, however old and corrupt, Francesco and Camilla influence the moral order much more successfully than Byron’s Marina or even Jacopo Foscari, who had placed himself outside the spirit of his times. Much more than Marina, whom Mary Mitford judges to be ‘a mere scold’33 whose vitality and verbal excesses turn out to be wholly ineffectual, Camilla, a character of intense femininity but also of great political and moral strength created from the sensitivity of a female playwright, triggers off a conflict between the female and male orders that successfully eradicates the obsolete, static power of the patriarchal dimension, and thus initiates the reconstruction of the world in her own terms.

33

Quoted in Vera Watson, Mary Russell Mitford, p. 149.

Lia Guerra (Università di Pavia)

Mary Shelley’s Contributions to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia: Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy

Mary Shelley wrote the largest amount of literary biography at a time when the British reading public was particularly eager for this genre. This essay seeks to clarify the context of Shelley’s entrance into the biographical genre, and examines her own approach to biography by looking at her lives of contemporary Italian authors written for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia and, more precisely, her ‘Life of Foscolo’, the sources of which will be reconsidered. As convincingly demonstrated by Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley’s involvement with history and biography – directly via Godwin, and indirectly via Johnson – was a very early one. She came to consider biographical writing as a way of investigating history and producing a new philosophy of history through private stories. As a result, her contributions to Lardner’s Cabinet were not merely conventional ‘lives’, but also the records of the authors’ intimate experiences in their strong connections with specific environments. Shelley carefully reconstructed social and domestic relationships, and, through the simple procedure of foregrounding relevant issues, provided commentary on specific ‘political’ topics. Thus, she successfully deployed forms of participation, sympathy, and involvement in the public sphere without excessively exposing herself, because the publication was anonymous and also because she wrote about someone else’s experiences. Finally, the essay considers her ‘Life of Foscolo’ as the site of a series of comments that Mary Shelley will later reprise and re-elaborate in the political reflections offered by her 1844 Rambles in Germany and Italy.

The period when Mary Shelley produced her major contributions to literary biography corresponds to a phase in British literature characterized by an ‘unusual appetite’ for the genre – as testified, for instance, by the success of the subscription family libraries, which had begun in the early part of the nineteenth century to become a major publishing enterprise by 1838.1 My purpose here is twofold: first of all I would like to set the stage for Mary Shelley’s entrance into this genre by considering the cultural milieu of the early nineteenth century. Afterwards, I intend to examine her treatment of biographies of contemporary Italian authors, concentrating in particular on her contributions to Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835), composed for the third volume of Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet of Biography – and more specifically on her life of Ugo Foscolo – in order to reconsider her sources and their impact on her work. Many factors contributed to the popularity of literary biography in Romantic-period Britain, starting with the consolidation of the paid profession of ‘literary journalism’ in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The profession itself had begun to emerge in the

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See Joseph W. Reed, English Biography in the Early Nineteenth Century 1801-1838 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 25.

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previous century with the attempt to institute a national canon of English literature (Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, 1779-81, could be taken as a starting point, later followed by William Gifford and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Many literary series emerged during the 1820s and 30s thanks to a reduction in the costs of printing and ‘in response to the so-called March of Mind’.2 Apart from John Murray’s ‘Family Library’ (for which Mary Shelley herself suggested a series of subjects), we should mention the publications of the Society for the Propagation of Useful Knowledge, with its important connections to the Westminster Review, founded in 1823, to which Mary contributed a number of reviews, as well as to the institution of London University in 1828. Biographical essays also appeared in the liberal quarterly Edinburgh Review, which ran from 1802 to 1929; in The Liberal, the quarterly magazine set up by Leigh Hunt in cooperation with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley in 1822, running for only two years; monthly magazines and literary weeklies that began to dedicate more space to literary authors;3 and, later in the century, the pocket-sized monographs of the ‘English Men of Letters’ series published by Macmillan from 1878 onwards. As distant precursors, we could also cite Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), William Oldys’s and Joseph Towers’s Biographia Britannica (1747-66, 6 vols), Cibber’s The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the Time of Dean Swift, a direct ancestor of Dr Johnson’s Lives, and, in the nineteenth century, in addition to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829-46, 133 vols), The Dictionary of National Biography, completed in 1890. This is a rich panorama, to which we might add, as a finishing touch, the enormous number of volumes entitled ‘The Life and Letters of…’.4 Very simply, what happened was that the publishing industry took it upon itself to satisfy the needs and curiosity of a middle class that had become a full-fledged part of the reading public, and was beginning to consider the activity of reading as a habitual, enjoyable, and useful pastime.5 This market was accommodated by focusing on different interest groups: young readers, fashionable readers, educated and religiously, or intellectually-oriented readers. The growth of the reading population, stimulated by the public lectures by prominent authors sponsored by London’s Royal Institution, gave considerable impetus to nineteenth2 3

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Nora Crook, ‘General Editor’s Introduction’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, vol. I: Italian Lives (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), p. xix. Among the most important magazines were The London Magazine, that ran from 1820 to 1829; The New Monthly Magazine, which, in 1824, published portions of William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age; The New Monthly, which in 1831 presented ‘Living Literary Characters’; and the Monthly Chronicle, edited by Lardner himself from 1838 to 1841 and meant to back his greater effort in the ‘Cabinet Cyclopaedia’. As for the literary weeklies, mention should be made of The Athenaeum, a London weekly founded in 1828, which often featured sketches of contemporary authors. Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Knopf, 1965), chapters 3 and 4. The wide popularity of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, published as early as 1728, testifies to the need for a new model of information based on a very large range of subjects and on the continuous play of crossreferencing which characterized the effort. An invaluable instrument for readers who could not afford to buy many books on different subjects, Chambers’s work provided information in organized form and clear language. A second edition in 1740 was announced in the Italian Novelle letterarie of Florence, marking the beginning of widespread distribution in Italy through translations which appeared in Naples, Venice, and Genoa between 1747 and 1753. For a detailed discussion of the topic, see Calogero Farinella, ‘Le traduzioni italiane della Cyclopaedia di Ephraim Chambers’, Studi Settecenteschi, 16 (1996), pp. 97-160.

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century biography by placing the authors’ personae at centre stage and stimulating the readers’ interest in these figures.6 At the same time, the frequent references to the ‘average reader’ or ‘the mass of mankind’ in contemporary reviews of biographies testifies to a widespread concern for that reader’s edification through the censorship not only of inappropriate words or actions, but of ‘wicked’ lives as well.7 And, by 1835, the Quarterly Review already recognized the dangers to the standards of historical truth.8 The overall result for the genre of biography was the widening of an audience which expected some form of education from a reconceived practice of ‘life-writing’ now intended as a branch of history. Lord Bolingbroke’s idea of history as ‘philosophy teaching by example’9 could fit easily a definition of biography as history in miniature – a single life being a microcosm of the great events of the period under scrutiny. Thus, Mary Shelley was not moving in a vacuum when she started to turn her attention to biography, but rather in quite a crowded arena. Very little theoretical reflection, however, had been directed towards biography so far, if we except James Field Stanfield’s Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography, published in 1813, or Thomas Carlyle’s contributions. Stanfield suggested a notion of biography as ‘a study of man in individual manifestations’ that, if properly systematized, could become a humanistic science.10 A disciple of contemporary empirical psychology, he believed that ‘the laws of influence and motivation can be discovered and formulated’,11 and therefore stressed the ‘importance of environment, childhood physiological and psychological factors, and physical traits’, and believed in a close connection between author and work.12 The real problem for him, however, was ‘the general decline in the biographer’s responsibility’, and he recommended that ‘the biographer, far from mere chronicler, use the full resources of art’.13 A similar preoccupation with the pedestrian state of the art of biography appeared in Thomas Carlyle’s protestations against compilations and indexes.14 Carlyle, moreover, stressed both that a man’s life, when properly written, is the logical extension of his writings, and that it is important to consider a man’s relationship to society and history as background exploration for explaining the genesis and qualities of an artist’s art. Nevertheless, according to Altick’s analysis of the history of literary biography,15 for the first three quarters of the century no biographer of a man of letters even came close to fulfilling Carlyle’s requirements – that is, explaining the man in terms of his times. Least of all

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A careful analysis of this phenomenon is found in Johanna Smith, Mary Shelley Revisited (Prentice Hall: Twayne, 1996), particularly chapter 6: ‘Biography and Criticism’. Joseph Reed, English Biography, chapter 3: ‘Dignity and Suppression’, pp. 38-65. Quoted in Joseph Reed, English Biography, pp. 63-64. Letter 2, in Lord Bolingbroke, On the Study of History, in Historical Writings, ed. by I. Kramnick (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), p.9. See Joseph Reed, English Biography, p. 67. Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters, p. 185. Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters, p. 185. Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters, p. 185. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Essay on Richter’ (1827), originally in the Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, and ‘Essay on Richter’ (1830), originally in the Foreign Review, reprinted in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 4 vols (Boston: Munroe, 1838-39), II, p. 101; ‘Biography’, Fraser’s Magazine, 5 (1832). Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters, pp. 218-22.

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did anyone, in Altick’s opinion, show the impact of contemporary ideas on his subject’s mind. For him the first biographer to set his figures firmly in their intellectual milieu was John Morley – ‘a belated child of the Enlightenment’ – whose biographies of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Edmund Burke, however, appeared much later, between 1872 and 1878, and could not, therefore, have influenced Mary Shelley. It seems that recent criticism on the latter contradicts Altick’s view of Morley’s primacy, if we consider the direction taken by her contributions to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia.16 There she shows – in my opinion – that she was certainly a daughter of the Enlightenment, in addition to being – or precisely because she was – William Godwin’s daughter, but also that she was in tune with theories and ideas that set her in a position of some relevance in the new field of literary criticism. As Jean de Palacio has convincingly demonstrated in her seminal 1969 study,17 Mary Shelley was involved with history and biography very early on, directly via Godwin and indirectly via Johnson. I tend to put Godwin first, because he devoted himself to biography all his life,18 and Mary obviously knew her father’s literary work. Indeed, she must have absorbed directly from the home environment many of Godwin’s tenets on the topics that were to remain with her all her life: a belief in biography as a form of the history of civilization and customs, that is, the historical method applied to biography; the necessity for an almost encyclopaedic culture strongly supported by a background as a historian; a ‘belief in the formative influence of external circumstances’;19 and, finally, the didactic conception of biography as an exemplary genre.20 Indeed, these concepts are clearly as much a part of her background as of Godwin’s. And Johnson’s model is explicitly invoked by Mary Shelley in her ‘Life of Metastasio’:

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The list of works that deal with Mary Shelley’s ‘minor’ production must include Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre: Contribution aux études shelleyennes (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1969), Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley, Romance and Reality (Boston and London: Little, Brown; 1989; rev. and corr. edn Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. by Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther Schor (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Johanna Smith, Mary Shelley Revisited, Betty T. Bennett, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: an Introduction (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). See Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre, especially the chapter ‘La critique littéraire’, pp. 493-529. From 1783 (The History of the Life of William Pitt) to The Life of the Necromancers (1834), Godwin virtually continued to produce biography without interruption. Pamela Clemit, ‘Editor’s Introduction to Life of William Godwin’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, IV, p. xvi. A similar preoccupation seems to be present in Foscolo’s ‘Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, in Ugo Foscolo, Opere, tomo II, ed. by Franco Gavazzeni (Milan, Naples: Ricciardi, 1981), p. 1409. As for the idea of biography as a monument meant to immortalize the glory of the author for the benefit of the human species and for immortalizing his/her memory, Godwin in his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) had explicitly stated that it is a duty ‘incumbent on survivors’ to celebrate the lives of worthy people not just for the sake of memory itself but also as an instrument of education for others. Furthermore, in his ‘Essay of History and Romance’ (1797) he stressed the importance of ‘individual history’ as a means for historical change. His ‘Essay on Sepulchres’ of 1809 (London, W. Miller, now in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. by Mark Philp, vol. VI: ‘Essays’ [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993], pp. 1-30) eventually reinforces Ugo Foscolo’s point as expressed in his long poem Dei Sepolcri (1807).

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It is from passages such as these, interspersed in his letters, that we can collect the peculiar character of the man – his difference from others – and the mechanism of being that rendered him the individual that he was. Such, dr Johnson remarks, is the true end of biography, and he recommends the bringing forward of minute, yet characteristic details, as essential to this style of history; to follow which precept has been the aim and de21 sire of the writer of these pages.

Biography was to Shelley, as it was to Johnson, a form of humanism, because its main interest must be the human character: hence, her careful analysis of the personality of a subject whenever the sources allowed her to do so with some degree of reliability. Otherwise, she had recourse to the works in order to explain the man,22 or to information about authors or readings that might have influenced the subject. But, above all, Johnson’s lesson is one of faithfulness to truth, and this emerges very clearly when, dealing with Vincenzo Monti’s want of political integrity, she gives a negative moral evaluation in spite of her strong admiration for his poetry.23 Given the wide range of Mary Shelley’s literary interests, as well as her personal history, it is not surprising to find so much material concerning Italian culture in her production. Her love and direct knowledge of that culture led her to steer clear of the common, contemptuous British attitude which saw the Italians’ political weakness as the consequence of negative traits in their national character: Most of the defects of the Italians’, she writes, ‘are those that always arise in a society debarred from active duties. An Italian has no career, and can find occupation only in intrigue and vice. The utter hopelessness that pervades their political atmosphere, the stagnation of every territorial or commercial enterprise, the discouragement cast over every improvement, – all these are checks to laudable ambition; and yet such is not entirely checked. How many Italian hearts beat high for their country. When any opening has presented itself, how many victims have rushed into the breach. Perhaps in the history of no people in the world has there appeared so tenacious a love of country and of liberty, nor so great a readiness shown to make every sacrifice to acquire 24 independence, nor so confirmed and active an hatred for tyranny.

In the wake of her mother’s analysis of women’s subjection, and in light of the changes she observes among Italian intellectuals, Mary Shelley advocates a reform of the status of the Italians through culture and a rediscovery of their ancestors: ‘The creations of genius and the inventions of the imagination are derived from, and depend on, the moral culture of the intellect, and this culture was shackled’.25 The Austrian government, she states, denies the ‘rich and high-born’ Italians an ‘enlightened education’, which explains why they display 21

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‘Life of Metastasio’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, I, p. 226. The Johnsonian reference is to The Rambler no. 60. Mary Shelley apparently read Johnson at a very early age: Rasselas in 1814 and again in 1817; the Rambler essays on 24 September1816, and on 19 January, 23 February-9 April 1817, while Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson was read in 1820 and reread in 1831. In her ‘Life of Foscolo’ she makes extensive use of paragraphs from his novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802) as a biographical source. ‘Life of Monti’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, I, pp. 300 and 328. Mary Shelley, ‘Modern Italian Romances’ (1838), in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, IV, p. 227. The topic however reappears in ‘Review of The Italian Novelists’ (1827), in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, IV, pp. 356-57, and in the ‘Preface’ to Rambles through Germany and Italy in the years 1840, 1842, and 1843 (London: Moxon, 1844). Letter XVI in Mary Shelley’s Rambles, II, p.192.

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‘the faults of the oppressed’. She considers the Italians as ‘highly gifted with intellectual powers’ and therefore as capable of developing ‘severer virtues’ when ‘free institutions’ appear that reward intellectual activity. Modern Italian poetry is already proof that the genius of the Italians survives ‘the blighting influence of misrule and oppression’.26 Shelley’s view is independent of both Whig and Tory historians, who would tend to identify the roots of the Italian Risorgimento in Napoleon’s constitution of the Kingdom of Italy and its unification under French occupation. By contrast, she reads Italian nationalism as inborn and eventually stimulated by the example of England’s free institutions. The ‘Preface’ to Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844) urges the responsibility of the English towards the Italian political situation in the light of the English tradition of free institutions and freedom of expression. The Italian exile Giuseppe Pecchio, who had settled in England in 1823 and obtained English citizenship in 1832, in his writings of the late 1820s and early 1830s presented the Italian public with a description of English political life and institutions meant to show how the latter are linked to the development of patriotic feelings.27 Mary Shelley’s knowledge of the Italian language, acquired through an early reading of Italian literature (mainly Ariosto and Dante, following Percy Shelley’s advice28) enabled her – once she settled in Italy in March 1818 – to appreciate aspects of Italian culture that would have been lost on her if she had not applied herself with such enthusiasm and serious intentions to the task of studying her new country. In this she was quite different from the many accomplished ladies of her time who would take Italian lessons from expatriates in London merely to be able to enjoy the Italian operas that were all the rage in early nineteenth-century London.29 Biographers and critics of Mary Shelley have amply researched her fascination with Italy, which lasted well into her mature age, as her Rambles clearly testify. After her return to Britain, in August 1823, following Percy’s death, she began cooperating with Godwin on a series of projects many of which dealt with Italian topics.30 The brief summary provided below lists her contributions between 1823 and 1844 and highlights her penchant for Italy:31 ‘Giovanni Villani’, an essay on the medieval Florentine historian, author of Croniche fiorentine (published in The Liberal, no. 4, 1823);

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Mary Shelley, Rambles, I. pp. 86-87. Many of these quotations are highlighted in Johanna Smith, Mary Shelley Revisited, chapter 7: ‘Travel Narrative’, p. 169. See Giuseppe Pecchio, Un’elezione di membri del Parlamento in Inghilterra (1826), and Osservazioni semiserie di un esule sull’Inghilterra (1831), both published in Lugano, rptd in Rome in 1848; now in Scritti politici, ed. by Paolo Bernardelli (Roma: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, 1978). Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was read through May, June, and July 1818, and Dante between 1817 and 1822. What Nora Crook calls ‘operatic Italian’, in her ‘General Editor’s Introduction’ to Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, I, p. xv. She also observes that, ‘Building on previous study, Mary Shelley became a fluent Italian reader in Italy’ (I, p. xv). Pamela Clemit, ‘Editor’s Introduction to Life of William Godwin’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, IV, p. xiv. The list excludes her novels and stories set in Italy. Indeed, at least six of her novels present Italian settings, and seven short stories written and published between 1823 and 1835 have an Italian subject.

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‘Recollections of Italy’, a semi-fictional essay (published in The London Magazine, 1824), analysing the type of traveller capable of appreciating both Italy and England. The main character, Edmund Melville, is a prefiguration of the ‘Anglo-Italian’ who reappears in the next item on the list; ‘The English in Italy’, a review (published in 1826 in the Westminster Review) of a number of books in which the literary type of the Anglo-Italian later to re-emerge in ‘Modern Italian Romances’ is first delineated ‘The Italian Novelists’, a review of a collection of Italian tales translated by Thomas Roscoe, published in 32 1827 in the Westminster Review and attributable to Mary Shelley; ‘Modern Italy’, a review of two travel books (Henry Digby Best’s Italy as it is, and Louis Simond’s A Tour in Italy and Sicily, both dated 1828), published in July 1829 in the Westminster Review and containing an appreciation of the Italian character and an overview of Carlo Goldoni’s drama; Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, a contribution to Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopedia (1835); 33 ‘Modern Italian Romances’ (published in Lardner’s Monthly Chronicle in 1838), an analysis of Italian Risorgimento novels, explicitly informed by Mazzinian ideals; Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), published with the name ‘Mary Shelley’ on the title-page (Letter XVI deals with contemporary Italian men of letters).

From 1818 onwards, when the first edition of Frankenstein appeared anonymously, Shelley explored the possibility of connecting private history to political history: Safie’s biography – as narrated by the unnamed Creature – shows that the young woman’s education is carried out through politicized readings of Volney’s The Ruins of Empires (1791) and its reconstruction of the roots of oppressive governments. Thus, it is not surprising to find a comment in Mary Shelley’s French Lives about how the successful sketch of a life entails both ‘the biography of an individual’ and the political ‘history’ of an era.34 A great admirer of Mary Hays’s Female Biography; or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Centuries (1803, 6 vols), Mary Shelley came to consider biographical writing as a way of investigating public history, and producing a new philosophy of history through private histories. For Lardner’s Cabinet she wrote not merely a series of lives, but a record of intimate experiences. She devoted particular attention to social and domestic relationships, and family connections, possibly under the influence of her own personal experience, which caused her to identify sympathetically with tales of loss. Participation, sympathy, and involvement could be indulged without excessively exposing herself, first of all because the publication was anonymous, and also because she was writing about somebody else’s experiences. By simply foregrounding this or that topic, Shelley could comment on a variety of issues. Thus, in her ‘Life of Goldoni’, criticism of patriarchal society surfaces in a brief comment she chooses to make about Goldoni’s father’s invitation to his son to join him in Rome: ‘He does not appear to have thought of inviting his wife also; and the mother and child were separated’.35 Other examples are offered by the Nora Crook, Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, IV, pp. lxxxi-ii. Previously attributed to Carlo Pepoli, a dissident member of the provisional government of Bologna during the Ancona uprising of 1831, who, as an exile, lectured ‘On the Language and Literature of Italy’ at University College, London (6 November 1838). Nora Crook has convincingly demonstrated that the essay can be attributed to Mary Shelley. See Nora Crook, ‘General Editor’s Introduction’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, IV, pp. lvi-iii. 34 See Greg Kucich, ‘Mary Shelley’s Lives and the Reengendering of History’, in Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. by Betty Bennett and Stuart Curran, p. 199. 35 ‘Life of Goldoni’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, I, p. 231. 32 33

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discussion of primogeniture or the practice of the cavalier servente in her ‘Life of Alfieri’, as well as by her critique of male egotism as a destructive force in the ‘Life of Foscolo’, a figure – as she describes him – self-absorbed in a vacuum of sympathy. The obvious, interesting questions that have largely been answered by the recent edition of Lives, touch upon: a) Mary Shelley’s degree of freedom to choose her own subjects; b) the canon of Italian literature recognized among British readers; c) and Shelley’s use of previous biographies and other sources. We must keep in mind that, apart from some biographical interest encoded in the form of other literary genres, Mary Shelley’s interventions in the field of biography were mainly through Lardner’s project and through magazines for which she reviewed marketable books. If there was a choice in the latter case, it had to be secondary, in terms of refusing to review books offered to her for criticism that did not comply with her tastes or ideas. But we also know that writing of this kind was a source of income for her, not just a leisurely activity, and she needed the money on offer. As for who chose the subjects for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, the editors of Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives have tried to answer the question in great detail.36 We can simply add that what personalizes both her reviews for periodicals and the literary biographies for Lardner – given the limited autonomy of her choices – is the freedom she takes in providing as thick a contextual evocation as possible, relying on her deep, first-hand knowledge of Italian texts, culture, and politics; as well as her capacity to judge existing translations on the basis of her excellent linguistic competence. As for the second question, which is probably connected to the previous one in so far as the authors’ popularity was most likely a major criterion for the choice, according to C. P. Brand ‘Monti was generally rated very highly, but Parini was little known, and Leopardi hardly at all’.37 This judgment should be modified in the light of the large amount of research that is currently being carried out on the many editorial enterprises set up by both Italian exiles eager to spread the knowledge of Italian literature, and by British intellectuals interested in promoting their activity.38 One of the most highly praised treatments of Italian literature at the time was J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi’s De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813), recommended by Byron as the best available introduction to Italian authors in a letter of 25 August 1814 to Annabella Milbanke.39 Among the English, Byron’s friend Leigh Hunt was also ‘a key figure in the popularisation of Italian literature during the post Napoleonic period’, producing also a translation of Tasso’s pastoral works in 1820. Byron himself had contributed in 1817 with his Lament of Tasso to circulate the name of

Nora Crook discusses Lardner’s general politics in her ‘General Editor’s Introduction’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings I, pp. xxvi and xxvii. Tilar J. Mazzeo goes into further detail in ‘Introduction by the Editor of Italian Lives’, pp. xxxvii-xli. 37 C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). 38 The essays collected in this volume, originally delivered as papers at the Conference ‘Romanticismo inglese e letteratura italiana’ held at the University of Parma on 23-24 October 2003, testify to this activity. See also Tilar J. Mazzeo, ‘Italian Literature in England, 1500-1835’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings I, pp. xliii-vii, which offers a very informed, although brief, critical survey of the topic. 39 Quoted in Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 2. 36

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the proverbially unfortunate Italian poet.40 On the Italian side, an important figure in London was Pietro Rolandi, who kept a bookshop from 1826 to 1863 where Italian works were available and who also acted as publisher for many anthologies of Italian authors. The absence of Giuseppe Parini in the Lardner series is somewhat surprising, since Mary Shelley introduces him indirectly in the lives of both Monti and Foscolo where he is praised as a patriot poet opposing tyranny.41 As for Alessandro Manzoni, she will devote attention to his production a few years after writing for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia, in her essay on ‘Modern Italian Romances’ (1838), and was to deal with him at length in letter XVI of Rambles. Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi, besides, were still alive in 1835, and Lardner’s policy was apparently to avoid living authors, a fact which may indeed account for what appears to be a rather limited perspective on Shelley’s part.42 The British intellectuals, particularly the Whig aristocrats, in contact with many Italian patriot exiles who had moved to London in three different waves (1821, 1832, and 1848), gave moral support to their cause. In strictly political terms, however, their priority remained the maintenance of a European balance of power in order to avoid the risk of a European war.43 Nevertheless, they also felt they had much in common with the Italians from an intellectual point of view. In effect, the exiles from the first and second waves were mainly men of letters, adhering to the same ‘Romantic’ notions as the British aristocratic groups they joined. And Italian literature was becoming better known by the British through the activities of these Italian exiles, and many of them, particularly the more politically moderate, supported themselves by teaching Italian literature, either privately or in public institutions.44 Conscious of the enormous power that literature could have to defeat despotism, these patriots used Italian literature in order to reaffirm their political programme. According to Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley’s sources – and this brings us to the third question – were carefully explored and tested by using the best editions and the most reli-

40 41 42 43

44

Tilar J. Mazzeo, ‘Introduction by the Editor of Italian Lives’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, I, p. xlvi. Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre, pp. 501-02. ‘Living writers were not included in the Cyclopaedia’, observes Mazzeo in her ‘Introduction by the Editor of Italian Lives’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, I, p. xlvii. Thus, Whig politics in the early nineteenth century seems to mirror some features of the politics of the previous century, as represented for instance in Joseph Addison’s 1701 Letter from Italy (ll. 145-52). On the Italian exiles and their reception in Whig circles, see Margaret C. W. Wicks, The Italian Exiles in London, 1816-1848 (Manchester: 1937; New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), H. W. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters (London: 1940); Franco Della Peruta, Mazzini e i rivoluzionari italiani (Milan: 1974). About earlier waves of emigration, see Maurizio Isabella, ‘Gli esuli italiani in Inghilterra e il movimento liberale internazionale fra filellenismo e americanismo’, Annali della Fondazione Einaudi, 28 (1994), 413-65. For the Tory side of the question, see Charles MacFarlane’s Reminiscences of a Literary Life (London: John Murray, 1917). Antonio Panizzi worked first at the Royal Institution of Liverpool, then at University College, London, before being appointed Director of the British Museum Library. Gabriele Rossetti, who arrived in London in 1823, was Professor of Italian Literature at King’s College, London, from 1831. As a Professor at London University, Panizzi published in 1828 an anthology of Italian prose writers from Niccolò Machiavelli to Manzoni, Extracts from Italian Prose Writers, that certainly contributed to arouse interest in new trends of Italian prose. In addition, Panizzi’s edition of Orlando Innamorato (1830-34) was a source for Mary Shelley’s ‘Life of Boiardo’.

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able translations: Girolamo Tiraboschi, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, and Andrea Maffei are all employed in the Italian Lives, Giuseppe Pecchio for Foscolo, and Antonio Panizzi for ‘romantic’ narrative poetry (Boiardo). And in her ‘Life of Foscolo’, in particular, Mary Shelley cannot refrain from commenting negatively on existing translations. Indeed, the latter life of the great Italian poet and exile is a good case in point in terms of sources. Let us briefly consider what was available to Shelley in print in 1835, ignoring for the moment the possibility of her meeting Italian exiles in London. Foscolo had died at Turnham Green, London, in 1827, at the end of a long exile begun in 1816. By 1829 Michele Leoni had published a short biographical essay in Lugano with the title of Ragguagli intorno a Ugo Foscolo.45 In 1830 Pecchio published his famous biography, which Mary Shelley repeatedly quotes in her ‘Life of Foscolo’.46 Two other projects were started in the Venetian area, but never completed, one by Leopoldo Cicognara in 1828, and the other by Emilio de Tipaldo, a half-Greek half-Venetian writer involved in Luigi Carrer’s project of the Biografia degli italiani illustri, published in Venice in 10 volumes between 1834 and 1845.47 It was the publication of Carrer’s own ‘Vita di Ugo Foscolo’ in 1837 that probably put an end to the two projects mentioned above.48 Carrer’s ‘Vita’ is very polemical with those who had turned Foscolo into an author à la mode or a mere editorial pretext. In contrast, he tried to produce a correct documentary reconstruction of the poet’s life without indulging in apologias or resorting to sentimental anecdotes, a device, according to him, exploited very skilfully by Pecchio. Yet, it will not be until 1860 that Carlo Cattaneo will deliver a speech in Naples, later published in Il politecnico,49 about the human qualities of the author above and beyond any literary judgement, through a careful reconstruction of Foscolo’s engagement under the political banner of the Risorgimento movement aimed at highlighting the parallelism with the Dantean model (but this is obviously well ahead of Mary Shelley’s time). The rise of the biographical and political myth of Foscolo, however, is linked to the renewed interest in Dante in the early nineteenth century. After 1838, Mazzini, who had been fascinated with Foscolo’s writings (particularly Ortis) since his university years,50 will devote his efforts to writing a life of Foscolo that would, however, never see the light of day. It was the discovery of Foscolo’s manuscripts at Pickering’s, as well as the desire to print a philologically correct version of Foscolo’s commentary on Dante’s Commedia, that convinced Mazzini to abandon the biographical project in order to edit what was for him Foscolo’s politically pre-eminent work. Gabriele Rossetti’s Commento on Dante’s Commedia, published in 1826, had anticipated both Mazzini’s and Cattaneo’s positions. According to Rossetti’s reading – in line Ugo Foscolo’s brother, Giulio, resented that Leoni’s biography was a misrepresentation of truth. Recently ed. by G. Nicoletti (Milan: Longanesi, 1974). For the story of Foscolo’s biographies, see Carlo Mariani, ‘Momenti della fortuna biografica del Foscolo nella prima metà dell’Ottocento’, in Scrivere le vite: Aspetti della biografia letteraria, ed. by Vanni Bramanti and Maria Grazia Pensa (Milan: Guerini Studio, 1996), pp. 1-13. 48 L. Carrer, ‘Vita di Ugo Foscolo’, in Prose e poesie edite e inedite (Venice: Co’ Tipi del Gondoliere, 1842). Carrer was the first biographer who collected and studied Foscolo’s early writings (which he later published in his edition of Foscolo’s Prose e poesie, Venice: Andruzzi, 1842) in order to reconstruct Foscolo’s literary education. Obviously, Mary Shelley could not possibly have seen his ‘Vita di Ugo Foscolo’ in time . 49 Il politecnico, 9 (1860), pp. 441-74. 50 Giuseppe Mazzini, Note autobiografiche, ed. by M. Menghini (Florence: Le Monnier, 1943), p. 80. 45 46 47

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with the politics of the Carbonari – many aspects of Dante’s life and thought fitted in with those of his companions in exile. A similar view was later to re-emerge in Antonio Gallenga’s Italy, Past and Present, published in 1848.51 Among his Italian contemporaries, Foscolo inspired admiration and sympathy for his own personality, but also harsh criticism of the novelty of Ortis and the ‘obscurity’ of the Sepolcri. The man – no aristocrat, no clericus, but rather a fighter for the new revolutionary and democratic ideals – had roused the early enthusiasm of the young Milanese intellectuals who were later to publish Il Conciliatore (3 September 1818-10 October 1819), and who appreciated his political-ideological teaching, and his love of freedom and country. His classicism, however, did not go down well with the anti-mythological attitude of the Conciliatore, nor did his ‘English’ estrangement from the new Romantic trends in literature and politics. Pecchio is the spokesman of this Romantic generation and its reaction to Foscolo, particularly after his exile in England, while it was Giuseppe Montani who celebrated his figure from the pages of the Antologia, the Florentine review directed by the Swiss-Italian G. P. Vieusseux (1825). But it was certainly Mazzini who first inaugurated the Byronic image of the genius, opposing him to the school of Manzoni and thus setting him up firmly as the pioneer of a truly revolutionary and democratic literature.52 Mazzini had a strong impact on Mary Shelley, as ‘Modern Italian Romances’ testifies. There she quotes his article from the London and Westminster Review (1837) in which he describes the state of contemporary Italian literature, and she actually follows his evaluation of the Italian novels and romances that she will examine more closely in Letter XVI of her Rambles. In 1818, an early portrait of Foscolo had appeared together with the profiles of Melchiorre Cesarotti, Giuseppe Parini, Vittorio Alfieri, Ippolito Pindemonte, and Vincenzo Monti in the ‘Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, an anonymous publication printed in John Cam Hobhouse’s Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold. The long ‘Essay’ (pp. 347-484) ‘composed of original material (now lost) that was supplied by – but not attributed to – the Italian exile, Ugo Foscolo, and translated by Hobhouse’,53 was meant to provide background information to the Canto IV of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold,54 See Toni Cerutti, Antonio Gallenga: An Italian Writer in Victorian England (London: Oxford University Press for the University of Hull, 1974), quoted in Maurizio Isabella’s article ‘Italian Exiles and British Politics before and after 1848’ (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/ [online]) to which I am indebted for this last comment. Dante’s revival in Britain had probably started with H. F. Cary’s blank verse translation of the Commedia (1805-14), and continued through John Flaxman’s (1807) and William Blake’s (1820s) illustrations of the poem, Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1816), Lord Byron’s Prophecy of Dante (composed in 1819), Felicia Hemans’s ‘The Maremma’ (1823), and P. B. Shelley’s Dantesque ‘The Triumph of Life’. See Tilar J. Mazzeo, ‘Italian Literature in England, 1500-1835’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, I, p. xlvi. 52 Actually, the identification with some aspects of Byron had already been pointed out by Hobhouse, who might have been struck by the unusual symmetry of their destinies. See part III in Adriana Flamigni, Rosella Mangaroni, Ugo Foscolo: La passione dell’esilio (Milan: Camunia, 1987). 53 Nick Havely, ‘“This Infernal Essay”: English Contexts for Foscolo’s Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, in Immaginando l’Italia: itinerari letterari del romanticismo inglese / Imagining Italy: Literary Itineraries in British Romanticism, ed. by Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Bologna: CLUEB, 2002), p. 234. 54 On the complex topic of authorship, responsibility, and consequences related to the publication of the ‘Essay’, see Adriana Flamigni, Rosella Mangaroni, Ugo Foscolo; Nick Havely, ‘“This Infernal Essay”’, in Immaginando l’Italia, pp. 233-50; and Lilla Maria Crisafulli, ‘“An Infernal Triangle”: Foscolo, Hobhouse, Di Breme and the Italian Context of the Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, in Immaginando l’Italia, pp. 251-85. 51

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composed during the first year of Byron’s stay in Italy and commonly assumed to be a record of his personal observations of the Italian scene and his response to Italian life and culture. As Peter Vassallo has documented, however, Byron’s primary sources for it were essentially literary, and particularly Friedrich Schiller, Ann Radcliffe, and Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie. Hobhouse was later to acknowledge Foscolo’s fundamental contribution to the ‘Essay’ in his Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits from the Year 1816 to 1854.55 And critics now agree on attributing the essay to Foscolo who, prompted by Hobhouse, apparently wrote it between the end of March and April 1818. Publication followed immediately. Yet, the rapidity of Foscolo’s composition has puzzled many critics and raised many doubts: according to some scholars, the essay must be a rewriting of previous notes and reflections, since Foscolo had been thinking for years of a publication on Italian literature.56 However, the original Italian version has been lost, and so it is difficult to reconstruct the author’s drafts with any precision. Hobhouse, moreover, stated that he amended the text, so the question remains uncertain.57 The Shelleys read Byron’s Childe Harold IV in November 1818, while in Italy.58 My point is that, although Mary did rely heavily on Pecchio for biographical information and did actually use Ortis as an additional source,59 as far as her literary and political comments and theoretical principles are concerned, she seems to follow closely in Foscolo’s footsteps. Indeed, she seems to be writing with the ‘Essay’ close by, although we do not know whether she acknowledged Foscolo’s authorship. This fact stands as further proof of the influence the ‘Essay’ had on the ‘reading of Italian writers in Regency England’.60 Foscolo’s ‘Essay’ – a survey of the present state of Italian literature, and not a collection of biographies – would have been of no use to Mary Shelley, if she had strictly followed Lardner’s wish that she concentrate on lives and not on literature. But, since literature constitutes a large part of her analyses, Foscolo’s notes could be exploited, and she apparently did so when dealing with his own life. In the final lines of his Introduction to the ‘Essay’, Foscolo states, much in the vein of Mary Shelley’s idea of the use of biography: ‘Such an effort has, however, been made in the following sketches of these distinguished Italians, and so much of their biography has

55

56 57 58 59 60

Childe Harold IV was translated into Italian by Michele Leoni, who ‘attested to the fact that his translation […] was considered subversive by the Austrians’ in a letter to Byron of 3 May 1820, quoted in Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence, pp. 21-22. Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits from the Year 1816 to 1854 (London: Murray, 1859), II, p. 378. Here, Hobhouse states: ‘The materials for the foregoing Essay [a reprint of the original Essay on the Present Literature of Italy] were furnished to me by an Italian exile, whose assistance I could not avow without compromising him with his fellow-countrymen. The critical judgements were from my friend, the language and adaptation to English literature were, of course, my own’ (quoted in Nick Havely, ‘“This Infernal Essay”’, p. 246). See Lilla Maria Crisafulli, ‘“An Infernal Triangle”’, pp. 253-55, for a reconstruction of Foscolo’s projects. Neither Hobhouse nor Foscolo ever acknowledged Foscolo’s paternity. Both Italian and English scholars, however, have by now produced convincing proof of it. Mary Shelley, Journals 1814-1844, ed. by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), I, p. 235. This is particularly evident in the pages dealing with the years leading up to his exile, where long passages from Ortis, translated by herself, are offered as evidence. Nick Havely, ‘“This Infernal Essay”’, p. 238.

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been added as appeared serviceable in illustrating the motives that inspired, and the occasions that called forth, their various compositions’.61 He also stresses the responsibility of the man of letters especially in a country such as Italy, where most of the people are illiterate,62 and his appreciation for an independent-minded poet such as Parini, who ‘refused to recite a single verse at the table of any great man’.63 Mary Shelley’s linking of moral conduct and politics seems much in keeping with Foscolo’s own position, and could possibly explain the similarities that may be detected between her biography and Foscolo’s ‘Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’. She seems particularly indebted to the chapter where Foscolo describes himself. Curiously enough, although Mary Shelley does not quote the ‘Essay’ in her ‘Life of Foscolo’, when she discusses the suppression of the Professorship of Eloquence at Pavia and the subsequent measures taken in other Italian universities, she quotes Alfieri’s axiom ‘that absolute monarchs hate the historian, the poet, and the orator, and give the preference to the sciences’, adding a note referring the reader to ‘Hobhouse’s Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’,64 without mentioning the ‘Essay’ and the fact that it quotes Alfieri’s statement in the very same context. Thus, Shelley makes use of Foscolo’s ‘Essay’, but never mentions it, nor does she record the harsh polemics it aroused in the intellectual worlds of both London and Milan. We must obviously keep in mind that Foscolo’s and Mary Shelley’s writings had very different agendas. He meant to offer a picture of Italian letters that eventually promoted his own position within that world. Her intention, by contrast, was to offer a series of biographies of the most eminent Italian men of letters. Therefore, he had the opportunity to include details of many of his contemporaries’ ideas and outputs, while she was obliged to select (or accept a selection of) the most important names in the history of Italian literature. The number of names was probably limited by editorial choice, therefore curbing her possibilities of inclusion. That she was aware of the reductive nature of her biographical effort is attested to by the fact that on two different occasions, in 1838 and in 1844, she felt the necessity to complete the picture by explicitly dealing with the new authors engaged in the literary-political debate in Italy. It is in the chapter on Ugo Foscolo that a series of parallelisms with Mary Shelley’s biographical sketch of Foscolo becomes clearly visible. Some borrowings have already been recorded in the footnotes to the 2002 edition of Mary Shelley’s Italian Lives, although there are a few more which I would like to clarify here through a parallel analysis of a number of paragraphs. It is not only the casual occurrence of similar words or concepts that is striking, but at times the turn of the phrases themselves, as some of the following quotations show:

Ugo Foscolo, Opere, tomo II, p. 1409. ‘Whatever may be the honours acquired by poetry in England, we cannot form an idea of the influence enjoyed by a man who has obtained a great literary reputation in a country where the largest portion of the people cannot read. He is listened to with a sort of religious obedience’ (Ugo Foscolo, Opere, tomo II, pp. 1453-54). 63 Ugo Foscolo, Opere, tomo II, pp. 1453-54. 64 ‘Life of Foscolo’, in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings I, p. 348. 61 62

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‘Hugo Foscolo’, in ‘Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’ p. 1522: ‘The total change in the political condition of his country, his military education, and the part which he played in public affairs, developed however his talents, and formed his character, in a manner quite different from that of his predecessors’ (my italics) p.1525: ‘After all, it [Ortis] is but an imitation of Werther’ p. 1526: ‘The author is in his proper element when he breaks forth into his ethical reflections: how truly he says, ‘That we are too proud to give our compassion when we feel we can give nothing else’ (my ital65 ics) p. 1526: ‘the misfortunes and the heroic despair of 66 the Italian Werther’ p. 1527-28: ‘the purity of [Ortis] language, combined with a certain easy style, have suited it to the taste of every reader. It cannot be too often remarked, that it is principally the style which in all works attracts the admiration of the Italians’ p. 1531: [Here Foscolo offers an abstract of the Orazione per il Congresso di Lione] p. 1534: ‘This discourse […] maintains a certain impetuosity and gravity of style which overwhelm and fatigue the attention’ p. 1540: [In mentioning his lecture on the Origin and the Duties of Literature given at the University of Pavia, Foscolo insists on the moral function of literature, and on the peculiar role of men of intellect as mediators between the government and the people]

Mary Shelley’s ‘Life of Hugo Foscolo’ p. 331: [There is no word by word correspondence here, but Foscolo’s birth, the necessity to abandon his native island and family to receive an education in Venice, the historical events that marked his youth are mentioned in order to explain the man and his work (a practice Mary Shelley repeatedly used throughout her biographies)] p. 339: ‘its [Ortis] chief fault is, that it is an imitation’ p. 340: ‘And yet, in representing his hero as a selfdestroyer, Foscolo was not without moral aim […] What more true than the remark, “That we are too proud to give our compassion, when we feel we can give nothing else”?’ (my italics) p. 342: ‘Such was the outward appearance and manners of the Italian Werter’ p. 341: ‘The style, also, of these letters (and the Italians make style a chief merit) is pure, elegant, and forcible’

pp. 342-43: [Mary Shelley uses the same passage with a few variations, as it has already been recognized in the 2002 edition of Mary Shelley’s Italian Lives] p. 343: ‘The style of the oration is forcible, but too rhetorical; and, though full of truths […] calmer representations and closer reasoning would command more of our admiration’ p. 347: [Mary Shelley mentions his lecture by stressing in particular Foscolo’s refusal to introduce any praise of Napoleon, while she certainly agreed with Foscolo’s idea of the function of literature and men of letters as testified, for instance, in her Rambles, where the figure of Manzoni is meant to embody this principle]

The text of the ‘Essay’ published in Ugo Foscolo, Opere, in footnote no. 2 states: ‘Nelle varie edizioni ortisiane non mi è stato possibile rinvenire la frase citata. Potrebbe essere citazione compendiosa di quanto si accenna all’inizio della Storia di Lauretta, là dove il Foscolo cita anche Epitteto’. Also the 2002 edition of Mary Shelley’s Italian Lives presents a footnote indicating that ‘This and next quote from Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, letters of 25 May 1798 and 22 Nov.1797’. The hypothesis that British readers had an English translation available is legitimate but difficult to prove. The British Library Catalogue does not offer any relevant item, while one is recorded in the Library of Congress in Washington, dated 1817. In his ‘Introduction’ to Felicia Hemans, Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002), Gary Kelly mentions the fact that an English Translation of Ortis ‘by F.B’ appeared in 1812 in London, and suggests that ‘Felicia Browne’ (Hemans’s maiden name) could be concealed in the ‘F.B.’, since, at the time, the poet was very active with translations from modern languages. Given the fact that Mary Shelley would not have needed an English version for a text she could easily read in the original, what interests us here is that she certainly had Foscolo’s ‘Life’ to hand when writing her biography, since she employs the same quotation in virtually the identical context. 66 The parallelism is recognized in footnote b) in the 2002 edition of Mary Shelley’s Italian Lives. What seems interesting is that the expression Mary Shelley certainly borrowed from Foscolo was already familiar to her through Godwin’s use of the parallel ‘female Werter’ in connection with Wollstonecraft’s biography. 65

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pp. 1541-42: [Discussing the suppression of the pro- p. 348: [Mary Shelley repeats the comment, already recfessorship of eloquence at Pavia, Bologna and Pa- ognized as a borrowing from Foscolo by the editors of dova, he mentions Alfieri’s comment that ‘absolute the 2002 edition of Mary Shelley’s Italian Lives] monarchs hate the historian, and the poet, and the orator, and give preference to the sciences’]

For Mary Shelley, true literature was ‘national’ literature.67 As an advocate of Italy’s cultural, social, and political resurgence, she expressed her confidence in the potentialities of the country by stressing the active engagement of the many intellectuals who devoted their abilities to the patriotic ideal. However, since what constitutes a nation is its cultural achievement, the rebirth of Italian letters to which she bears witness is in itself an indication of such an achievement. And it is no coincidence that her subsequent essays will pay close attention to the works of Alessandro Manzoni as a possible champion of the Italian cause.

67

See ‘Preface’ to Rambles.

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Diego Saglia (Università di Parma)

‘Freedom alone is wanting’: British Views of Contemporary Italian Drama, 1820-1830

In late eighteenth-century Britain, the growing interest in contemporary Italian drama and theatre was dominated by the figure and works of Vittorio Alfieri, while other established and new authors soon began to attract attention. Nonetheless, if at the turn of the century critical contributions on Italian dramaturgy were far from numerous, the 1820s saw a renewal of critical attention linked to the popularity of the first Italian revolutionary insurrections that seemed to indicate the resurgence of patriotism and the return to a more deeply national and traditional literature. British commentators were also attracted by the fact that an artistically fertile nation such as Italy had never distinguished itself in the dramatic field and had never produced a tradition of ‘regular’ theatre. Between the early 1820s and the 1830s, such aesthetic and ideological reinterpretations of Italian drama did not produce book-length studies, but rather appeared in long essays published in some of the most influential periodicals of the periods, from the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, to Fraser’s Magazine, and Blackwood’s Magazine. The Italian authors considered in these essays ranged from Alfieri and Vincenzo Monti, to Ugo Foscolo, Silvio Pellico, Ippolito Pindemonte, Alessandro Manzoni and Giambattista Niccolini. And interpretations of their works ranged from a celebration of the Italians’ return to a form of patriotic, libertarian, and ‘liberal’ writing, to pessimistic conclusions about their inability to achieve political or artistic independence. Thus, on the one hand, writing about the Italian stage in late Romantic Britain was a way of discussing the status of the dramatic and the theatrical – crucial issues for a culture that saw its own theatre as unworthy of Shakespeare’s heritage; on the other, it enabled commentators to throw light on the clash between liberal and conservative discourses that distinguished the cultural and ideological panorama of early nineteenth-century Britain.

‘Il n’y a pas plus en Italie de comédie que de tragédies; et dans cette carrière encore c’est nous qui sommes les premiers. Le seul genre qui appartienne vraiment à l’Italie ce sont les arlequinades’.1 Thus the French Comte d’Erfeuil dispatches Italian drama in Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807), prompting the heroine, the prince Castel-Forte and other Italians to vindicate the national dramatic tradition. A complex debate ensues in which Alfieri’s achievements are amply discussed. Yet, despite this concerted attempt at redressing the balance, Corinne’s intervention ultimately confirms that ‘notre littérature exprime peu notre caractère et nos moeurs’, as well as certifying the lack of ‘regular’ national tragedy in Italy: ‘Nous sommes une nation beaucoup trop modeste, je dirais presque trop humble, pour oser avoir des tragédies à nous, composées avec notre histoire, ou du moins caractérisées d’après nos propres sentiments’.2 Thus, even as she qualifies the Comte d’Erfeuil’s prejudiced judgement, Corinne does not disprove it, reflecting Madame de Staël’s opinions on Italian literature and its lack of tragedy in De la littérature (1800) where she inquires: ‘Les

1 2

Madame de Staël, Corinne, ed. by Simone Balayé (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), part VII, ch. 2, p. 180. Madame de Staël, Corinne, pp. 186-87.

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Italiens ont-ils poussé très loin l’art dramatique dans leurs tragédies? Malgré le charme de Métastase et l’énergie d’Alfieri, je ne le pense pas’.3 These critical reactions to the Italian dramatic tradition are in keeping with longstanding reservations, common throughout eighteenth-century Europe, about the Italians’ ability to produce ‘regular’ theatre. As late as 1828, an essay on ‘Italian Comedy’ by the critic and writer Mary Margaret Busk in the Foreign Quarterly Review explained that: […] the regular drama did not, in Italy, as in other countries, bear from its earliest infancy the strong, and always interesting stamp of nationality. It had nothing of the raciness which distinguishes the natural produce of every soil. Coldly and dully imitative, it seems to have been equally uncongenial to author, actor, and audience […] [By contrast,] the genius of the clime burst forth in other forms. One of these is the opera; but in those splendid exhibitions, the poet’s part is held so subordinate to the musical composer’s, that notwithstanding the acknowledged beauties of Metastasio, we name the opera only to observe how detrimental its un4 bounded popularity must have proved to the legitimate drama.

Since early nineteenth-century British culture was pervaded with images of Italy and echoes of its literature, it seems almost a matter of course that it should have been fascinated with Italian drama.5 Nevertheless, the British passion for Italy faltered when it came to the theatre. For scholars and literati could not explain how a lively cultural tradition such as the Italian had not produced a strong dramatic heritage, and yet had spawned such a conspicuously spectacular manifestation as the opera. Therefore the earliest Romantic-period attempts at a history of Italian drama were essentially devoted to explanation and justification, as in the studies published by the Irish antiquary Joseph Cooper Walker (1761-1810), who had become acquainted with Italian culture during a long permanence in the peninsula between the late 1790s and the early 1800s. His Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy, from the earliest period to the present time (1799) opens with a description of its own pioneering nature. In the preface Walker confesses that: ‘Discovering in Italian tragedy, a rich mine of intellectual wealth, hitherto almost totally unexplored by my countrymen, I determined, however ill-qualified I might be, to endeavour to direct their notice to this literary treasure’.6 And, after a brief overview of medieval drama and theatre, the book launches into a detailed examination of theatrical and dramatic developments in Italy from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Walker does deny that Italian theatre seems to have followed a peculiar trajectory, and that very little in its evolution conforms to the mandates of ‘regular’ theatre. But this received notion is partly corrected by his reconstruction of re3

4 5

6

Madame de Staël, De la littérature, ed. by Gérard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1991), part I, ch. 10, p. 201. On Madame de Staël’s ideas about drama and the theatre in the context of the Coppet circle, see Danielle Johnson-Cousin, ‘Les idées dramatiques du Groupe de Coppet’, in Le Groupe de Coppet, Actes et documents du dixième Colloque de Coppet, 10-13 July 1974, ed. by Simone Balayé and Jean-Daniel Candaux (Geneva: Slatkine; Paris: Champion, 1977), pp. 239-62. Foreign Quarterly Review, 2 (February 1828), 60-61. See C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), The Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 12: Ian Jack, English Literature 1815-1832: Scott, Byron and Keats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 378-83, and Kenneth Churchill, Italy and English Literature 1764-1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980). Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy, from the earliest period to the present time…by a Member of the Arcadian Academy of Rome (London: E. Harding, 1799), p. v.

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cent developments on the Italian stage and, even more emphatically, by his methodical analysis of Vittorio Alfieri’s production through an overview of the author’s life, themes, and techniques, as well as a brief synopsis and profile for each of his plays. The only other contemporary dramatist discussed by Walker is Vincenzo Monti with his tragedy Aristodemo (1787). Although generally censured as an excessively distressing and terrifying work, its moralizing effect is praised by Walker: ‘This awful drama shakes the soul to its inmost recesses, and makes the coward conscience shrink back upon itself’.7 Eventually, even though he cannot refute accusations against the irregularity and deficiency of Italian drama, Walker feels confident enough to predict a resurgence of regular dramaturgy in Italy and a concurrent decline of the opera in a statement couched in grandiosely triumphant images, ironically moulded on operatic stagecraft: […] from the natural ardour of the Italian character, and the resources with which the national language and genius abound, Italy, ere many years roll away, will surpass the rest of Europe in the dramatic, as well as in the other arts. Rapt with this idea, methinks I now behold Melpomene reigning in simple majesty in that enchanting country, while ‘le beau monstre de l’opera’, warbling an expiring note, lies prostrate at the foot of her 8 throne!

The criticisms levelled at this volume – in 1820 Henry Hart Milman still called Walker ‘a very uncertain and treacherous guide’ because of his excessive enthusiasm9 – induced the author to write a second study, An Historical and Critical Essay on the Revival of the Drama in Italy, published in 1805. Intended as a riposte to those reviewers and critics who had accused the earlier volume of providing only a slight treatment of Italian theatre, the second book examines Italian drama in greater detail, and especially its earlier phases: the Middle Ages, the early Renaissance, as well as the commedia dell’arte, and theatre in dialect (with a sizeable section on the sixteenth-century Paduan author Ruzante). Although this second volume has little to say about developments in contemporary Italian theatre, its structure and prefatory materials define it as a collaborative effort emerging out of a network of British and Italian scholars and writers. Thus, in the preface, the author highlights his connections with important Italian literati, the Paduan poet and critic Melchiorre Cesarotti in particular, and institutions such as the Arcadia. Indeed, Walker’s Arcadian pseudonym, ‘Eubante Tirinzio’, appears in the frontispiece together with the list of learned societies of which he is a member: ‘Honorary Member of the Societies of Perth and Dublin, and of the Academies of Cortona, Rome, and Florence’. To these credentials he adds the list of his advisors and collaborators on the project, among whom such important intellectuals, writers, and specialists on Italian subjects as William Roscoe, Sir Richard Clayton, William Parr Greswell, William Shepherd, Thomas James Mathias, William Preston, Henry Boyd, Susannah Watts, and Anne Bannerman.10 Once again, the aim of this multifaceted, ostensi7 8 9 10

Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy, p. 317. Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy, p. 294. Quarterly Review, 24 (October 1821), p. 75. William Roscoe, the Liverpool banker, patron and writer, was famous for his Life of Lorenzo de Medici (1795). Sir Richard Clayton had translated, with a commentary, Nicolas Tenhove’s Memoirs of the House of Medici (1797). William Parr Greswell was the author of a Memoir of Angelus Politianus (1801). The ‘Mr Shepherd’ in Walker’s list is probably William Shepherd, a friend of Roscoe’s and the author of a Life of Pog-

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bly collaborative, effort is the revival of an interest in Italy which, in Walker’s optimistic opinion, is imminent, as he observes that ‘the Literature of Italy is now about to rise with new splendour in England’ and ‘The Muses of Italy will no longer languish on the borders of the Thames’.11 In fact, after Walker’s volumes no further attempts were made at a comprehensive overview of Italian theatre, both in its development and present state. Perhaps the only comparable operation, albeit on a much less ambitious scale, was Ugo Foscolo’s final dissertation on Italian belles lettres in John Cam Hobhouse’s Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold…and an Essay on Italian Literature (1818). Early nineteenth-century perceptions of contemporary Italian drama reduced it to a small number of authors and texts, with the only exception of the enormous interest generated by the life and works of Alfieri, as is testified by the publication of his Life in English translation in 1810 and again in 1821, the Edinburgh edition of fifteen of his tragedies in the original Italian in 1806, and Charles Lloyd’s translations in The Tragedies of Alfieri (1815). As remarked by C. P. Brand, ‘after 1795, there are signs of a rising interest [in theatre], but as we approach the 1820’s it becomes clear that it was one man alone, Alfieri, who really attracted attention’.12 Similar conclusions, however, appear to be wide of the mark as, throughout the 1820s and well into the 1830s, interest in Italian drama and theatre, and especially their contemporary manifestations, was visibly on the increase. Yet, this renewed interest did not result in studies published in book form, but rather in extensive review essays in the leading periodicals. These publications constituted new and influential organs of cultural and political opinion, and the substantial reviews that composed them were crucial cultural instruments in post-1800 British culture, as they enriched and expanded the Romantic-period ‘public sphere’, strengthened its role as a political and ideological forum, and, more specifically, enlarged the scope of British culture through regular features on contemporary foreign pub-

gio Bracciolini (1802). The literary critic Thomas James Mathias, the author of the dialogues The Pursuits of Literature (1794-97), had probably been taught Italian by Agostino Isola at Cambridge, and was the editor of Gravina, Tiraboschi, and Manzini, the author of lyrics in Italian, and of a three-volume Lyrics from the Italian Poets (1802, 1808, 1809). The translations included in Walker’s book were provided by Henry Boyd, the translator of Dante’s Commedia; William Preston, probably the Irish poet and dramatist and one of the founders of the Dublin Literary Society and the Royal Irish Academy; and by women writers, too, as Walker chivalrously observes that ‘some of the Parnassian flowers which will be found in these pages, were strewed by fair hands’. Joseph Cooper Walker, An Historical and Critical Essay on the Revival of the Drama in Italy (Edinburgh: Mundell and son; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805), p. ix. These female contributors were Susannah Watts, the translator of Lorenzo de Medici’s Ambra (contained in a volume entitled Original Poems, and Translations; particularly Ambra, from Lorenzo de’ Medici, chiefly by S. W., 1802), and the Scottish poet Anne Bannerman, whose second collection of verse Tales of Chivalry and Superstition (1802) is praised by Walker in the preface, and who contributes two translations – a lyric from Angelo Poliziano’s Orfeo and a ballad by Luigi Alamanni. 11 Joseph Cooper Walker, An Historical and Critical Essay, pp. v, vi. 12 Italy and the English Romantics, p. 120. The reviewer of Alessandro Manzoni’s Conte di Carmagnola for the London Magazine (1820) asserts that ‘before the time of Alfieri, the Italians possessed no tragedies – although many of their obscure poets often made miserable attempts, and tottered in the path of tragedy’. London Magazine, 2 (September 1820), p. 285.

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lications.13 Indeed, the latter aspect was also subject to the periodical’s (more or less firm) political affiliation, so that discussions of Italian theatre in the reviews delineated a space for ideological debate which, in the 1820s, was influenced by Italy’s constitutional movements and resistance to the restored monarchies and the settlement imposed by the Holy Alliance after the Congress of Vienna. As the traditional place of the interaction of politics and culture, the theatre of contemporary Italy was carefully monitored in a British cultural environment that was both fascinated by spectacularity and obsessed with the degraded state of its own stage.14 Some of the most prominent periodicals of the Romantic age – Blackwood’s Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, the Quarterly Review, Fraser’s Magazine, and the Foreign Quarterly Review – dedicated long essays to the Italian theatre and recent drama, as did some lesser but relevant titles such as the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany.15 These essays generally broached their subject as a question of aesthetic evaluation, but, since aesthetics and politics could not be easily extricated in 1820s cultural discourse, they soon inflected their treatments through a variety of ideological argumentations. Thus, the New Monthly and the Edinburgh Magazine were generally supportive of Italy’s libertarian cause on the basis of their ‘proto-liberal’ hostility to the Holy Alliance and the British government’s tacit assent to its foreign policy. By contrast, the conservative Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine took a rather less sympathetic view of movements and events that destabilized the South of Europe. Accordingly, their discussions of contemporary Italian theatre generally eschewed celebratory tones and played down predictions of sociopolitical resurgence and renovation. The period between 1820 and the early 1830s marked a climax in the British interest in the new Italian drama both because the theatre was a foremost preoccupation for British commentators and intellectuals, and because of the explosive situation in Italy that seemed to announce a return of pride and strength to this disunited and decadent nation. In a brief entry on Italian literature in April 1822, the European Magazine observed approvingly that See Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium. The Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. by Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 120-47. More specifically, see also J. H. Alexander, ‘Learning from Europe: Continental Literature in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine 1802-1825’, The Wordsworth Circle, 21 (1990), 118-23. 14 On discussions of the situation of the British theatre in the Romantic period, see Greg Kucich, ‘“A Haunted Ruin”: Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment’, in British Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays, ed. by Terence Allan Hoagwood and Daniel P. Watkins (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 56-83. 15 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, first published in 1817, was essentially conservative, and intended as a riposte to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review (founded 1802); the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany (1817-26) was published by Archibald Constable, the publisher of the Edinburgh Review, but its editor from 1819 was the Episcopalian minister Robert Morehead who was mostly ‘neutral in politics’, so that the journal cannot be ascribed to any single political orientation; in the 1820s the New Monthly Magazine was edited by Thomas Campbell and had close links to the Holland House circle, and was thus essentially Whig in outlook; the Foreign Quarterly Review (1827-46) initially attracted both conservatives such as Robert Southey and Walter Scott, foreign liberal émigrés such Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Whigs and Benthamites such as John Bowring, and thus, ideologically, it was mostly neutral, although in the early 1830s it turned ultra-Tory. See British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age 1789-1836, ed. by Alvin Sullivan (Westport, London: Greenwood Press, 1983). 13

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‘The taste of the Italians for tragedy seems to develop itself more and more’, while their efforts ‘exhibit a tendency and actual progress to a noble and patriotic end’.16 Before this, in the issue for October 1820, the Quarterly Review had published an important intervention by the dramatist Henry Hart Milman on ‘Italian Tragedy: Manzoni, Foscolo, Pellico’. In September 1820, the London Magazine featured a review of Alessandro Manzoni’s Il Conte di Carmagnola which, by way of introduction, contained an extensive overview of the state of Italian tragedy and Alfieri’s pre-eminent role in its resurgence. Between October 1820 and June 1821, the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany published a series of articles on recent Italian literature by Felicia Hemans. In 1822 the New Monthly Magazine published an essay on Alfieri’s Don Carlos (actually entitled Filippo) and one on his political comedies, and between 1825 and 1828 Mary Margaret Busk published her series of ‘Horae Italicae’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. The first issue of the Foreign Quarterly Review (July 1827) featured an essay by the poet George Moir presenting Manzoni as the figurehead of the new Italian tragedy, and in 1828 one on ‘Italian Comedy’ by Busk. In 1833 Moir published an essay on Pellico’s tragedies in the same periodical, which in 1836 printed an unattributed piece on ‘Niccolini’s Tragedies’. And in 1832 Fraser’s Magazine published an overview of Vincenzo Monti’s production in which special attention was given to his dramatic works. Yet, as the 1820s drew to a close, essays on Italian drama became fewer and fewer, and the general interest in Italy seemed to be on the wane. By 1830, according to C. P. Brand’s reconstruction, ‘there is […] less sympathy for Italy’s political situation, less for classical drama, and less for Italian literature in general’.17 Review essays addressed Italian drama both as an aesthetic artifact and as an ideological construction, and both aspects were seen as deeply interwoven with the revolutionary tensions that animated this foreign tradition from Alfieri to the Romantics of the 1810s and 1820s. In particular, the Italian stage was seen to reflect the country’s status as the place where the current clash between opposite ideologies came to a head. Dealing with Italy – a country struggling for change, and one of the ‘liberal’ countries of Southern Europe – could provide an arena for the debate about new political and social principles, while, at the same time, the debate about the new (‘Romantic’) aesthetics could be effectively related to changes in the political dimension. Thus, British commentators generally agreed that the Italian debate between Classics and Romantics was a political one, and that Romanticism, especially its Milanese brand, had deep links with the Carboneria or other organized forms of anti-Austrian and constitutional activism. The joint aesthetic and ideological relevance of the Italian theatre is in full sight in Henry Hart Milman’s essay on the Italian drama (focusing on Manzoni, Pellico, and Foscolo) published in the Quarterly Review for October 1820. A regular contributor to this conservative periodical, Milman addresses the most recent innovations in Italian dramaturgy in order to reach the conclusion that, in spite of these writers’ efforts, Italians prefer

European Magazine, 81 (April 1822), pp. 339, 340. In addition, the anonymous author of this notice brings to the reader’s attention the figure of Francesco Benedetti, a young patriotic dramatist whose premature death interrupted a promising production of historical tragedies on national themes. 17 European Magazine, 81 (April 1822), p. 124. 16

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‘servitude’ and ‘imitation’ to new departures and innovations.18 Interestingly, Milman’s previous writings anticipate this stringent judgement, especially his early and very successful tragedy Fazio, set in Renaissance Italy, published in 1815, and first staged at the Surrey Theatre as The Italian Wife on 22 December 1816, then as Fazio at Covent Garden on 5 February 1818. The play anticipates his views on the inevitable subjection of Italy to foreign powers in a poem, embedded in Act II. 1, about the Italians’ lack of freedom. The lines contrast the ancient dominion of Rome over its vast empire with Italy’s current situation: ‘Sad and sunken Italy! / The plunderer’s common prey! / When saw the eye of day / So very a slave as thee?’.19 The list of woes stands out against the imposing record of the Italians’ artistic achievements, culminating in the question ‘Will the golden days return / ’Neath the azure of her skies?’ – the answer follows promptly: ‘This is done, oh, this is done, / When the broken land is one; / This shall be, oh, this shall be, / When the slavish land is free’.20 Although this may sound as a bona fide Romantic wish for the unity and independence of Italy, yet the character who intones this song in Fazio, the poet Philario, is a courtly parasite and a mercenary poetaster, much like the figure of the Greek Raucocanti in Lord Byron’s Don Juan III (1821) and his song ‘The Isles of Greece’ (III. 689-784). While singing of Italy’s future resurgence, Milman’s character presents a picture of Italian art and culture that is as degraded as the country’s political situation: Oh, in a capering, chambering, wanton land, The lozel’s song alone gains audience, Fine loving ditties, sweet to sickliness; The languishing and luscious touch alone, Of all the full harp’s ecstasies, can detain 21 The palled and pampered ear of Italy.

Voiced by such a figure, the song’s celebration of liberty and resurgence falls flat, and becomes an ironic commentary on fashionable wishful thinking. And the song’s ambivalence is even clearer in the light of the essay of October 1820, where the historical destiny of Italy is that of acting the role of Europe’s clown. As with the poet in Fazio and the famous improvvisatori, its artists are ready to sing and write about any topic, turning even political and patriotic verse into a form of light entertainment. Accordingly, Milman’s essay on Italian drama takes the traditional notion of a lack of original theatre in Italy and maps it on to a wider political context. Just as ‘servile imitation’ characterizes its literature rather than a strong national tradition, so Italy is lost to foreign masters. Lack of independence in the arts is mirrored by the present subjection of Italy to its Austrian overlords, a condition that is made worse by Milman’s damning comparison between modern Italians and their Roman forbears. All greatness has disappeared from social The roots of this situation are to be found in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance when ‘all those who might perhaps themselves have done better things, or at least have led the way and directed the poetic feeling into the proper channel, deliberately preferred servile imitation’. Henry Hart Milman, ‘Italian Tragedy’, Quarterly Review, 24 (October 1820), p. 74. 19 Henry Hart Milman, Fazio: A Tragedy (Oxford: Samuel Collingwood, 1816), p. 27. 20 Henry Hart Milman, Fazio, p. 29. 21 Henry Hart Milman, Fazio, p. 26. 18

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and political life, as well as from the stage, in a kind of double bind that Shelley also discusses in his Defence of Poetry, composed the following year.22 Focusing on the fortunes of legitimate tragedy in Italy, Milman remarks on its recent resurgence and praises the attempt, but concludes with a dim panorama of continued Italian subjection to Austria: ‘though she still remain divided and subdivided, and portioned out among different sovereigns – and we see no probability of her being otherwise, in any manner consistent with the peace of Europe and her own internal happiness; still let her be able to pride herself on her poets winning the admiration of the world’.23 Published in an influential and widely read review, Milman’s essay attracted criticism from proto-liberal intellectuals, most importantly from Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, who in her Italy (1821) discussed Milman’s severe judgement, referring her reader to the Quarterly essay in a footnote, in order to disprove it by way of a detailed evocation of Milan’s lively cultural and theatrical life. A well-known Whig and ‘liberal’ writer, Morgan was one of the favourite targets of the conservative critics of the Quarterly Review, and had made public this mutual hatred in the preface to her previous travel book France (1817).24 In this context of ideological attrition, Milan’s cultural environment proved particularly useful to Morgan’s attack against Milman’s conservative views about Italian drama. For the capital of Lombardy saw the earliest manifestations of Italian Romanticism, the supporters of which had received substantial help from Madame de Staël in their battle against the Classicists thanks to her essay ‘Sulla maniera e l’utilità delle traduzioni’, published in the periodical La biblioteca italiana in January 1816. In her discussion, Morgan assesses the weaknesses of Milanese theatrical and dramatic life, as well as the potential for cultural and political renewal at work within it. Contra Milman, therefore, Morgan reconstructs the history of the theatre in Italy from the Renaissance onwards in order to deny that the lack of princely patronage was the main cause for the absence of national drama in the past. By contrast, Morgan turns to contemporary theatre, and especially its ‘illegitimate’ expressions, as evidence of a cultural vivacity which, in turn, indicates an intense political activism. In this combination of the cultural and the political, Morgan follows the well-established commonplace that ‘The state of a national theatre may be taken as no unfair barometer of public opinion, as well as of national taste’.25 At the same time, her interpretation is in keeping with Madame de Staël’s (and the Coppet Circle’s) vision of drama and theatre, and more generally literature, as deeply enmeshed in the socio-political progress of a nation.26 22

23 24 25 26

Shelley writes that ‘in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts […] or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines which the writers considers as moral truth’, adding that ‘it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished is a mark of corruption of manners and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life’. Shelley’s Prose, ed. by David Lee Clark, preface by Harold Bloom (London: Fourth Estate, 1988 [1954]), pp. 285-86. Quarterly Review, 24 (October 1820), p. 102. See Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora, 1988), pp. 9495, 138-39. Lady Morgan, Italy, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1821), I, p. 102. See Danielle Johnson-Cousin, ‘Les idées dramatiques du Groupe de Coppet’.

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When, in the case of Italian Romantic drama, she focuses on ‘high’ or ‘legitimate’ tragedy, Morgan perceives signals of a revival in the work of contemporary authors and especially in the drama of Silvio Pellico who, for Morgan, is the main representative of the new tragic experimentalism in Italian letters and, significantly, a martyr to Austrian political repression. In her explicitly ‘liberal’ panorama of the Italian theatre, the author optimistically remarks: At the present moment Italy abounds in poetical talent. The names of Monti, of Niccolini, of Pellico, of Foscolo, and Manzoni, all living dramatic writers of eminence, evince that freedom alone is wanting (that element without which true poetry is rarely produced,) to revive the stage, and to raise the Italian tragedy to a 27 greater elevation than it has yet been suffered to attain.

Similar concerns emerge, albeit in a more nuanced form, in Felicia Hemans’s essays on recent Italian literature published in the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany between December 1820 and June 1821. Although these contributions never overtly deal with the cultural and ideological value of Italian drama, Hemans often hints at its significance for the political resurgence of Italy. Her pro-Italian attitude is confirmed by the fact that one of her sources was Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi’s De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813), a foundation text for proto-liberal approaches to Italian culture in this period. From this encyclopaedic survey Hemans draws materials for her opening essay ‘Italian Literature: Monti’ (October 1820), a translation of chapter 21 of Sismondi’s book and an examination of Vincenzo Monti’s poem Bassvilliana (1793). Moreover, the context in the Edinburgh Magazine clarifies further Hemans’s Italophilia, as this publication often featured pieces on Italian topics and carefully monitored the fortunes of the Neapolitan revolution of 1820. Eventually, the links between Hemans’s writing in 1820-21 and oppositional politics are made plain by her essay on ‘Patriotic Effusions of the Italian Poets’ (June 1821) which evokes an uninterrupted line of patriotic poetry, ‘from the days of Dante and Petrarch, to those of Foscolo and Pindemonte’,28 which keeps alive an idea of national pride and (aspirations to) independence. Hemans is thus particularly optimistic about a notion of national identity that ‘may well be considered as imperishable, since the “ten thousand tyrants” of the land have failed to quench its brightness’.29 The first of these essays to be specifically dedicated to the theatre was published in June 1821 and discusses Monti’s tragedy Caio Gracco (1800, represented at La Scala, Milan, 1802). The play’s subject is obviously associated with notions of republican virtue which, in Monti’s tragedy, are accentuated by the fact that it was composed at a time when the author was a supporter of, and a propagandist for, the ideals of the French Revolution. In her essay Hemans observes that ‘the whole piece seems to be animated by that restless and untamable spirit of freedom, whose immortalized struggles for ascendency give so vivid a colouring, so exalted an interest, to the annals of the ancient [Roman] republic’.30 Then, the translations from Monti illustrate the relevance of civic virtues and liberty in the play, while Hemans’s commentary highlights the figure of the mother of the Gracchi, Cornelia, whose 27 28 29 30

Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 106. Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, 8 (June 1821), p. 513. Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, 8 (June 1821), p. 513. Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, 8 (June 1821), pp. 515-16.

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‘high-hearted’ qualities and ‘collected majesty’ assimilate her to the type of female figures, caught up in adverse, revolutionary times, that Hemans was developing in her own dramas The Siege of Valencia and The Vespers of Palermo, both published in 1823.31 In the subsequent essays, Hemans discusses and translates two other recent Italian plays: Vittorio Alfieri’s Alceste (1798) and Alessandro Manzoni’s Il Conte di Carmagnola (1820). The former, presented in the issue for December 1820, is among Alfieri’s later works and is therefore less combatively political than most of his early output. Accordingly, rather than reiterating the author’s well-known oppositional politics, Hemans focuses on the eponymous heroine as an instance of female heroism and resistance to adversity: ‘with all its lofty fortitude, heroic affection, and subdued anguish [Alcestis] powerfully recalls to our imagination the calm and tempered majesty distinguishing the masterpieces of Greek sculpture’.32 Once more, there is an evident analogy between this heroic female character and the many stoic women in Hemans’s poetry and drama. With Manzoni’s Carmagnola, by contrast, she offers her readers a recent Italian text with political overtones and a historical tragedy which indirectly comments on contemporary events in Italy, and thus a play that presents similarities with her own project in Vespers of Palermo. As the plot of Manzoni’s tragedy, drawn from late-medieval Italian history, could not be familiar to many of her readers, Hemans provides a summary of the life of the protagonist, a heroic military commander betrayed and sentenced to death by the Venetian Republic. If Carmagnola is ‘a piece which has excited [...] much attention in Italy’, Hemans discusses it mostly in terms of its aesthetic merits, throwing light on ‘the boldness of the author in so completely emancipating himself from the fetters of the dramatic unities’.33 The tragedy therefore exemplifies Continental ‘Romantic’ dramaturgy, and is an important intervention in the debate on the Aristotelian unities, as well as a document testifying to the Italians’ reflection on their current historical and political situation. Together with the other essays in the series, the piece on Manzoni records how Italy’s libertarian impulses spill over into its literary production, and especially the drama. However, in her 1821 essay on ‘Patriotic Effusions of the Italian Poets’, Hemans concludes despondently that ‘It is not, perhaps, now, the time to plead the cause of Italy’.34 For the celebratory tone of the texts included in the essay are in contrast with the fact that, after the defeat of the Italian revolutions of 1820-21, the cause of Italian liberty seemed to have been lost forever. Despite such setbacks, interest in contemporary Italian drama continued unabated. Between 1825 and 1828 the dramatic productions of the Italians and their cultural-ideological implications were addressed by Mary Margaret Busk in her series of ‘Horae Italicae’ for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, modelled on the successful ‘Horae Germanicae’ started by the same periodical in 1817. Appearing in a conservative publication, Busk’s essays conform to its general ideological orientation. The ‘Horae Italicae’ invite readers to while away their time in the literary and cultural tradition of Italy but, in fact, show little sympathy for this country, its recent cultural achievements and, especially, its fight for independence. 31 32 33 34

Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, 8 (June 1821), p. 515. Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, 7 (December 1820), p. 513. Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, 8 (February 1821), pp. 123, 131. Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, 8 (June 1821), p. 513.

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Published between the middle and the end of the decade, the essays reflect the decrease in general support for the failed Italian revolutionary movements, as well as for the Spanish Constitutional monarchy of 1820-23 brought to an end by the intervention of a French army, the ‘Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis’, led by the Duke of Angoulême and sanctioned by the Holy Alliance. More specifically, Busk’s less than sympathetic attitude is also an inversion of her own previous enthusiasm for the ‘liberal’ causes of Southern Europe. In some of her poems, composed in the early 1820s and published collectively in her 1837 volume of Plays and Poems, Italy, Spain, and Greece are important, politically relevant places, while the celebration of constitutionally sanctioned liberty is a major issue. In particular, the collection presents a series of compositions on Italian themes that testify to her familiarity with Italian literature, such as a long poem about the Mantuan troubadour Sordello (anticipating Robert Browning’s homonymous verse narrative of 1840) and the poem ‘Spanish Revenge’, inspired by an episode drawn from Matteo Bandello’s sixteenth-century novelle. In addition, Busk’s poems address the Greek insurrection against the Turks, and make references to the Duke of Angoulême’s suppression of the Spanish Constitutional monarchy in ‘Waterloo’ (written in 1823 after a visit to the battlefield). Finally, her ‘Irregular Ode to Liberty on the Failure of the Spanish and Italian insurrections’ is a hymn to liberty from foreign oppression celebrating Greece as the only Southern European country that continues the fight against tyranny.35 If these early poems celebrate principles of liberty and national self-definition, they are also declarations of defeat. The two sentiments are finely balanced, and, in spite of the Italian and Spanish failures, British hopes can be still be pinned on the Greek revolutionary effort. Yet, in Busk’s later essays on Italian drama this early combination of enthusiasm and disillusionment has significantly mutated into a rejection of the possibility of Italy’s resurgence. The opening of the first essay immediately clarifies that the author is seeking to improve her readers’ knowledge of Italian drama, whilst informing and pre-empting their interpretive approach. The English public, Busk begins, mostly associate Italian theatre with the opera: ‘To the English reader, the words, Italian Theatre, convey no idea except of the Opera, such as we are accustomed to behold it in the Hay-Market, adorned with all the splendour of spectacle, but disgracing, if not marring, by its absurdities, the beautiful music of which it serves as the vehicle’.36 This predominance of the operatic mode indicates the supremacy of ‘irregular’ and ‘illegitimate’ forms in contemporary Italian theatrical culture, an observation which Busk expands further in expressly political terms: […] the Opera is a later offspring of the Ausonian Muse, the child of her declining age, brought forth when fair Italy had lost, amidst the enervating luxury ever attendant upon wealth, and more especially and perniciously upon commercial wealth, the hardihood, the energetic love of liberty and independence, which, if they deluged her bosom with native blood, converting her cities into collections of fortresses, and her streets into battle-fields, yet raised her to a proudly exalted station during the darkness of the middle ages, and, in all likePlays and Poems by Mrs William Busk, 2 vols (London: Thomas Hookham, 1837). The list of subscribers to this volume features, among others, the names of Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes, John Gibson Lockhart, Mrs Robert Malthus, Samuel Rogers (for 10 copies), and Sydney Smith and his wife. Besides the verse, the volume also contains two tragedies and a comedy. 36 Blackwood’s Magazine, 18 (November 1825), p. 545. 35

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lihood, accelerated her career towards that very prosperity, which has unfilially destroyed its parent, and, combining with other causes into which it is not our present business to inquire, has sunk the seat of Roman 37 patriotism, Roman valour, and Roman empire, into its actual state of helpless and degraded slavery.

The damning comparison with the Romans harks back to Milman’s review of 1821. Disclosing Busk’s conservative approach to Italian belles lettres, these opening remarks effect an unimpeded transition from a discussion of the opera and its associations with a consumer culture of effete aristocratic luxury, to the degraded socio-political condition of Italy. Indeed, the author observes that it is difficult to resist the temptation of ‘wandering from the theatre into the dark mazes of political speculation’,38 and the ‘Horae Italicae’ regularly provide ideologically charged interpretations of Italian drama and theatrical life. Busk purposefully avoids the works of Alfieri, as they are widely available, familiar to the public, and have been the object of extensive critical discussion. Instead, in the first essay (November 1825) she chooses to introduce Ippolito Pindemonte and his tragedy Arminio (1804). Pindemonte is presented as a follower of Alfieri and his play as an essentially neoclassical text. The critic, however, disapproves of its rigid structure and finds fault with ‘the species of tragedy which he desires either to introduce or to revive’, especially the use of the chorus and the strict adherence to that ‘undramatic law, which banishes action from the stage’.39 But Busk’s aesthetic strictures and examination of the play’s structure soon lead to an ideological interpretation. For, despite previous caveats, her discourse strays from the literary to the political, and concludes with an analysis of the similarity between Arminio and Bonaparte, historic figures hailed as liberators and promoters of patriotic independence before becoming ambitious despots blinded by power.40 Similarly, Busk’s essay on Monti and Aristodemo (February 1826) begins with strictly critical and dramaturgic observations, and yet, towards the end, opens up to more decidedly ideological questions. Respectful of an already established canon, Busk defines Monti as one of the leading voices in contemporary Italian literature; but, equally desirous to revise canonical structures, she also queries the fact that an ‘Italian critic, of no ordinary abilities and acquirements’ has recently called this tragedy ‘the masterpiece, not only of the Italian, but of the universal European modern theatre’.41 In particular, she finds the aesthetic features of Aristodemo difficult to accommodate because of the horror inspired by the play, an ‘ultra-atrocity’ which is typical (and not just in the present) of Italian tragedy, and that may be linked to a curious inversion of the more recent expressions of the soft and effeminate Italian national character: ‘a sort of volcanic eruption of a naturally blood-thirsty disposition, previously restrained, upon the stage at least, by the arbitrary laws of dramatic decorum, and of the scenic fitness of things’.42 Nevertheless, it is in its conclusions that the essay takes Monti more drastically to task on political and ideological grounds. His play is accused of providing an entirely dismissive portrait of monarchic power, because no character in the play suggests ‘as a topic of conso37 38 39 40 41 42

Blackwood’s Magazine, 18 (November 1825), p. 545. Blackwood’s Magazine, 18 (November 1825), p. 545. Blackwood’s Magazine, 18 (November 1825), p. 556. Blackwood’s Magazine, 18 (November 1825), p. 546. Blackwood’s Magazine, 19 (February 1826), p. 173. Blackwood’s Magazine, 19 (February 1826), p. 177.

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lation to the grieving monarch [Aristodemus], the good use he has made of his royal authority, however nefariously acquired’.43 Conscious of Monti’s chequered political development and ideological affiliations, the critic detects something politically suspect in his refusal to extol ‘the enjoyments of sovereignty’. As she explains: ‘Through the whole play, the pomp and exaltation of royalty seem to be the principal, if not the only ideas connected with the kingly office, or, to speak more in the spirit of the work we are reviewing, with the kingly title’.44 However, when it comes to clarifying ‘the spirit of the work’, Busk decides not to invoke Monti’s famous chameleon-like political adaptability, but rather concedes that this lack of enthusiasm for the monarchic role ‘must be ascribed rather to the moral and political mal aria of the fair, but degraded land, where our poet’s “young idea” first learned “to shoot”, than to any vulgar or jacobinical prejudices appertaining more idiosyncratically to il Cavaliere Vincenzo Monti’.45 In other words, the play’s ‘jacobinical’ and anti-monarchic overtones cannot be imputed to authorial intention and ideology, as, by contrast, they belong to the play’s original cultural context. The image of turn-of-the-century Italy emerging from this judgement – and perhaps partly against Busk’s intentions – is that of a hotbed of pervasive sedition and dissidence. The next instalment in Busk’s ‘Horae Italicae’, published in August 1826, presented Alessandro Manzoni’s Adelchi (published in 1822), and here the concatenation of the aesthetic and the ideological is fully visible in the midst of a generally dismissive attitude towards contemporary Italy. The opening of Busk’s essay invokes the language and images of the discourse of the ‘condition of England question’ and the wide panorama of contemporary afflictions such as the financial and social upheavals caused by the 1826 crash, partypolitical diatribes or parliamentary debates on Emancipation. Britain is collectively preoccupied with grave and pressing issues such as ‘the present commercial distress’, ‘the late agricultural distress’, the ‘corn laws’, the ‘currency’, and ‘the banking system’.46 By contrast, Italy is solely concerned with the literary querelle between Classics and Romantics: Italy is divided, not into Whigs and Tories, Catholic Emancipators, and anti-Catholics, &c., but into Classicisti and Romanticisti; the latter glowing with all the inconsiderate, hand-over-head impetuosity of reformers; the former exhibiting all the irritability […] which occasionally marks the advocates of ‘things as they are’, and of 47 ‘the wisdom of our ancestors’.

The serious issues debated in Britain contrast with the trifles dominating the Carnivallike atmosphere of Italy, a land of fiction as inconsistent and frivolous as the theatre in

43 44 45 46 47

Blackwood’s Magazine, 19 (February 1826), p. 183. Blackwood’s Magazine, 19 (February 1826), p. 183. Blackwood’s Magazine, 19 (February 1826), p. 183. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 164. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 164. This judgement obviously rehearses Ugo Foscolo’s dismissal of the Romantics-Classics debate in Italy as an ‘idle enquiry’ in his Essay on the Present Literature of Italy published as an appendix to John Cam Hobhouse’s Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (1818). See Nick Havely, ‘“This Infernal Essay”. English Contexts for Foscolo’s Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’, in Immaginando l’Italia: Itinerari letterari del Romanticismo inglese/Imagining Italy: Literary Itineraries in British Romanticism, ed. by Lilla M. Crisafulli (Bologna: Clueb, 2002), p. 235.

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comparison with the weighty concerns of the British present.48 In this context, the ideological equation between Romantics and ‘reformers’, on the one hand, and Classics and ‘conservatives’, on the other, is not intended in its actual, albeit simplifying, political relevance to the Italian situation. Instead, it transforms Italian politics into theatre, even as it offers an interesting introduction to Manzoni’s dramatic works, which, as in the example of Adelchi, Busk praises as a talented and outstanding contribution to the Romantics’ cause. She provides evidence of his sound literary practice by summarizing the main ideas in the ‘Lettre à M. Chauvet’ (composed in 1819-20) and includes a translation of those passages that specify the importance of a faithful representation of the ‘historical causes of an action’, as these ‘possess in the highest degree that character of poetic truth which is required in tragedy’.49 Busk’s assessment is, in principle, appreciative, and Manzoni is portrayed as an important and innovative voice in recent Italian drama: ‘what he has done is executed with a vigour, a freshness, a spirit, and a dramatic individuality, unexampled in their combination, we believe, in the Italian theatre’.50 Nonetheless, political preoccupations re-emerge, as the critic interestingly finds fault with Manzoni’s use of political allusion. Busk highlights his critique of other authors’ habits of ‘holding up Charlemagne as a prototype of Buonaparte’, and then charges Adelchi with incurring the same fallacy: ‘The Frank Conqueror’s perfect disregard of all moral obstacles that might impede his purposes, combined with his respect for religion and virtue when not thus inconvenient, and his ready magnanimity, when magnanimity is become innoxious, are to our minds features of strong resemblance with the worst characteristics of his Corsican successor’.51 Once more, an examination of the shortcomings in the play’s structure and contents mutates into a renewed assertion of the critic’s lack of sympathy for the Italians’ plight. In particular, Busk points out the structural superfluity of the chorus at the end of the third act with its evocation of ‘the feelings of the enslaved Italians, or Latins, as they were then usually denominated, upon the defeat of their Lombard tyrants’.52 Although beautiful, and in keeping with the tone of her early verse on Italian liberty, this passage is deemed to be out of place, ‘unless it be either to spare the author the labour of devising a dramatic mode of exhibiting the conditions and feelings of the Italians – which, assuredly, a play of this nature ought to do – or to indulge his fancy with a burst of lofty poetry’.53 Busk’s disclosure and critique of the political content of the play goes even further, as, in her final paragraphs, she criticizes Manzoni’s characterization of Adelchis as a hero who, nevertheless, is always presented as a defeated character and whose military prowess is never actually demonstrated. By the same token, Busk cannot find any satisfactory explanation for the fact that Charlemagne is so consistently described as a victorious warrior devoid of all weaknesses. This cannot be easily accounted for in view of Manzoni’s principle of historical accuracy set out in the ‘Lettre à M. Chauvet’. The only explanation suggested by 48

49 50 51 52 53

This was something which even the supporters of Italy’s cause could not avoid observing, as is the case in Byron’s Beppo (1818). See my essay ‘“I Recur from Fiction to Truth”. Beppo e il mondo carnevalizzato’, Textus: English Studies in Italy, 7 (1994), pp. 113-32. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 164. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 165. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 169. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 172. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 172.

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Busk is, once again, a political and ideological one, for she accuses Manzoni of a kind of hypothetical, belated Bonapartism: ‘We could almost suspect that those who have grown up in a sort of imaginary participation in Buonaparte’s triumphs, have thereby so inseparably associated every species of admiration, every notion of greatness and excellence, with military prowess and success, that they cannot connect the idea of guilt with any action of a conqueror’s’.54 This would explain why the play does not depict Charlemagne as ‘insecure upon his new throne, suspecting, and suspected by, the Lombard traitors, and incessantly dreading the talents, the valour, and the popularity of the lawful sovereign’.55 The fact remains, however, that the play presents a ‘want of poetical justice’56 which is once more connected with political-historical reasons and not just with the generic demands of history and tragedy theorized by Manzoni. If, as seen above, Charlemagne is Bonaparte (the unlawful new sovereign, the usurper), he should have been represented as fearful of Adelchis’ power, who, in a faithful reconstruction of history, should have found refuge at the court of Constantinople. Busk laments the heroic depiction of the Charlemagne-Bonaparte figure and the fact that Manzoni seems to have ‘grown up in a sort of imaginary participation in Buonaparte’s triumphs’. If this is not the reason for the incorrect characterization of the protagonist, then the only other possible explanation is that the author’s ‘cranium [is] most peculiarly deficient in the organ of justice-lovingness’.57 Similar praise and similar strictures were addressed at Manzoni in the first issue of the Foreign Quarterly Review (July 1827) in an essay by the Scottish poet David Moir. Here the Milanese Romantic was also hailed as the new voice of Italian drama and pronounced to be capable of far superior dramatic efforts than his recently published ones: ‘we have the fullest confidence that he may yet give to Italy a drama far surpassing the Carmagnuola or the Adelchis’.58 His dramatic theory is applauded, but the actual plays are subjected to a severe critique. Carmagnola is built on poor incidents, while its dialogue is poetical and ‘diffuse’ rather than terse and concise, as befits the drama. As for Adelchi, Moir agrees with Busk, judges the plot obscure and the characterization of the eponymous hero and Charlemagne excessively one-sided, and laments the lack of poetical justice in the catastrophe. Like Busk, Moir also notices that Manzoni’s self-professed respect for historical facts does not prevent him from radically transforming history in the conclusion to his tragedy. Finally, Moir criticizes Manzoni for missing the dramatic opportunity of depicting the Italians’ involvement in the momentous dynastic and political transformations evoked in the play: ‘The Italians, mere witnesses of the impending struggle on which their destiny is to depend, never appear at all; and their silence, their inaction, their exclusion from all participation in the plans of the contending parties, develop more strongly than words their dependence and debasement’.59 Never clearly expressed, the reviewer’s lack of sympathy for the Italians’ condition is obliquely present in these words.

54 55 56 57 58 59

Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 179. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 179. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 179. Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 179. Foreign Quarterly Review, 1 (July 1827), p. 168. Foreign Quarterly Review, 1 (July 1827), p. 168.

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Other early 1830s essays in the Foreign Quarterly Review seem to bear out this generally unsympathetic attitude. In October 1833, Moir published a piece on Silvio Pellico’s works which criticized the incongruous reiteration of patriotic themes. Thus, in Pellico’s plays, the characters’ ‘talk is of liberty, the renown of Italy, the good of the state […] in short, the very last themes which we have reason to believe constituted the actual interests or standing topics of conversation of those fierce periods of individual ambition and private selfishness’.60 If political freedom and civic virtues are not valid themes for drama, Moir also reduces the literary relevance and resonance of the writer: ‘we may not indeed be disposed to welcome them with so much enthusiasm as his countrymen, to whom the character and fame of the author, and the allusions and scope of the dramas themselves, furnish additional grounds of interest and sympathy’.61 After an analysis of Pellico’s latest tragedy, Gismonda da Mendrisio (1833), Moir dismissively concludes: ‘We can hardly conceive that a tragedy such as this would excite any very lively interest on the British stage’.62 Italian drama of the politically relevant kind seems to be of interest only to Italians, whose aesthetic judgement is generally flawed by partiality and partisanship. David Moir’s and Mary Busk’s critical observations do not constitute ‘great’ criticism. And yet, they are crucial documents because, published in widely-read and influential magazines, they are an index to what mattered to British readers in their approach to Italian literature and drama. As the theatre was seen as a historically, socially, and politically conditioned dimension, their critical discussions invariably reverted to the figure of Bonaparte and ideas of legal monarchy, kingship and good sovereignty, sedition, and jacobinism. Their reviews betray a clear dislike for the Italians and their futile attempts at revolution and independence. Busk’s opinion on the latter question is unmistakable: Italy is ‘enslaved […] chiefly because she deserves no better fate’.63 Hemans’s and Morgan’s hopeful attitudes are reversed, and the essays from the mid- to late 1820s make plain that, in the later Romantic period, Italian drama seemed to be no longer interesting per se. The last of Busk’s ‘Horae Italicae’ (November 1827) deals with Ugo Foscolo’s Ricciarda, another violent tragedy in the Italian style, published in Britain and yet unpopular with the British reading public. In this case Busk limits herself to a very traditional act-by-act examination, more concerned with a reconstruction of the plot than any actual interpretation of the text. The critical fortunes of Italian drama in Romantic-period Britain seem to follow closely the ebb and flow of British interest in Italian politics. A significant peak is reached in the 1820s, when revolutionary activity brings Tory, Whig, and proto-liberal periodicals to devote a large amount of attention to Italy. Interest begins to wane in the late 1820s and early 1830s when, as C. P. Brand asserts, sympathy for the Italian cause was decreasing and critical interest in German literature seemed to become preponderant in periodical publica-

Foreign Quarterly Review, 12 (October 1833), p. 399. On Pellico’s fame in British culture, and especially the resonance of Le mie prigioni, see C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, pp. 129-30. For comparative critical studies on Pellico, see Alfonso Sammut, Bibliography of Anglo-Italian Comparative Literary Criticism 1800-1990, ed. by Peter Vassallo and Franco Lanza (Malta: University of Malta, 1997), p. 292. 61 Foreign Quarterly Review, 12 (October 1833), p. 400. 62 Foreign Quarterly Review, 12 (October 1833), p. 410. 63 Blackwood’s Magazine, 20 (August 1826), p. 164. 60

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tions.64 It is equally true, however, that not all discussions of Italian drama led to dismissive comments on Italy and its state of political subjection. If, as Brand asserts, ‘the general state of opinion on modern Italian literature was by the 1830’s undoubtedly low’ and ‘almost every important work reviewed in the periodical press met with some sharp, adverse criticism’,65 at the same time, the 1830s witnessed a resurgence of interest in Italy that corresponded to the gradual development of Victorian intellectual support for the Risorgimento. The early 1820s were a time of enthusiasm averse to negative comments, and support for Italy was easily voiced from a variety of more or less informed ideological standpoints. By contrast, in the late 1820s and 1830s positive judgements coexisted with strictures such as Busk’s direct and Moir’s indirect condemnations. Therefore, even in this later, more disenchanted period, it was still possible to come across appreciative views of the state of contemporary Italian letters, as for instance in André Vieusseux’s essay on ‘Italian Literature of the Eighteenth Century’ published in the Foreign Quarterly Review for 1828: There is now in that country a new literary generation, not numerous, but select; fresh and vigorous, and we believe honest. Their prospects are at present doubtful, their pretensions not well defined, but their powers begin to make themselves felt. Italy follows, though slowly, the system of the other great European nations; but she follows, revolving in an orbit of her own, which is prescribed by laws, moral and political, peculiar to 66 her.

The essay celebrates a new generation of writers whose works demonstrate the effective resurgence of Italy in the artistic field and her realignment with the progress of civilization in Europe. A similar kind of assessment emerges in a review of the Opere varie del Cavaliere Vincenzo Monti (Milan 1828) published in Fraser’s Magazine in November 1832. An overview of Monti’s output, this essay also delineates an overview of Italian literature and its appreciation in Britain. Monti’s tragedies are quickly dispatched as they cannot stand up to Alfieri’s, by now the recognized protagonist in recent Italian dramaturgy: Caius Gracchus ‘is a copy of the French scene’; Galeotto Manfredi is ‘a cold and inanimate failure’; and Aristodemo – for which the reader is referred to the English version by Frances Burney, the novelist’s niece – is ‘entirely upon the French model; and […] is scarcely worth the place assigned it by his countrymen in their literature’.67 Nevertheless, contemporary Italian belles lettres are not completely dismissed on the basis of Monti’s inadequacies, for they boast an impressive cohort of authors among whom are ‘Cesarotti, Parini, Alfieri […] Foscolo, Pindemonte, Manzoni, Niccolini, &c.’; it is a literature ‘softened down by the mournful remembrance of their ancient greatness, and consoled by the hope of making the future more prosperous, by conspiring together with noble and masculine sense’, which presents

The ‘Horae Germanicae’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, with essays by John G. Lockhart, R. P. Gillies, Sarah Austin and Thomas De Quincey, were published between 1817 and 1828. However, other essays on German literature appeared both before and after the latter date in the same periodical. From 1815 to 1830, further critical essays on German authors appeared in the Foreign Quarterly Review and the European Magazine where a series of essays on German drama begins in the issue for June 1825 (vol. 89). See V. Stockley, German Literature as Known in England 1750-1830 (London: Routledge, 1929), pp. 191-93. 65 C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics, p. 130. 66 Foreign Quarterly Review, 2 (June 1828), p. 661. 67 Fraser’s Magazine, 6 (November 1832), p. 398. 64

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signs of a ‘mind, more solid and austere’.68 The conclusion expatiates in confident and hopeful tones on the future of the political and cultural situation of Italy: A powerful spur has already been given to the new romantic literature by the Germans and other writers; and we look forward with hope to the dawn of a new day, when another Rienzi shall shout the thrilling paean of liberty to the sons of Romulus, a happier Dante restore the good estate of Florence, and the winged genius of 69 romance, flowing on and filling all things with melody, shall once more hover over his own beautiful land.

The theatre, and contemporary theatre and drama in particular, become controversial terrains where the cultural and political identity of Italy are debated. Writing about the theatre and Italy is thus a politically conditioned fact, and not just a question of ‘pure’ scholarship and historical-aesthetic evaluation as in Joseph Cooper Walker’s volumes. Discussions of Italian drama in late Romantic-period Britain provide a virtual forum for commentaries on internal politics in which the emergence of liberal discourse contends with a varied, ideologically conservative landscape. The intercultural links between Italy and Britain also become politically and ideologically relevant connections. And the essay ends with a conscious rewriting of Percy Shelley’s declaration, in the preface to Hellas (1822), ‘We are all Greeks’, and a final reassertion of the inextricable intercultural ties between Britain and Italy that becomes a plea for the Risorgimento: ‘We are all Italians – our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Italy – and, but for her, we might still have remained the same painted savages which Julius Caesar found us. It is time for Europe to arise and assert her liberties’.70

68 69 70

Fraser’s Magazine, 6 (November 1832), p. 401. Fraser’s Magazine, 6 (November 1832), p. 402. Fraser’s Magazine, 6 (November 1832), p. 402. See Shelley’s ‘We are all Greeks – our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece’. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poems and Prose, selected by George E. Donaldson, ed. by Timothy Webb (London: Dent, 1995), p. 298.

Caroline Franklin (University of Wales, Swansea)

Cosmopolitanism and Catholic Culture: Byron, Italian Poetry, and The Liberal

This essay focuses on the ideological context of the interest in Italian literature of the Byron-Shelley-Hunt circle. These second-generation British Romantics, like earlier Italophiles such as the Della Cruscans and later expatriates such as the Brownings, tried to inspire nationalist feeling in, and on behalf of, their adopted homeland. But their struggle for the authority to re-present Italy was also directed towards rival literary coteries back home. Byron’s poetry in the years of fame had been produced from the Murray circle which published the Quarterly Review. This coterie reprised that of the Antijacobin Review which, in the 1790s, had satirized liberal writers, particularly William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as the Della Cruscans. Some members of the Quarterly set were Anti-Jacobin veterans, for example William Gifford, John Hookham Frere, and George Canning. Post 1815, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Leigh Hunt consciously re-instituted the Godwin ‘Jacobin’ circle. In proclaiming the genius of Dante, the group saw the medieval exiled poet as a Promethean hero who opposed the absolutism produced by secular and religious power combined. They created a cosmopolitan canon of writers who championed liberty to rival the way Gifford and Coleridge were moulding Shakespeare and British Renaissance dramatists into patriotic icons of ‘merrie England’. In addition, by adopting Italian burlesque poetry as a model, Byron was attempting to wrest from pioneering anti-Jacobin wits Frere and William Stewart Rose the weapon of satirical comedy and use it for what he saw as its original purpose: sceptical questioning of the authority of the church and moral absolutism. Thomas Carlyle would later drily comment that he was setting up as a latter-day Voltaire. Eventually, the launch of The Liberal by the Byron-Shelley-Hunt circle was an overt attempt to link their authoritativeness on Italy and Italian literature with radical political views disseminated to a British audience and, specifically, their support for the renewed campaign for religious toleration.

Increased fascination with Italy was arguably an index of the growth of British Romanticism. For the second generation, led by Lord Byron, Italy assumed paramount importance.1 Dry classicism was replaced by experience of the country itself after 1815, when travel was possible again after the Napoleonic wars. Byron and Shelley channelled their political idealism into Italian nationalism, focusing on the political irony that Italy, cradle of republicanism in the classical and medieval past, was now mostly under the heel of Austrian dynastic or monarchical administrations. They deeply resented their own British government’s complicity with the Congress system, operated by Metternich, which actively prevented any liberalization whatsoever of these absolutist regimes. For example, Viscount Castlereagh had withdrawn British support for the constitutional experiment in Sicily as soon as Napoleon was defeated in 1814, and when the constitutional governments set up after the revolutions of 1820-21 in Piedmont and Naples were dismantled by the great powers he made no 1

For a detailed consideration of the Italian influence on Byron, see Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1984).

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objection.2 Italy offered a European stage for these aristocratic yet liberal poets, whose Whig party at home had been out of power for almost all their lifetimes and whose class was in the process of losing power to the mercantile classes, themselves at the mercy of lower-class agitation for reform. Not only did these poets make Italian history and landscape their subject-matter, but they devoured Italian literature: imitating, adapting, and translating the poetry into English.3 One could adapt Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism to this cultural appropriation. The British poets constructed a Romantic myth of Southern primitive, irrational present-day Italy in paradoxical contrast with its historical role as source of European culture. Joseph Luzzi suggests that Shelley portrayed Italy as a ‘museum-going-on-mausoleum’ and showed little interest in its contemporary life.4 Byron, though he too perpetuated the primitivist myth, revelled in, rather than condemned, what he saw as the exotic, the sensual, even the barbaric in present-day Italian mores. Nabob-like, the expatriate poet took advantage of the poverty of his adopted country, acting as a sexual tourist in despoiled Venice. His boasting increased sales of his titillating verse tale Beppo back home. However, Byron and Shelley were enmeshed in a more complex cultural exchange than simple exploitation. Rather than alluding to the classics, which would endow their own verse with the reflected glory of Italy’s heritage, they were, after all, engaged in recuperating and translating medieval and early modern Italian poetry which was often not well known or highly regarded in Britain. They believed that re-establishing pride in her cultural traditions would foster patriotism in Italy itself. Though Byron is traditionally seen as a political Janus – revolutionary abroad and reactionary at home – this essay will show that his championing of past Italian poets also had ideological significance for his British readership. For, demonstrating that Italian Catholic poets had pioneered the values of liberty and individualism even before British Protestantism, legitimated Byron’s crusading humanism when attacking religious authoritarianism at home. His cosmopolitan attitude challenged the assumptions which underlay British Establishment opposition to the emancipation of Roman Catholics, based on familiar Enlightenment clichés that Catholic culture kept an ignorant priest-ridden populace in thrall to superstition, so that, if allowed political participation, the Irish, for example, would be easily manipulated by demagogues, and that, anyway they owed temporal allegiance to the Pope which compromised their loyalty to the nation. Peace brought renewed calls for reform in Britain, and so a reprise of the bitter 1790s ideological war between loyalists and cosmopolitan liberals. Byron found himself in the middle. The Quarterly Review was the journal of his own publisher, John Murray, and had secret links to the Tory government, for it had been set up in 1809 at the instigation of Pittite George Canning to combat criticism of the Peninsular campaign by the Whig Edin-

2 3

4

On the historical background, see Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento 1789-1870 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 175-79. See Roderick Marshall, Italy in English Literature 1755-1815: Origins of the Romantic Interest in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934) pp. 365-91, C.P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), and Kenneth Churchill, Italy and English Literature 1767-1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 30-49. Joseph Luzzi, ‘Italy without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth,’ Modern Language Notes, 117 (2002), 48-83.

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burgh Review. At this time, Byron had published a popular satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, against the Edinburgh Review, in revenge for its scornful review of his Hours of Idleness, and then adopted Murray as his publisher. The editor of the Quarterly Review thus became the in-house adviser on the publishing of Byron’s poetry. He was the brutal satirist William Gifford, scourge of the first wave of Italophile liberals, the Della Cruscans, and former editor of the Anti-Jacobin. This latter periodical, supported by the government from 1797-98, had been founded to destroy the nonconformist Analytical Review, which had supported the campaign for the repeal of the Test Acts on behalf of both Dissenters and Catholics. Pitt and Canning particularly feared the Analytical’s support for the United Irishmen, and its reviewing of Arthur O’Connor’s State of Ireland in September 1798.5 The Quarterly now reprised the Anti-Jacobin agenda, for its acerbic chief reviewer, John Wilson Croker, was an Anglo-Irish Tory who notoriously vilified Lady Morgan because of her support for the Catholic cause. The main literary target of the Quarterly and the livelier Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, however, became the group they saw as the successors to the radical Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle of Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review. This was the coterie surrounding leading radical journalist and Italophile poet Leigh Hunt – which included William Hazlitt, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – seen as freethinking, libertine advocates of paganism. Any poetry which was not religious, moral, instructional, and preferably patriotic was condemned not only by the Quarterly but by many of the periodicals of the day, several of which were religious and/or sectarian.6 ‘How can so contemptible a being as the editor of the Examiner newspaper, presume to talk of poetical capabilities when the germ of all true poetry is religion and patriotism?’ demanded a reviewer of Hunt’s poetry in 1818. That same year Parliament voted £ 1,000,000 for the building of churches.7 For some time, Byron’s position was equivocal as he was the best Romantic horse (or milch-cow) in John Murray’s stable. In spite of his Whig politics, Byron continued to consult William Gifford and the dilettante Tory wits of the former Anti-Jacobin who ran the Quarterly, such as John Hookham Frere and George Canning. Party politics were fluid, shifting interest groupings at that time, and the followers of Canning were not ‘Ultras’. For example, Canning had been prepared to countenance Catholic emancipation for pragmatic reasons. And, on their part, when the flagellants of the Quarterly Review or the young fogeys of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review laid into Leigh Hunt’s ‘Cockney School’, Byron was treated more respectfully – because of his title and also his association with Murray. But there were tensions and rivalries, particularly over the appropriation of Italian literature by right and left.

5 6

7

Andrea A. Engstrom, ‘Joseph Johnson’s Circle and the Analytical Review: A Study of English Radicals in the Eighteenth Century’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southern California, August 1986, p. 182. See William S. Ward, ‘Some Aspects of the Conservative Attitude towards Poetry in English Criticism, 17981820’, PMLA, 60 (1945), 386-98. Ward names five reviews founded under the patronage of the Church, and estimates that the titles of at least fifty more indicate a specifically Christian outlook (p. 390). The New Monthly Magazine, 10 (September 1818), p. 162. Quoted by Ward, who also gives the information on the building of churches that year (‘Some Aspects of the Conservative Attitude towards Poetry in English Criticism, 1798-1820’, p. 389).

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British scholarly interest in the Italian burlesque tradition is usually assumed to have been an ideologically neutral concern with genre. In fact, Luigi Pulci was extremely contentious because of his incongruous juxtaposition of romance with anticlerical sceptical irony. John Herman Merivale’s Orlando in Roncesvalles, a poem in five cantos (published by John Murray in 1814) attempted to redeem Pulci from the prevailing British view that he was merely a buffoon.8 Merivale was an earnest Presbyterian and he had collaborated with Byron’s clergyman friend Francis Hodgson in a book of classical translations praised in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. His idea was to purge Pulci’s poem of its ‘low buffoonery or the grossest profaneness’,9 and to present only the serious romance elements. This he did in a beautiful volume dedicated to Thomas Johnes of Hafod, printed on vellum and handsomely illustrated by Utterson. This book, praised at the time by Byron, anticipates the later Victorian representation of sanitized medieval epics, mythologizing the links between monarchy and Christianity in exquisite elitist art. Another pioneering Italianist from the Murray clique was John Hookham Frere, diplomat and close friend of George Canning. Frere’s career in the foreign office had ended in disgrace when he was blamed for the failure of Sir John Moore’s expedition during the Peninsular War. While Merivale had rendered Pulci solemn, Frere did the opposite in Whistlecraft (1817), where he focused on transplanting into English colloquial speech Pulci’s mockery of the heroic idiom, assuming the faux-naive voice of a rural harness-maker to tell the story of King Arthur.10 As Vassallo remarks, Frere concentrated ‘on the ludicrous encounter between Sir Tristram and the troublesome giants to the entire exclusion of the serious religious elements’, for he was at pains to avoid ‘Pulci’s rather controversial disquisition on the nature of God’s justice and mercy’.11 William Stewart Rose, a friend of Frere, was the third Italianist to introduce burlesque poetry to a British readership, entirely emasculated of its sceptical or satiric content. His verse adaptation of the eighteenth-century Giovan Battista Casti’s Animali Parlanti appeared anonymously in 1816, and was published by Murray in 1819.12 His preface announces proudly that he had ‘boil’d down three thick volumes to a quarter of one’ and ‘let go my author’s skirt wherever he has plung’d through filth and dirt’. Of Rose’s Orlando Furioso (John Murray, 1823-31), Samuel Rogers is said to have waspishly suggested that the Italian should be provided on the opposite page to enable the reader to understand the English! In his Thoughts and Recollections by One of the Last Century (John Murray, See Merivale’s notes to his Poems Original and Translated, 2 vols (London: William Pickering, 1838). Merivale had published articles on Pulci in the Monthly Magazine in 1806-07, and he also produced a translation of Dante which the Quarterly Review thought superior to that of Cary. His interest in Pulci was sparked by P. L. Ginguené’s Histoire littéraire d’Italie (1811-35) and also Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Romances (1805). 9 John Herman Merivale, Orlando in Roncesvalles, a poem in five cantos (London: John Murray, 1814), p. xvi. 10 The full title was The Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, of Stow-market, in Suffolk, Harness and Collar-Makers. Intended to Comprise the most interesting Particulars Relating to King Arthur and his Round Table. 11 Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence, p. 142. 12 On 25 March 1818 Byron wrote to Murray denying he had seen Rose’s Animali ‘till a few days ago’. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973-94), VI, p. 24. Henceforth cited in parenthesis as BLJ. 8

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1825), Rose betrays his resentment at the way Byron, while fully acknowledging the influence on him of Whistlecraft, had so easily upstaged the weak jeu d’esprit with his risqué Beppo (1818), even when anonymously published. It must have particularly rankled that it had been Rose himself who had presented Byron with a copy of his friend Frere’s poem in Venice in 1817. Thoughts and Recollections, which advocates the spread of Christianity to civilize India and the East, opens by remarking that, according to Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, the noble author remembered once being strongly impressed by a work in defence of Christianity: thus implying that even such hardened infidels as he are susceptible to conversion. It concludes by assuring the reader that Byron’s poetic influence will not last, because of his bad English, and asserting the superiority of Whistlecraft. This fear over the popularity of Beppo and Don Juan was generated by the fact that Byron had transplanted ottava rima burlesque out of the elitist preserve of antiquarians and scholars who could bowdlerize the humour or render it harmlessly quaint, into contemporary popular culture. Byron’s highly contentious juxtaposition of the sceptical and ribald with professions of moral orthodoxy was particularly relished by readers of the cheap editions produced for the working classes, and this mercurial burlesque style performed the same feat of evading censorship that had worked for Pulci. Byron had put Murray’s conservative scholars in the shade. Influenced by Casti’s Voltairean Novelle Galanti, Don Juan targeted the new religiosity of the British Establishment. The dedication mocked the ‘conversion’ of the Lake poets, former revolutionaries who were now using their pens to support the ‘Ultra’ Tory insistence on the inviolable sacred tie between the Anglican Church and the Kingdom.13 Southey went on to write The Book of the Church (1824) and Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826); Wordsworth published Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822); and Coleridge wrote On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830). Instead of writing as independent critics of government, they obeyed ‘The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh’ (CPW V, p. 6), whose hands, still bloodstained with ‘Erin’s gore’ (CPW V, p. 6) having crushed the Irish rebellion of 1798, had been ‘Cobbling at manacles for all mankind’ (CPW V, p. 7) at the Congress of Vienna. […] Italy! Thy late reviving Roman soul desponds Beneath the lie this state-thing breathed o’er thee; Thy clanking chain, and Erin’s yet green wounds, Have voices – tongues to cry aloud for me. (CPW V, p. 8)

The point about linking together Ireland and Italy was that religious chauvinism had been used to justify monarchical tyranny in both. Ireland’s Union of 1800 was not followed by Catholic emancipation because the King, the clergy, and many influential aristocrats feared it would be the first step leading to the disestablishment of the Anglican Church and the loss of the Protestant constitution. The ‘Holy Alliance’ of Russia, Austria, and Prussia (and

13

Dedication VI. 3, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-93), V, p. 5. From henceforth cited in parenthesis in the text as CPW.

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Britain) in 1815 portrayed imposing dynastic imperialist rule over most of Italy in language evoking the restoration of the crusaders’ Christendom, led by divinely-appointed kings. Shocked, Murray’s advisors led by Frere, asked Hobhouse to persuade Byron not to publish the poem. They felt he had ‘gone native’ and lost touch with the decorum expected in modern Britain. When the poet declared himself determined to go ahead, Murray only reluctantly published the first two instalments, omitting his firm’s name, in case he was prosecuted for obscenity or blasphemy. Though Byron, in the 1823 Advertisement to his translation of Pulci’s Morgante, referred inclusively to ‘a new style of poetry very lately sprung up in England’ based on Pulci and pioneered by Merivale and Frere, in fact the Quarterly dilettantes did not want their harmless cod-mediaevalism associated with Byron, whose libertine satire was immediately pirated by lower-class radicals. Murray also procrastinated for over a year before publishing Byron’s overtly political poem in terza rima, The Prophecy of Dante in April 1821, two months after the revolution in Ravenna, which it was meant to encourage, had failed.14 The reassessment of Dante was of course a principal feature of Romanticism. But here too we can discern a struggle over his appropriation between the first- and second-generation British Romantics. The rehabilitation of Dante was led by German idealist philosophers, whose ideas Coleridge disseminated in his lecture on Dante of 1818. Coleridge’s conservatism is evident in his portrayal of Dante as a sternly orthodox Christian poet who ‘philosophized the religion and christianized the philosophy of Italy’, but whose achievement was unfortunately marred by ‘a state of intense democratical partizanship’ in the network of free city republics in Northern Italy, ‘an afterbirth of eldest Greece’.15 But it was the Promethean Dante of Alfieri, now cast into Byronic mode, who would dominate amongst supporters of the Risorgimento, as Michael Caesar comments.16 Byron saw Dante as ‘[T]he poet of liberty. Persecution, exile, the dread of a foreign grave, could not shake his principles’.17 The Prophecy of Dante showed Byron

The poem was sent on 14 March 1820 (BLJ VII, p. 57). On 12 August Byron told Murray: ‘Italy’s primed & loaded – & many a finger itching for the trigger’ (BLJ VII, p. 115). On 17 he wrote again: ‘The time for the Dante would be now […] as Italy is on the Eve of great things’ (BLJ VII, p. 158). On 7 September he wrote excitedly: ‘Oh Jerusalem! Jerusalem! The Huns are on the Po – but if once they pass it on their march to Naples, all Italy will rise behind them – the Dogs – the Wolves – may they perish like the host of Sennacherib! If you want to publish the P. of D– you will never have a better time’ (BLJ VII, p. 172). On the 14 December, he complained: ‘You are losing (like a Goose) the best time for publishing the D. & the tragedy [Marino Faliero] – now is the moment for Italian subjects’ (BLJ VII, pp. 250-51). On 19 January 1821 he ordered: ‘Pray publish the D & the Pulci [translation]’ (BLJ VIII, p. 73). But when the poem was at last published, safely after the failed event, he wrote despairingly to Hoppner on 31 May 1821: ‘Alas what could Dante himself now prophesy about Italy?’ (BLJ VIII, p. 130). 15 Dante: The Critical Heritage 1314(?)-1870, ed. by Michael Caesar (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 441. 16 On Dante and the British Romantics, see Dante: The Critical Heritage; Dante in English Literature from Chaucer to Cary, ed. by Paget Toynbee, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1909); David Wallace, ‘Dante in English’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. by Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 237-58; Ralph Pite, The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Dante’s Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney, ed. by Nick Havely (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998). 17 Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. by Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 160. Byron continued: ‘He is certainly the most untranslatable of all poets. You may give the mean14

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consciously identifying with the ‘Bard of Hell’: they were both exiles and satiric scourges of their enemies.18 The Byronic Dante declaims bitterly to Florence: We can have but one country, and even yet Thou’rt mine – my bones shall be within thy breast, My soul within thy language […] (CPW IV, p. 222)

By recreating Dante as a Byronic hero, Byron conferred authority on his own republican ideals: Who toils for nations may be poor indeed But free; who sweats for monarchs is no more Than the gilt chamberlain, who, cloth’d and fee’d, 19 Stands sleek and slavish, bowing at his door. (CPW IV, p. 237)

Not only could Dante be raised from the dead to ventriloquize modern Italian patriotism, but his championing of the vernacular tongue and his insistence on the separation of imperial and papal power made him seem a proto-Protestant. Byron was by no means the first to interpret Dante this way. David Wallace notes that Dante’s opposition to Papal power had even earned him a quotation in Protestantism’s second favourite book, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), and Dante’s insistence on the separation of Papal and imperial powers proved useful to Milton.20 The imprisonment of Ugolino by Archbishop Ruggieri in Inferno XXXIII had also been utilized as material for Whig anticlericalism since the eighteenth century.21 Shelley left far behind the orthodox view of Dante as a stern moral judge or didactic Christian poet, portraying him (especially in the Paradiso) as a visionary idealist, a precursor of Renaissance enlightenment – ‘Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe’.22 Having been brought up a Scots Presbyterian Calvinist, Byron was less inspired by Dante’s Paradise, and more haunted by his Hell. He struggled with his revulsion against the doctrine of torture illustrated in The Divine Comedy, yet he contested Friedrich Schlegel’s

18

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ing; but the charm, the simplicity – the classical simplicity, – is lost. You might as well clothe a statue, as attempt to translate Dante. He is better, as an Italian said, “nudo che vestito”’. In his biography of Byron, his friend Thomas Moore compared Byron to Dante in their childhood loves, love of sport, unhappy marriages, contempt for the world’s opinion, and support for the nationalist cause. See extracts in Toynbee’s Dante in English Literature, II, pp. 24-27. See Valeria Tinkler-Villani, ‘Byron’s Vision of Dante’, in Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron and Eliot in the Year 88, ed. by C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’Haen (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990), 203-14. On The Prophecy of Dante, see also Beverly Taylor, ‘Byron’s Use of Dante in The Prophecy of Dante’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 28 (1979), 102-19, Chester H. Mills, ‘The Prophecy of Dante’, The Byron Journal, 8 (1980), 50-59; Drummond Bone, ‘Political Choices: The Prophecy of Dante and Werner’, in Byron: Poetry and Politics, ed. by E. Sturzl and J. Hogg (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Americanistik Universität Salzburg, 1981), 15265, Katherine Kernberger, ‘Poet and Persona: The Two Exiles in Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante’, in L’esilio romantico: forme di un confitto, ed. by Joseph Cheyne and Lilla Crisafulli Jones (Bari: Adriatica, 1990), pp. 231-43. See David Wallace, ‘Dante in English’, pp. 241-42 Nick Havely: Dante’s Modern Afterlife, pp. 2-3, summarizing Frances A. Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14 (1951), 92-117. Quoted from A Defence of Poetry, in Toynbee’s Dante in English Literature, II, p. 227.

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criticism of Dante’s want of gentle feelings, exclaiming: ‘[W]ho but Dante could have introduced any ‘gentleness’ at all into Hell?’ (BLJ VIII, p. 40). As Ralph Pite explains, Byron felt Dante exhibited a sympathy with human imperfections and a recognition of the humanity of the damned, which existed alongside and without modifying the rationale of his didactic intentions to illustrate orthodox theology.23 Dante obeys the letter, but unconsciously betrays the spirit, of divine judgement. The resulting incongruity could be read as irony by the modern sceptic, against the Christian grain. Empathy represents the humanist thread running through art which connects writers of the religious past with present-day sceptics. Byron was regarded with as much horror in the Papal states, where he was spied upon, as he was by the British Establishment. The Royal Commissioner of Volterra, too, nervously wrote to the Governor of Florence about The Prophecy of Dante: ‘To me it appears designed to augment popular agitation, already sufficiently aroused. Lord Byron makes Dante advocate democracy and the independence of Italy for the salvation and good of the country’.24 Byron’s earlier poetry had been promoted by Milanese Romantics: Pellegrino Rossi had published an Italian version of The Giaour, and Silvio Pellico translated Manfred in 1818.25 The defiant repudiation by both Byronic protagonists of the solace of the Christian religion appealed to the intellectuals spearheading the Risorgimento who wanted to repudiate the grip of the Catholic Church over Italy. However, the Catholic statesman and philosopher Vincenzo Gioberti would judge that Byron ‘was and is a curse to the whole of Europe, as long as his writings will survive, which teach blasphemy and corruption’.26 As Giorgio Melchiori comments, the sceptic poet’s role in Catholic Italy was far more tendentious than the part he went on to play in Greece, where he was reprising the Crusades in fighting a Muslim Empire. Byron was beyond the pale in literary London, too. By 1822 the break with Murray was inevitable. Byron’s The Vision of Judgment, the biblical play Heaven and Earth, and new cantos of Don Juan remained unpublished and unpublishable, except by a radical willing to risk gaol. So, with Leigh Hunt as editor, Byron launched his own periodical, originally in collaboration with Shelley.27 Byron had been introduced to Leigh Hunt by Thomas Moore in 1813, when he visited him in prison, where Hunt languished for two years after he had been prosecuted for libelling the Prince Regent in The Examiner. Hunt was spending his time reading through the fifty-six volumes of the Parnaso Italiano, and was already enthusing about Pulci’s attractive combination of a ‘religion of charity’ and the satire of Christian dogma.28 Byron commented in MS on Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1816) which was dedicated to him. Both Italophile poets associated literary cosmopolitanism with their progressive politics. The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South was to champion Italy’s cause and

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28

For a comparison of Schlegel and Byron’s views, see Ralph Pite, The Circle of Our Vision, pp. 199-202. See Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; London: John Murray, 1957), III, p. 949. Giorgio Melchiori, ‘The Influence of Byron’s Death on Italy’, The Byron Journal, 5 (1977), p. 68. Quoted in Giorgio Melchiori, ‘The Influence of Byron’s Death on Italy’. Marshall suggests that Byron was the instigator of the project, because of his difficulties with Murray, but Shelley actually acted to bring it about by persuading Leigh Hunt to join them in Italy. William H. Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt and The Liberal (Phildelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), p. 25. See Elizabeth French Boyd, Byron’s Don Juan: A Critical Study (New York: The Humanities Press, 1958), p. 50.

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simultaneously to campaign for religious toleration (including the emancipation of Roman Catholics) and further reform of the British constitution. The outcry in the most bigoted section of the Tory press even before it was launched demonstrates that an attack on orthodox religion and the Anglican church was expected from the author of Cain, shortly to be pronounced blasphemous in court; and the papers gloated over the death in a sailing accident of Byron’s intended collaborator, Percy Shelley, author of The Necessity of Atheism. The reason that the relevance to British politics of the Romantic interest in Italy has been overlooked is that modern critics have viewed it through too secular a lens. Every British government of the new century had been riven on the issue of the campaign for religious toleration: Pitt had resigned in 1801 when George III refused Catholic emancipation after the Union, and the ‘ministry of all the talents’ came apart over the question in 1807. Byron had made a speech in the House of Lords in support of Roman Catholic Claims in 1812, the year when the government was forced to adopt a position of neutrality, because the Tories were so hopelessly divided that a majority could not be achieved in the upper chamber.29 The Test and Corporation Act would eventually be repealed in 1828, and the Catholic Emancipation Act passed in 1829. But throughout the 1820s, the issue was bitterly contested. Some Tories supported emancipation for reasons of political expediency: to prevent a violent civil war in Ireland.30 Canning had been prominent amongst these, but in 1822 he exchanged office (becoming foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons) for compromise and yet another shelving of the question. Anti-Catholic ‘Ultras’ and even some high Whigs believed the 1688 revolution settlement was sacrosanct, and their undying opposition to emancipation reflected the anti-Catholic feeling of some sections of the British populace, such as the Methodists. They feared that disestablishment was on the horizon, that emancipation would destroy the unity of church and state, and that the whole basis of British nationalism and its colonial rule of Ireland would be destroyed. The most radical wing of the Whigs, however, believed in the principle of toleration as an aspect of natural rights. Byron and Leigh Hunt signalled that this was their position when they named their periodical, The Liberal: the first recorded example of the word being used in English as a noun. Though the Whig Irish poet Thomas Moore had helped raise Irish political consciousness through his Irish Melodies, he was too frightened by its radicalism to join The Liberal when Byron urged him (BLJ IX, p. 183, BLJ IX, p. 197). Yet the periodical included, through its cosmopolitan agenda, principles comparable to the liberal Catholicism the Irish poet had pioneered. According to Fergus O’Ferrall, Moore was the

See Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. by Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 28-42. For the historical background, I am indebted to Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy 1820-30 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985), and G.I.T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics 1820-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 30 For example, Rose in A Letter to Henry Hallam Esq on the conduct of the Catholic Priesthood During the late Elections in Ireland (London: John Murray, 1826) argues that ‘we should infinitely prefer having a Catholic population represented (if it is to be represented) by a Catholic gentry, – (for whose good conduct we should have security in their birth, fortune and education,) – to its being represented by the Protestant tools of a Catholic priesthood; who, to ingratiate themselves with those whom they have no natural connection, would necessarily become the blind instruments of their constitutents’ (p. 4). 29

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supreme purveyor of the notion that Catholic demands could be ‘put forward as expressions of liberal political theory rooted in the British Whig and constitutional tradition’.31 Hunt’s Preface to the first number of The Liberal repudiated charges that the intention of the periodical was to ‘cut up religion, morals and everything that is legitimate, a pretty carving’.32 He admitted the inevitable connection between ‘politics and all other subjects of interest’, but emphasized the literary nature of the new journal: ‘Italian Literature, in particular, will be a favourite subject with us’. Cosmopolitan literature was all part of Hunt’s agenda of demystifying loyalist ideology. The preface attacked the cynical use made by hypocritical ‘teachers of the honest and inexperienced part of our countrymen’ of hellfire authoritarian religion to frighten the working classes into quietism – through their Evangelical sermons, tracts and Sunday schools, and through control of print culture by censorship and the stranglehold of Church and King periodicals: If by religion they mean anything really worthy of divine or human beings; if by morals, they meant only true morals, justice and beneficence; if by everything legitimate, they meant but half of what their own laws and constitutions have provided against the impudent pretensions of the despotic, – then we should do our best to leave religion and morals where we found them, and shew their political good faith at least half as much respect as we do. But when we know, – and know too from our intimacy with various classes of people, – that there is not a greater set of hypocrites in the world than these pretended teachers of the honest and inexperienced part of our countrymen;– when we know that their religion, even when it is in earnest on any point (which is very seldom) means the most ridiculous and untenable notions of the DIVINE BEING, and in all other cases means nothing but the Bench of Bishops;– when we know that their morals consist for the most part in a secret and practical contempt of their own professions, and for the least and best part, of a few dull examples of something a little more honest, clapped in front to make a show and a screen, and weak enough to be made tools against all mankind;– and when we know, to crown all, that their ‘legitimacy’, as they call it, is the most unlawful of all lawless and impudent things, tending under pretence that the whole world are as corrupt and ignorant as themselves, to put it at the mercy of the most brute understandings among them, – men by their very education in these pretensions, rendered the least fit to sympathize with their fellow men, and as unhappy, after all, as the lowest of their slaves;– when we know all this, and see nine-tenths of all the intelligent men in the world alive to it, then indeed we are willing to accept the title of enemies to religion, morals and legitimacy, and hope to do our duty with all becoming profaness accordingly. God defend us from the piety of thinking him a monster! God defend us from the morality of slaves and turncoats, and from the legitimacy of 33 half a dozen old gentlemen, to whom, it seems, human nature is an estate in fee.

The number then opened with The Vision of Judgment, Byron’s masterly parody in ottava rima of the eulogy of the late king by Robert Southey. In the Preface to his Vision, Southey had characterized the Byron coterie as ‘men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations’ who hate ‘that revealed religion’ which ‘they are unable entirely to disbelieve’, and he dubbed them ‘the Satanic school’.34 Byron’s version, like Don Juan, offers us the life of a sinner (George III) in a tolerant satire which makes a particular point of suspending final judgement. This in spite of the fact that, on hearing that the king refused to grant Catholic emancipation, Saint Peter is made to rage ‘may I be damned myself’ before 31 32 33 34

Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 26. The Liberal; Verse and Prose from the South, 1 (1822), pp. v-vii. The Liberal, 1, p.vi. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself, 10 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, 1845), X, p. 205.

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such a ‘Guelph’ passes through the holy portals (CPW VI, p. 327). By pointing out that the House of Hanover was descended from the Guelphs, Byron was associating the British monarchy with the extirpation of liberty throughout Europe and throughout history. He was alluding to the account in J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italennes du moyen âge (1809-18) of the defeat by the Guelphs of the Ghibelline party, and the replacement of republicanism by despotism in thirteenth-century Italy. Despite the enumeration throughout the poem of all George III’s crimes against freedom, the poem stops short of pronouncing a verdict, and ends with the old imbecile slipping into heaven unnoticed: ‘God save the king!’ It is a large economy In God to save the like; but if he will Be saving, all the better; for not one am I Of those who think damnation better still: I hardly hope too of bettering future ill By circumscribing, with some slight restriction, The eternity of hell’s hot jurisdiction. I know this is unpopular; I know ’Tis blasphemous; I know one may be damned For hoping no one else may e’er be so; I know my catechism; I know we are cramm’d With the best doctrines till we quite o’erflow; I know that all save England’s church have shamm’d, And that the other twice two hundred churches And synagogues have made a damn’d bad purchase. God help us all! God help me too! I am, God knows, as helpless as the devil can wish, And not a whit more difficult to damn Than is to bring to land a late-hook’d fish, Or to the butcher to purvey the lamb; Not that I’m fit for such a noble dish As one day will be that immortal fry Of almost everybody born to die. (CPW VI, 316-17)

Byron’s genial toleration threw into dark relief the narrow sectarianism of Robert Southey, who, with characteristic arrogance, had actually imagined Byron’s own deathbed and eternal punishment in the preface to his own poem: The publication of a lascivious book [i.e. Don Juan] is one of the worst offences that can be committed against the well-being of society. It is a sin, to the consequences of which no limits can be assigned, and those consequences no after repentance in the writer can counteract. Whatever remorse of conscience he may feel when his hour comes (and come it must!) will be of no avail. The poignancy of a death-bed repentance cannot cancel one copy of the thousands which are sent abroad; and as long as it continues to be read, so long is he the 35 pandar of posterity, and so long is he heaping up guilt upon his soul in perpetual accumulation.

35

The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, X, p. 204. Several parodies and satires on Byron pictured him in hell. For example, [Edward Dacres Baynes], Childe Harold in The Shades. An Infernal Romaunt (London, 1819), [Francis Hodgson], Childe Harold’s Monitor (London, 1819), [Anon], Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to the Dead Sea, Death on the Pale Horse and other poems (London, 1818), [Anon], Gordon, A Tale: A Poetical Review of Byron (London, 1821).

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As Emrys Jones has elucidated, ‘Byron’s poem was in the neoclassical Lucianic tradition of dialogues with the dead’ developed to burlesque those who have abused their power – for example in Erasmus’s account of Pope Julius II barred at heaven’s gate by Saint Peter.36 He makes the important point that both Erasmus and Byron write from within Christianity to satirize abuses. The near-blasphemous edge of the satire derives from the concept of eternal damnation. It would lose its power if this was entirely discredited. By positioning himself and his scepticism within this cosmopolitan Christian literary tradition, Byron shows up the petty insularity of Anglican chauvinism. The Pulcian burlesque tradition allowed serious and grotesquely comic points of view to co-exist, so that quaint iconography or naive religious beliefs could be mocked but without relapsing into outright cynicism or the sacrilegious.37 Byron succeeded – for the publisher of the poem, John Hunt, was only prosecuted for libel of the king, not for blasphemy. From the ridiculous of the Vision Byron went to the sublime in his modern Miracle play Heaven and Earth, published in the second number of The Liberal. He set out to develop further what he considered Dante had unconsciously achieved in his treatment of eternal damnation – an ironic disjunction between a literal representation of the biblical text and the humanitarian perspective of the poet: Chorus of Mortals. Oh son of Noah! Mercy on thy kind! What! Wilt thou leave us all – all all behind? While safe amidst the elemental strife, Thou sitt’st within the guarded ark? A Mother [offering her infant to JAPHET]. Oh let this child embark! I brought him forth in woe, But thought it joy To see him to my bosom clinging so. Why was he born? What hath he done – My unwean’d son – 38 To move Jehovah’s wrath or scorn? (I. 3. 828-39, CPW VI, p. 378)

In Heaven and Earth the doctrines of original sin, of God ordaining the suffering of the innocent along with the guilty, of the predestination of the majority to damnation, are illustrated from biblical texts, taken literally, and exhibited to the reader in all their authoritarian cruelty. The play exemplifies what Michael Wheeler has termed ‘the apocalyptical sublime’: Dantesque visions of the end of the world which we find not only in the poetry of Byron, but, throughout the 1820s and 30s, in the paintings of John Martin and Edward Ath-

Emrys Jones, ‘Byron’s Visions of Judgment’, Modern Language Review, 76 (1981), 1-19. For a careful discussion of the Pulcian influences on The Vision, see Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence, pp. 155-65. 38 The play was judged ‘not unworthy of Dante’ by the reviewer of The Monthly Magazine, 55 (February 1823), 35-39. See William H. Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and The Liberal, p. 156. 36 37

Byron, Italian Poetry, and The Liberal

267

erstone, and the idea of the last man on earth in works by Thomas Campbell and Mary Shelley.39 The fourth number of The Liberal contained Byron’s literal translation of the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante. As Peter Vassallo has pointed out, Byron had undertaken it specifically to demonstrate to the British detractors of Don Juan that this Italian burlesque tradition, when not toned down by pusillanimous translators, considered ‘an occasional laugh at things sacred as […] salutary’.40 In his Advertisement, Byron casts doubt on the idea that Pulci’s intention was ‘to deride the religion, which is one of his favourite topics’ or that his poem would have been interpreted in that spirit in his own day. This seems disingenuous for irony has the power to undermine conventional religiosity, while escaping detection by the unsophisticated believer and thus evading censorship. An example is Orlando teaching the giant about the theology of damnation: ‘E sonsio nostri dottori accordati, Pigliando tutti una conclusione, Che Que’ che son nel ciel glorificati, S’avessin nel pensier compassione De’ miseri parenti, se dannati Son ne lo inferno in gran confusione, La lor felicità nulla sarebbe; E vedi che qui ingiusto Iddio parrebbe. ‘Ma egli anno posto in Gesù ferma spene; E tanto pare a lor, quanto a lui pare; Afferman ciò ch’e’ fa, che facci bene, E che non possi in nessun modo errare: Se padre a madre è ne l’eterne pene, Di questo non si posson conturbare: Che quel che piace a Dio, sol piace a loro: Questo s’osserva ne l’eterno coro’. ‘Even our theologians are agreed, reaching the same conclusion all of them, that should the souls in heaven glorified allow the least compassion in their minds for their poor relatives now damned in hell, in great confusion and in great lament their blessedness would come to naught at all, or God’s own justice to injustice fall. ‘But they have placed in Jesus every hope, so that whate’er he likes they also like; they say that what he does is ever best, and never can he err in any way. So if their parents are in endless pain, This should not grieve or vex them in the least, For what their God desires they desire, 41 Just as is seen in the eternal choir’. Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell and the Victorians, p. 82. Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence, p. 152. See Byron’s letters to Murray on Pulci, BLJ, VII, pp. 35, 61, 97. 41 I. 51-52, in CPW, IV, pp. 266-67. Luigi Pulci, Morgante, The Epic Adventures of Orlando and his Giant Friend Morgante, trans. by Joseph Tusiani (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 50. 39 40

268

Caroline Franklin

Why did so much of Byron’s interest in Italian literature focus on its visions of judgement, hell and damnation? We might, like Southey, attribute it to his guilty conscience. But Byron was not alone. Nineteenth-century Protestant imaginings of the afterlife were even grimmer than Dante’s, as they had no concept of purgatory and therefore overemphasized the wrath of God. British theologians were much engaged in debating whether there was an immediate judgement after death or whether the soul experienced an intermediate state before the last judgement.42 In fact, Southey’s tactless Vision had inadvertently, and Byron’s deliberately, ‘highlighted the Church of England’s lack of a credible eschatology in the post-Enlightenment period’, according to Alan Hill.43 Byron’s rejection of judgement throughout his poetry struck at the heart of religious absolutism itself. The Byron coterie saw their fascination with Italian writing as at one with their cosmopolitan politics and humanist outlook in ideology. While Gifford and Coleridge were recuperating British Renaissance dramatists, and Shakespeare in particular, to construct a nationalist canon of patriotic great works, Byron and Hunt were keen to trace a rival tradition. They saw Italian literature keeping alive the flame of classical republicanism, and passing it on to the greatest British poet of liberty, John Milton. In their campaign for political independence for Italy and religious toleration and reform at home, disseminating Italian literature would show the British how narrow-minded their view of both poetry and religion was, if it could not include the laughter, sensuality and liberty ‘natural’ to the South.

42 43

See Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell and the Victorians, p. 76. Alan G. Hill, ‘Three “Visions” of Judgement: Southey, Byron, and Newman’, Review of English Studies, ns 41/163 (1990), p. 335. Hill quotes Edward Irving, author of For the Oracles of God, Four Orations, For Judgement to Come, An Argument (London, 1823), who saw little to choose between them: ‘one a brazenfaced piece of political cant, the other an abandoned parody of solemn judgement’.

Index

Abrams, M(eyer) H(oward) 42, 46, 71 Acerbi, Giuseppe 159 Ackroyd, Peter 67 Addison, Joseph 12, 122, 124,126, 229 Aganoor Pompilj, Vittoria 39 Alamanni, Luigi 240 Albergati Capacelli, Francesco 17 Alberti, Leon Battista 39, 43, 47, 49 Alcalá Galiano, Antonio 241 Alexander, John Huston 167, 241 Alfieri, Vittorio 13, 17, 22, 33, 37, 47, 50, 158, 160, 161, 175, 199, 204, 231, 233, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 246, 248, 253, 260 Algarotti, Francesco 17, 33 Altick, Richard D. 222, 223, 224 Amedollo, Alessandro 182, 183 Anceschi, Giuseppe 33 Andersen, Hans Christian 171 Angiolieri, Cecco 39 Angoulême, Louis-Antoine Bourbon, Duke of 247 Anselmi, Gian Mario 45, 47, 48 Antonelli, Roberto 105 Apuleius 47 Ariani, Marco 105 Arieti, Cesare 17 Ariosto, Ludovico 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 21, 23, 28, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 47, 49, 51, 71, 121-45, 162, 170, 226 Ariosto, Orazio 126 Armstrong, Isobel 94, 103 Arrivabene, Carlo 34 Asor Rosa, Alberto 47, 105 Atherstone, Edward 266 Augustine, St., of Hippo 196 Austen, Jane 16 Austin, Sarah 253 Avellini, Luisa 47

Baillet, Adrien 126 Baillie, Joanna 247 Baine o Bain, Rodney M. 66 Bakhtin, Mikhail 42 Balayé, Simone 238 Balderston, Katharine 89 Baldi, Bernardino 13 Baldry, Anthony 49 Bandello, Matteo 13, 247 Bandettini, Teresa 181, 182, 185 Bannerman, Anne 240 Barbarisi, Gennaro 48 Barbèra, Gaspero 34 Baretti, Giuseppe 8, 13, 27-30, 33, 123, 126 Barfoot, C. C. 261 Baruffaldi, Girolamo 14 Bassnett, Susan 150 Bate, W. Jackson 86 Batkin, Leonid M. 42, 48 Bayle, Pierre 199 Bayne, Edward Dacres 265 Beattie, Bernard 195 Beattie, James 117 Beaumont, Sir George 122, 132 Beccaria, Cesare 47 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 171 Behrendt, Stephen C. 98 Benedetti, Anna 123 Benedetti, Francesco 242 Bennett, Betty T. 190, 224, 227 Beolchi, Carlo 31 Berchet, Giovanni 18, 159 Berlan, Francesco 209, 210, 211 Bernardelli, Paolo 226 Berni, Francesco 28, 29, 35 Best, Henry Digby 227 Betham, Matilda 170, 171, 187 Bettinelli, Saverio 17, 203

270

Index

Bettoni, Nicolò 199 Biagioli, Niccolò Giosafatte 36 Bianchi, Stefano 46 Billanovich, Giuseppe 117 Bindman, David 55, 63 Binni, Walter 166, 203 Bion 50 Blain, Virginia 94, 103 Blair, Robert 57 Blake, William 14, 20, 46, 55-68, 207, 231 Blanchard, Laman 188 Blessington, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of 176, 179 Bloom, Harold 48, 71, 141, 142, 244 Blunt, Anthony 65, 66 Boccaccio, Giovanni 12, 17, 23, 29, 45, 50, 51, 111, 118 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 23, 28, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 47, 49, 129, 230 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 10, 11, 12, 23 Bold, Alan 172 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, first Viscount 223 Bollati, Giulio 31 Bone, Drummond 261 Bonini or Boninis, Bonino 58, 60 Boone, Thomas, William 35 Borsellino, Nino 117 Borsieri, Pietro 32, 159 Bosio, Ferdinando 34 Boswell, James 225 Botticelli, Sandro 59, 60 Bottral, Margaret 61 Bouhours, Dominique 126 Bourdieu, Pierre 149 Bowles, William 85-86 Bowring, John 241 Boyd, Elizabeth French 262 Boyd, Henry 74, 240 Brahms, Johannes 154 Bramanti, Vanni 230 Brambilla Ageno, Franca 57

Brancia, Francesco 30 Brand, Charles Peter 7, 9, 13, 15, 182, 212, 218, 228, 238, 240, 242, 244, 252, 253, 256 Brewer, William D. 214 Brilli, Ugo 31 Brooks, Stella 101, 103, 105, 106 Brooks-Davies, Douglas 99 Broughton, Lord see Hobhouse, John Cam Brown, Peter 196 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 116, 255 Browning, Robert 247, 255 Brunelli, Bruno 101 Burke, Edmund 29, 224 Burney, Fraces 253 Burroughs, Catherine 219 Bush, Douglas 48 Busk, Mary Margaret 238, 242, 247-52, 253 Butler, Marilyn 18, 241 Buttura, Antonio 31, 37 Bygrave, Stephen 102 Byron, Lord George Gordon 7, 13, 14, 18, 21, 22, 23, 33, 44, 45, 46, 74, 88, 123, 149, 150, 152-3, 157, 158-60, 165-80, 182, 189, 191, 193-97, 200, 201, 203, 205, 206-07, 212-18, 219, 220, 222, 228, 231-32, 243, 250, 255-68 Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar) 254 Caesar, Michael 260 Caldana, Giovanni 50 Calderón, Pedro de la Barca 46, 47 Campanella, Tommaso 39 Campbell, Mary 244 Campbell, Thomas 212, 241, 267 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canàl) 204 Candaux, Jean-Daniel 238 Canning George 255, 256, 257, 258, 263 Cantatore, Lorenzo 31 Cantù, Cesare 34 Capponi, Gino 34

Index Caprio, Alfonso 37 Carducci, Giosuè 34, 42 Caretti, Lanfranco 23, 127, 128 Carlson, Julie Ann 214, 216 Carlyle, Thomas 69, 72, 79, 223, 255 Caro, Annibal 39 Carpanini, Rudolf 122, 137 Carracci Agostino, Annibale, Ludovico, Antonio 48 Carrer, Luigi 39, 230 Caruso, Carlo 182, 184, 185, 186 Cary, Henry Francis 55, 231, 258 Castelvetro, Lodovico 116 Casti, Giovan Battista 13, 258, 259 Castiglione, Baldassarre 44, 45, 50 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount 255, 259 Cattaneo, Carlo 230 Catullus, Gaius Valerius 28 Cavalcanti, Guido 41, 47 Cavalleri, Edmondo 36 Cave, Richard Allen 217 Cecchi, Emilio 44 Cerutti, Toni 231 Cesarini Martinelli, Lucia 45 Cesarotti, Melchiorre 17, 231, 239, 253 Ceserani, Remo 27, 110 Chambers, Ephraim 222 Chapman, Alison 7, 19, 20, 162, 187 Chard, Chloe 187 Charlemagne, 250 Chaste, André 59 Chateaubriand, François René 41, 196 Chaucer, Geoffrey 8, 9, 10, 12, 23, 74, 122, 134, 137 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of 44, 74 Cheyne, Sir Joseph 27, 49, 261 Churchill, Kenneth 238, 256 Cibber 222 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 177, 205 Cicognara, Leopoldo 230 Cielo d’Alcamo 39 Cieszkowski, Krystof Z. 55

271

Cino da Pistoia 31 Clark, Alexander Frederick Bruce 9 Clark, David Lee 244 Clayton, Sir Richard 239 Clemit, Pamela 224, 226 Cochran, Peter 160, 175 Codro, Antonio Urceo 47 Colburn, Henry 151, 152 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 14, 44, 45, 69, 71, 75, 78, 85-86, 120, 128-29, 133, 135, 140, 175, 178, 222, 255, 260, 268 Colombo, Michele 33, 34 Colonna, Giacomo 117 Colonna, Vittoria 31 Constable, Archibald 78, 241 Contarini, Leonardo 215 Contini, Gianfranco 119 Corazzini, Sergio 39 Corilla Olimpica (D. Maria Maddalena Morelli Fernandez) 169, 170, 181-83, 185, 186-88 Corneille, Pierre 160 Cornwall, Barry 18 Corrigan, Beatrice 36, 71 Corti, Claudia 61 Costa, Gustavo 30 Costantini, Pietro Luigi 31 Cowley, Hannah 87, 88, 93 Crane, Walter 59 Crescimbeni, Giovan Mario 32 Crisafulli, Lilla Maria 8, 19, 27, 42, 45, 46, 49, 50, 102, 159, 187, 231, 232, 249, 261 Croce, Benedetto 44, 128, 162, 166, 185, 202 Crochunis, Thomas C. 214 Croker, John Wilson 257 Croker, Temple Henry 124 Crook, Nora 190, 222, 226, 227, 228 Cuoco, Vincenzo 206 Curran, Stuart 81, 84, 98, 102, 104, 224, 227, 241 Curtis, Jared R. 135

272

Index

Curtius, Ernst Robert 43 Dacre, Lady Barbarina Brand 14 Dall’Ongaro, Francesco 34, 39 D’Amico, Jack 106 Damon, Samuel Foster 65 Danby, John F. 134 D’Annunzio Gabriele 39 Dante Alighieri, 12, 13, 17, 20, 23, 28, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55-68, 69-79, 88, 110, 138, 220, 230, 231, 245, 255, 258, 260, 261-62, 266, 268 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 28 Darbishire, Helen 143 Daru, Pierre 211, 212, 214, 216 Davies, Damian Walford 140 Davila, Arrigo Caterino 132 Dawson, Paul M. S. 50, 156, 176 D’Elci, Angelo 87 Della Casa, Giovanni 31, 44 Della Peruta, Franco 229 Del Tuppo, Francesco 35 De Palacio, Jean 221, 224, 229 De Paz, Alfredo 45 De Quincey, Thomas 14, 79, 132, 253 De Rizzi, Ignazio Neumann 211 De Sanctis, Francesco 202, 204 De Tipaldo, Emilio 230 D’Haen, Theo 261 Di Benedetto, Arnaldo 37 Di Benedetto, Vincenzo 43 Di Breme, Ludovico 159, 160, 206 Diedo, Giacomo 13 Di Macco, Michela 197 Diogenes Laertius 50 Dionigi, Marianna 204 Dionisotti, Carlo 33, 39, 42 Di Ricco, Alessandra 181, 184, 185 D’Israeli, Isaac 171 Dixon, W. Hepworth 151 Dobson, Susanna 109-115, 120 Donaldson, George E. 254 Donato, Almorò, 210, 211

Donner, Henry Wolfgang 171 Dotti, Ugo 98, 110 Dryden, John 9, 10, 78, 126, 131 Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse 131 Duppa, Richard 122 Dürer, Albrecht 204 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 65, 174 Elford, William 216 Elledge, Scott 139 Ellis, George 212, 258 Engell, James 86 Engstrom, Andrea A. 257 Epictetus, 234 Erasmus, Desiderius 47, 51, 266 Erdman, David V. 59 Erizzo, Nicolò 211, 218 Fairer, David 9, 124 Fantastici, Massimina 181, 182 Fantoni, Giovanni 39 Farinella, Calogero 222 Federici, Camillo (Giovanni Battista Viassolo) 162 Fedi, Roberto 105 Feldman, Paula 232 Felsenstein, Frank 154, 170 Fernow, Carlo Ludovico 166 Fiaccadori, Pietro 30 Filangieri, Gaetano 33 Firenzuola, Agnolo 13 Fisch, Audrey A. 224 Flamigni, Adriana 231 Flauriel, Claude 17 Flaxman, John 56, 231 Fletcher, Loraine 98 Flora, Francesco 204 Foakes, R. A. 129, 131 Fogazzaro, Antonio 39 Forman, H. Buxton 176 Forman, Maurice Buxton 179 Forteguerri, Niccolò 51 Fortunati, Vita 45 Foscari Francesco, Doge of Venice 209-

Index 15, 218 Foscari Jacopo 22, 209-14, 218 Foscolo, Giulio 230 Foscolo, Ugo 14, 16-17, 22, 27, 35, 36, 41, 42, 43, 48, 120, 138, 161, 174, 193, 197-202, 203, 222, 224, 229, 230, 231-35, 237, 240, 242, 245, 249, 253 Fowler, Bridget 149 Foxe, John 264 Franci, Giovanna 45 Frere, Hohn Hookham 14, 178, 255, 257, 258, 259, 260 Frezzi, Federico 28 Fry, Caroll L. 104 Frye, Northrop 57, 67, 71 Fulford, Tim 195 Fuseli, Henry (Johann Heinrich Füssli) 56, 58, 62 Galiani, Ferdinando 17 Galibert, Léon 211 Galilei, Galileo 29, 33 Galimberti, Alice 56 Gallenga, Antonio 231 Gambara, Veronica 31 Gamer, Michael 92 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 197, 206 Garin, Eugenio 42 Garrick, David 29 Gatton, John Spalding 213 Gavazzeni, Franco 43, 138, 224 Gengembre, Gérard 238 George III, King of England 263, 264, 265 Germano, Bruno 117 Giani, Maurizio 154 Giannantonio, Pompeo 37 Gibaldi, Joseph 123, 132 Gibbon, Edward 33, 202 Gifford, William 92, 217, 222, 255, 257, 268 Gilchrist, Alexander 57, 64 Gillies, R. P. 253

273

Ginguené, Pierre-Louis 13, 70, 71, 120, 230, 258 Gioberti, Vincenzo 198, 202, 262 Giordani, Pietro 169 Giovannini, Ercole 112 Gironi, Robustiano 30, 31 Gisborne, Thomas 15 Gizzi, Corrado 56, 59 Gleckner, Robert 197 Godwin, William 156, 221, 224, 226, 234, 255, 257 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 41, 97 Goldoni, Carlo 13, 166, 227 Goldsmith, Oliver 174 Goldzink, Jean 238 Gonda, Caroline 172, 186, 189 Gozzano, Guido 39 Gozzi, Carlo 166 Graf, Arturo 8, 17, 39 Gramsci, Antonio 203 Grant, John E. 59 Graver, Bruce E. 134 Gravina, Gian Vincenzo 127, 240 Gravil, Richard 134 Gray, Thomas 9, 10, 81, 198, 200 Greatheed, Bertie 88 Green, Richard G. 64 Grenville, Thomas 38 Greswell, William Parr 239 Grillo, Ernesto 39 Grosart, Alexander B. 138 Guacci, Maria Giuseppina 182 Gualandi, Teresa 184 Guarini, Battista 47 Guazzaroni, Giuseppe 24 Guazzo, Stefano 44 Guerra, Lia 49, 158 Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico 34 Guerrini, Olindo 39 Guglielminetti, Marziano 138 Guicciardini, Francesco 33, 47 Guiccioli, Contessa Teresa 212 Guidi, Alessandro or Giambattista 31, 32 Guillon, Aimé 200

274

Index

Guittone (del Viva) d’Arezzo 39 Gussalli, Antonio 166 Haefner, Joel 102 Hallam, Henry 120 Hamilton, Alexander 206 Hamilton, A. C. 125 Hamlyn, Robin 55 Harington, Sir John 74, 121, 123 Harris, Michael 60 Hartman, Geoffrey 141 Harvey, James 198, 200 Havely, Nick 159, 231, 232, 249, 260, 261 Hawley, Judith 103, 104, 106 Hayley, William 74, 107 Hays, Mary 227 Hazlitt, William 20, 69-79, 120, 135, 222, 257 Hearder, Harry 256 Heber, Reginald 212, 215 Heine, Heinrich 157, 163 Hemans, Felicia Dorothea 7, 14, 18, 119, 120, 186, 187, 191, 231, 234, 242, 245-46, 252 Henderson, George 83 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 154 Hesiod 42 Hewitt, David 128 Hill, Alan G. 134, 139, 268 Hoagwood, Terence Allan 241 Hobhouse, John Cam, Baron Broughton 158-60, 174, 175, 231-32, 240, 260 Hodgson, Francis 258, 265 Hogg, James 261 Hogg, James, the ‘Ettrick Sheperd’ 171 Homer 56, 128, 131 Hoole, John 11, 13, 121, 123, 125-131, 132, 133, 136 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 177, 179 Horne, Philip R. 37 Howe, Percival Presland 70, 75 Huggins, William 121, 123-125, 130-31

Hugo, Victor-Marie 200 Hume, David 126 Hunt, James Henry Leigh 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 36, 37, 50, 74, 120, 149, 150, 152-55, 157-59, 163, 228, 231, 255, 257, 262, 263, 264, 266, 268 Hurd, Richard 8, 9, 11, 12, 22 Hutchinson, Thomas 47, 141 Iacopone da Todi (Iacopo de’ Benedetti) 39 Iamartino, Giovanni 122 Ingpen, Roger 23 Irving, Edward 268 Isabella, Franco 229, 231 Isola, Agostino 137, 240 Jack, Ian 238 Jack, Ronald Dyce Sadler 130 Jacoff, Rachel 260 Jeffrey, Francis, Lord 70, 212, 215 Jerdan, William 189 Jerningham, Edward 87, 89-91 Johnes of Hafod, Thomas 258 Johnson, Joseph 257 Johnson, Samuel 10, 29, 124, 126, 128, 221, 222, 224, 225 Johnson-Cousin, Danielle 238, 244 Jones, Emrys 266 Jones, Frederick L. 47 Jones, Steven E. 92 Jonson, Ben 74 Jordan, John E. 132, 141 Julius II, Pope (Giuliano della Rovere) 266 Kean, Edmund 160 Keats, Fanny 14 Keats, John 14, 18, 44, 120, 152, 179, 257 Kelly, Gary 234 Kelsall, Malcolm 195, 206 Kemeny, Tomaso 49, 61 Kennedy, Deborah 103, 105, 106, 107

Index Kernberger, Katherine 261 Keynes, Geoffrey 58 Kinsley, James 78, 126 Kitson, Peter 195 Klonsky, Milton 56, 57, 64 Knowles, James Sheridan 18 Kramnick, Isaac 223 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody 125 Kucich, Greg 227, 241 Labbe, Jacqueline M. 86, 103 Lamb, Charles 79 Landino, Cristoforo 58 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth 19, 21, 120, 171, 181-91 Landor, Walter Savage 14, 76, 78, 120 Lansdown, Richard 217 Lanza, Franco 19, 252 Lardner, Dionysius 221, 222, 224, 227, 228, 229 Lastri, Marco 88 Laura de Cabriers 110 Laura de Noves 109, 116 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 155 Leader, Zachary 172, 176, 177, 180 Leask, Nigel 197 Lefevere, André 150 Leigh, Augusta 175 Leighton, Angela 191 L.E.L., see Landon, Letitia Elizabeth Lenau, Nikolaus (N. Niembsch von Strehlenau) 196 Leoni, Michele 230, 232 Leopardi, Giacomo 22, 30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 193, 202-06, 228 Leopold (Pietro Leopoldo I), Grand Duke of Tuscany 87 Levati, Ambrogio 13 Levi, Eugenia 200 Levi Minzi, Giuseppe 38 Levi-Perotti, Giustina 114, 115 Levin, Phillis 102 Lewis, C(live) S(taples) 67 Linkin, Harriet Kramer 98

275

Lipking, Lawrence 10 Lloyd, Charles 240 Lockhart, John Gibson 159, 167, 212, 247, 253 Lofft, Capell 82-83, 104 Lombardo, Agostino 49 Longoni, Franco 48 Lonsdale, Lord William Lowther 134 Lorenzo, de’ Medici 31, 51, 240 Louis XIV, King of France 199 Lovell, Ernest J., Jr 14, 176, 260 Lucas, Saint John 39 Lucian 47 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 44, 47, 48 Luporini, Cesare 203 Luzzi, Joseph 256 Lyell, Charles 37 Macaulay, Rose 197 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 69, 76, 78 MacFarlane, Charles 229 Machiavelli, Niccolò 33, 46, 47, 162, 229 Machin, George I. T. 263 Macovski, Michael 18 Madison, James 206 Maffei, Andrea 34, 230 Maffei, Clara 182 Maginn, William 167 Magnan, André 27 Mai, Angelo 205 Malato, Enrico 28 Mameli, Goffredo 34 Mamiani della Rovere, Terenzio 34 Manfredi, Eustachio 30 Mangaroni, Rosella 231 Mansel, William Lort 32 Manso, Giambattista 47 Manzini, Giovan Battista 240 Manzoni, Alessandro 17, 22, 33, 34, 49, 159, 161, 174, 229, 231, 235, 237, 240, 242, 245, 246, 249-53

276

Index

Marchand, Leslie A. 14, 150, 166, 207, 258 Marcolini, Francesco 58 Mari, Michele 29 Mariani, Carlo 230 Marino, Giambattista 31 Marradi, Giovanni 39 Marshall, Roderick 9, 123, 256, 262, 266 Martin, John 266 Martz, Edwine Montague 8 Mason, William 32 Mathias, Thomas James 14, 32, 116, 239, 240 Mathews, William 132 Matthews, Geoffrey Maurice 47 Mayer, Enrico 36 Mazza, Angelo 39 Mazzei, Filippo 28 Mazzeo, Tilar J. 190, 228, 229, 231 Mazzini, Giuseppe 36, 202, 206, 230, 231 McFarland, Thomas 196 McGann, Jerome M. 7, 88, 172, 173, 178, 193, 196, 197, 259 Medwin, Thomas 74, 174, 176 Melchiori, Giorgio 123, 172, 217, 262 Mellor, Anne K. 224 Meneghelli, Donata 28 Menghini, Mario 230 Merivale, John Herman 14, 258, 260 Merry, Robert 87, 93 Metastasio (Pietro Trapassi) 13, 29, 30, 33, 71, 101, 168, 169, 184, 238 Metternich-Winneburg, Klemens Lothar, Prince of 255 Micali, Giuseppe 206 Michelangelo Buonarroti 48, 58, 67, 122, 137 Michelstaedter, Carlo 39 Milbanke, Annabella 228 Mill, John Stuart 179 Mills, Chester H. 261 Milman, Henry Hart 18, 212, 239, 242, 243-44, 248

Milton, John 9, 12, 23, 29, 43, 46, 47, 48, 56, 74, 76, 77, 83, 84, 85, 97, 104, 124, 138, 139, 261, 268 Mitchell, W. J. Thomas 59, 60 Mitford, Mary Russell 18, 22, 209, 216, 218-20 Moers, Ellen 181 Moir, David 251-52, 253 Moir, George 242 Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin) 160 Molloy, J. Fitzgerald 189 Moloney, Brian 87 Monari, Ernesta 182 Montaigne, Michel de 46, 47 Montani, Giuseppe 231 Monterossi, Giuseppe 34 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de 204 Monti, Vincenzo 22, 31, 32, 159, 161, 169, 197, 203, 225, 228, 229, 231, 237, 239, 242, 245-46, 248-49 Moore, John 218, 219, 220 Moore, Sir John 258 Moore, Mary 94, 95 Moore, Thomas 175, 207, 212, 261, 262, 263 Moorman, Mary 132, 139 More, Hannah 16 Morehead, Robert 241 Morelli Fernandez, D. Maria Maddalena 169 Morgan, Edwin 172, 179, 180 Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson) 149, 150, 151-52, 155-56, 158, 160-63, 171, 187, 244-45, 252, 257 Morley, John 224 Morrell, Janet Margaret 74 Mortimer, Anthony 98, 100, 102 Mosca, Carlo 14 Moschus 50 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 158, 159 Mullini, Roberta 162 Muratori, Ludovico 213, 218 Murray, John 14, 150, 160, 174, 177,

Index 212, 213, 222, 255, 256, 257, 258-60, 262 Musa, Mark 98, 102, 106 Myers, Robin 60 Nagari, Mario 35 Nani, Marina 215 Napoleon (Napoléon Bonaparte) 151, 155, 158, 161, 198, 200, 207, 234, 248, 251, 252, 255 Negri, Ada 39 Nelson, Horatio, Viscount 199 Nerval, Gérard de 196 Neumann De Rizzi, Ignazio 211 Newman, Gerald 10 Newton, Sir Isaac 66 Newey, Katherine 219 Newey, Vincent 195 Niccolini, Giambattista 22, 34, 161, 237, 242, 245, 253 Nice, Richard 149 Nicholson, Andrew 14, 263 Nicoletti, Giuseppe 43, 230 Nobile, Aniello 32 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) 196 O’Connor, Arthur 257 O’Connor, Maura 7 O’Ferral, Fergus 263, 264 Ogden, Daryl S. 194, 196 Oldys, William 222 Orlandini, Francesco Saverio 36 Ortensia di Guglielmo 31 Otway, Thomas 195 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 44, 46, 47 Owen, Warwick Jack Burgoyne 136 Pacella, Giuseppe 31 Pagnini, Marcello 66 Paine, Thomas 156 Paisiello, Giovanni 159 Paley, Morton D. 56, 63, 65, 66 Palmer, Michael 38 Panigarola, Francesco 111

277

Panizzi, Antonio 15, 18, 20, 27, 32-39, 229, 230 Parfitt, George 126 Parini, Giuseppe 33, 87, 198, 228, 229, 231, 233 Parson, William 88 Pascoe, Judith 102 Pascoli, Giovanni 39 Passeroni, Gian Carlo 29 Pasta, Giuditta 157 Pater, Walter 79 Paul, St., of Tarsus 49, 65 Peacock, Thomas Love 18 Pecchio, Giuseppe 226, 230, 231 Peck, Walter Edwin 23 Pedrocchi, Giorgio 57 Pellico, Silvio 22, 159, 160, 161, 237, 242, 245, 252, 262 Pensa, Maria Grazia 230 Pepoli, Carlo 34, 227 Perfetti, Bernardino 168, 169 Pericles 197 Pertile, Lino 182 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 13, 14, 17, 20, 21, 28, 29, 32, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 46, 49, 76, 81-95, 97-108, 109-20, 170, 199, 201, 245 Phillips, Michael 55 Philp, Mark 224 Piatti, Guglielmo 32 Piccioni, Luigi 8, 29, 126 Piccoli, Raffaello 50 Pickering, William 35 Pietropoli, Cecilia 102 Pignotti, Lorenzo 87 Pinch, Adela 98, 101, 103, 105 Pindar 42, 44 Pindemonte, Ippolito 22, 34, 87, 231, 237, 245, 248, 253 Piozzi, Hester Lynch Thrale 87, 89, 92, 149, 150-51, 158, 170, 171, 186 Pite, Ralph 56, 260, 262 Pitt, William, the Younger 257, 263 Plato 47, 48, 49, 60, 156

278

Index

Plotinus 47 Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini) 37, 41, 45, 49, 51, 240 Polo, Marco 28 Ponchiroli, Daniele 119 Pontano, Giovanni 47 Pope, Alexander 9, 10, 23, 46, 131 Poussin, Nicolas 154 Praz, Mario 44, 104, 123, 140 Preston, William 239, 240 Procter, Bryan Waller 14 Pucci, Antonio 39 Pudbres, Anna 213 Pugliese, Giacomino 39 Pulci, Luigi 23, 28, 36, 45, 51, 178, 258, 259, 260, 262, 267 Pulos, Christos E. 47 Puoti, Anna 182 Purcell, Sally 38 Querno, Camillo 167 Radcliffe, Ann 151, 171, 187, 195, 232 Raimondi, Ezio 42, 47 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) 48, 155 Rapin, René 126 Rapisardi, Mario 39 Raine, Kathleen 64, 65 Raycroft, Brent 104, 106, 107 Redi, Francesco 29, 39 Reed, Joseph 223 Reni, Guido 48, 155 Renier-Michiel, Giustina 182 Reynolds, Barbara 129 Reynolds, John Hamilton 14 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 29, 56, 77 Ricciarda de’ Selvaggi (Selvaggia dei Vergiolesi) 31 Ridenour, George M. 172 Rienzi (Cola di Rienzo) 254 Rimbaud, Jean-Arthur 196 Rinuccini, Ottavio 39 Ritson, Joseph 167 Robbins, Derek 149

Robinson, Charles 190 Robinson, Daniel 85, 103, 104, 107 Robinson, Jeffrey C. 98 Robinson, Mary 21, 81, 83, 84-85, 87, 92-95, 104, 188 Roe, Albert S. 55, 57, 60, 61, 64, 65 Rogers, Charles 74 Rogers, Neville 48 Rogers, Samuel 14, 18, 87, 166, 212, 247, 258 Rognoni, Francesco 48, 50 Rolandi, Pietro 31, 35, 229 Rolli, Paolo 28, 126 Rollins, Edward Hyder 14 Rosa, Salvator 154 Roscoe, Thomas 70, 227 Roscoe, William 13, 33, 239, 240 Rose, William Stewart 38, 121, 123, 128, 131, 132, 137, 138, 255, 258, 259, 263 Rossetti, Christina Georgina 38 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 37, 38, 171 Rossetti, Gabriele 18, 35, 37, 230 Rossetti, William Michael 38, 57 Rossi, Pellegrino 262 Rossi-Martinetti, Cornelia 182 Rossini, Gioacchino 157-59, 163, 166 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 29, 46, 47, 224 Rudman, Harry William 229 Ruskin, John 69, 79 Rustico Filippi or di Filippo 39 Rutherford, Andrew 172, 173, 178 Ruzante or Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco) 239 Sabellico, Marco Antonio 211 Sacchetti, Franco 47 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de 195 Sade, Hugues de 110, 116 Sade, Jean–François de, or Abbé de Sade 28, 109-118, 120 Saffi, Aurelio 34 Saglia, Diego 18, 30

Index Said, Edward 256 Sainte-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de 112 Salvarani, Luana 34 Sammut, Alfonso 19, 252 Sannazaro, Jacopo 14, 41, 46, 51 Santagata, Mario 98, 105 Sanudo, Marino 211, 218 Savoca, Giuseppe 31 Scaglione, Aldo 123 Scala, Flaminio 168 Scarry, Elaine 88 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 196 Schiller, Friedrich 118, 195, 232 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 71 Schlegel, Friedrich von 196, 261, 262 Schor, Esther 224 Schumann, Robert 154, 157 Scott, Sir Walter 14, 128, 129, 149, 167, 212, 241 Scott, William 190 Scott-Kilvert, Diana 232 Scrovegni, Jacopo degli 210 Selincourt, Ernest de 122, 134, 139, 141, 143, 144 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 198 Sessa, Giovan Battista, Melchiorre 58 Seward, Anna 21, 78, 81, 83-84, 85, 104 Sgricci, Tommaso 156, 165, 169, 174-76, 177, 178, 190 Shakespeare, William 8, 9, 10, 23, 33, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 83, 127, 149, 151, 165-66, 195, 217, 237, 255, 268 Sharp, Samuel 29 Shaver, Alice C. 132 Shaver, Chester L. 122, 132 Sheil, Richard Lalor 18 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin 14, 19, 22, 44, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 166, 174, 175, 189, 190, 221-35, 255, 257, 267 Shelley, Percy Florence 36 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 14, 18, 20, 22, 4151, 69, 74, 78, 88, 120, 152-3, 155,

279

156, 157, 158, 162, 165, 166, 169, 171, 175-77, 190, 191, 196, 206, 222, 226, 231, 244, 254, 255, 256, 257, 261, 263 Shepherd, William 239 Silvani, Giovanna 38 Simmel, Georg 196 Simone da Pesaro (Simone Cantarini) 155 Simpson, Erik 170, 171, 172, 187 Simpson, Michael 214 Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard Sismonde de 69-73, 75, 76, 120, 209, 211, 214, 218, 228, 245, 265 Smith, Johanna 223, 224 Smith, Charlotte 20, 81, 83-85, 86, 97108, 118 Smith, Gregory 124 Smith, Margaret M. 60 Smith, Sydney 247 Smollett, Tobias 130, 154, 158, 170, 113 Smyser, Jane Worthington 136 Sotheby, William 14, 18 Southey, Charles Cuthbert 128 Southey, Robert 23,128, 129, 138, 241, 259, 264-66, 268 Spaggiari, William 38 Spagnoli, Giovan Battista 41, 45 Spallanzani, Lazzaro 17 Spenser, Edmund 8, 9, 10, 12, 23, 32, 33, 41, 45, 79, 83, 104, 123-25, 131, 138 Springer, Carolyn 197, 200 Stabler, Jane 7, 19, 104, 162, 172, 180, 187 Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Baroness of Staël-Holstein (Mme de) 19, 70, 155, 166, 169, 171, 172, 181, 185, 186, 187, 194, 204, 232, 237-38, 244 Stagnino, Bernardino 59, 60 Stanfield, James Field 223 Stanislavskij, Konstantin Sergeeviþ (K. S. Alekseev) 166 Steele, Robert, 124

280

Index

Stephenson, Glennis 191 Stendhal (Henry Beyle) 41, 48, 157, 158 Stern, Jeffrey 16 Sterne, Lawrence 88 Stockley, Violet 253 Storch, Rudolf F. 135 Sturrock, Jane 121, 122, 128, 138, 144 Sturzl, E. 261 Sulgher Fantastici, Fortunata 170, 181, 182, 185, 186 Sullivan, Alvin 241 Sunstein, Emily W. 224 Super, Robert Henry 14 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of 74, 83, 99 Swedenborg (Swedberg), Emanuel 61, 65, 66 Tagliazucchi, Girolamo 30 Tanner, Tony 195, 197 Tarcaniota (Marullo Michele) 45 Tarsi, Galeazzo di (Galeazzo Di Tarsia) 39 Tasso, Torquato 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 23, 28, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 71,126, 129, 132, 138, 162, 170, 228 Tassoni, Alessandro 39 Taylor, Anya 171 Taylor, Beverly 263 Taylor, Jane 186 Taylor, John E., Richard 35 Tellini, Gino 27 Tenhove, Nicolas 239 Theocritus 50 Thomson, James 32 Timpanaro, Sebastiano 203 Tinkler-Villani, Valeria 55, 261 Tiraboschi, Girolamo 28, 70, 71, 230, 240 Tissoni, Roberto 36, 182 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 154 Tomasini, Filippo 114 Tommaseo, Niccolò 34

Toscano, Tobia R. 37 Tovey, Duncan C. 10 Towers, Joseph 222 Toynbee, Paget 261 Treves, Paolo 206 Trueblood, Paul Graham 172 Trusler John, 65 Turchi, Marcello 125 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 154 Tusiani, Joseph 267 Tytler, Alexander Fraser 109, 115-20 Ubezio, Matteo 29 Ulivi, Ferruccio 56, 59 Ulysse, Georges 27 Utterson, Edward Vernon 258 Valla, Lorenzo 41, 43, 47 Varchi, Benedetto 112 Vasari, Giorgio 33 Vassallo, Peter 14, 19, 123, 194, 228, 232, 252, 255, 258, 266, 267 Veca, Salvatore 203 Vellutello, Alessandro 58, 110, 116 Venier, Antonio 218 Vernon, Lord G. G. Warren 35 Vico, Giambattista 49, 199 Vieusseux, André 253-54 Vieusseux, Giovan Pietro 231 Viganò, Salvatore 162-63 Vincent, Eric Reginald 14, 35 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 42, 44, 49, 122, 131, 134 Visconti, Filippo Maria, Duke of Milan 209, 211 Vitagliano, Adele 169 Volney, Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf 206, 227 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 73, 126, 151, 224, 255 Wagner, Ann 83 Wagner, Richard 42 Walker, Joseph Cooper 238-40, 254

Index Wallace, David 260, 261 Ward, Geoffrey 195 Ward, William S. 257 Warner, Janet A. 59 Warton, Joseph 8, 9, 22, 170 Warton Thomas 8, 9, 10, 83, 123-125, 127, 128, 201 Watkins, Daniel P. 241 Watson, George 113, 129 Watson, Vera 216, 220 Watts, Susannah 239, 240 Waugh, Arthur 124 Webb, Timothy 254 Webster, John 151 Weinberg, Alan M. 14 Weintraub, Wiktor 168 Welby, T. Earle 76 Wellek, René 71 Whalley, Peter 10 Wheeler, Michael 266, 267, 268 Whittingham, Charles 35 Wieck, Friedrich 157 Wicks, Margaret C. W. 27, 229 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch 110 Wilson, Carol Shiner 102 Wilson, John 167, 212 Wittreich, Joseph A. 57 Wolfson, Susan J., 8 Wollstonecraft, Mary 234, 255, 257 Woodhouse, John R. 19, 37 Woodings, Robert Bertram 46 Wordsworth, Dorothy 131, 132 Wordsworth, Jonathan 138, 188 Wordsworth, Richard 132 Wordsworth, William 14, 21, 121-23, 131-42, 177, 178, 196, 259 Wu, Duncan 100 Wyatt, Thomas 74 Yates, Frances A. 261 Yeats, William Butler 67, 149 Young, Edward 198, 200 Zacchi, Romana 162

281

Zanella, Giacomo 39 Zanotti, Giampietro 30 Zapata de Cisneros, Christoforo, conte 116 Zappi, Faustina 31 Zappi, Giambattista 31 Zimmerman, Sarah M. 18, 98, 103, 104, 105 Zotti, Romualdo 13, 36 Zuccato, Edoardo 129