Seneca in Early Elizabethan England

Jessica Winston
Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 29-58 (Article) Published by Renaissance Society of America DOI: 10.1353/ren.2008.0232
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Seneca in Early Elizabethan England*

by J E S S I C A W I N S T O N
In the 1560s a group of men associated with the universities, and especially the early English law schools, the Inns of Court, translated nine of Senecas ten tragedies into English. Few studies address these texts and those that do concentrate on their contributions to the development of English drama. Why such works were important for those who composed them remains unclear. This essay examines the translations against the background of the social, political, and literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s. In this context, they look less like forms of dramatic invention than kinds of writing that facilitated the translators Latin learning, personal interactions, and political thinking and involvement.
1. I N T R O D U C T I O N riting in the late 1580s, Thomas Nashe famously accused contemporary dramatists of a lack of originality, describing them as triviall translators who did little more than copy the good sentences and tragicall speeches out of Seneca. Such playwrights, he suggested, were akin to mountebanks, who let blood from the classical author, sapping his words line by line and page by page, until he at length came to die to our stage.1 Nashes attack on his contemporaries is puzzling. After all, many Renaissance authors borrowed lines, scenes, and plots from historical and literary sources, a practice that was not (except in this case) viewed as a problem. Still, his statement is also apt, prefiguring and encapsulating the main critical line on the reception of Seneca in Elizabethan England. Dramatic authors worked with the tragedies in a piecemeal fashion, copying and adapting elements of them: the good sentences and tragicall speeches, as well as the bombastic rhetoric of the characters, the stock figures and plot devices (such as a chorus, nurses, and ghosts), and the five-act dramatic structure. They looked to Seneca, in other words, as a source of ideas, styles, techniques, and forms that they could draw upon or, in Nashes terms, bleed dry in order to enliven their own plays and the English dramatic tradition.2
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Research for this essay was funded by a Humanities and Social Sciences Research Committee Grant from Idaho State University. 1 Works of Thomas Nashe, 3:31516. 2 The earliest and most influential examples of this argument appear in Cunliffe; Manly; Charlton; Lucas; Eliot, 1927; Mendell. Miola provides a more recent instance of this trend. Although aiming for an integrated assessment (9) of Senecas influence, he instead provides a subtle analysis of Shakespeares tactical, sporadic, allusive, and playful engagement with Senecan sources. Hunter, 1967 and 1974, deviates from this strain of criticism, disputing the extent and significance of Senecas influence. Kiefer, 1978a and 1985, provides a useful overview of criticism on the influence of Seneca.
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This line of criticism, however, often fails to recognize that the Elizabethan reception of Seneca occurred in two distinct phases, and only accurately describes the second of these.3 The first took place in the 1560s. Prior to this decade there was little concern with Seneca in England, with only a handful of philosophical works and fragments of the drama published in manuscript and print.4 Beginning in 1559, however, there was intense interest in the author, especially at the universities and early English law schools, the Inns of Court, where students and fellows translated most of the drama and performed a series of Senecan and neo-Senecan plays.5 The later phase took place in the 1580s and 1590s when, after a decadelong break in the performance and publication of Seneca, Thomas Newton compiled the first English anthology of the Tenne Tragedies (1581), and Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare adapted elements of the drama for their plays. The difference between the phases is pronounced. Later playwrights imitated aspects of the tragedies, but earlier ones engaged with them comprehensively and in their entirety. Thus, in the 1560s authors fully translated nine of the tragedies into English. Jasper Heywood (153598) translated Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560), and Hercules Furens (1561). Alexander Neville (15441614) did the same with Oedipus (1563). John Studley (ca. 154590?) followed with Agamemnon, Medea, Hercules Oetaeus
A comparable outline of these phases appears in Charlton, 13947. The philosophical works include Robert Whittingtons translation of De Remediis Fortuitorum (1547) as well as editions and translations of two works by St. Martin of Braga (515ca. 579), which were erroneously attributed to Seneca in the period: The Rule of an Honest Life (1516, 1523, 1538, and 1546) and The Mirror of Glass of Manners and Wisdom (1547). The fragments of plays include Wyatts translation of the last stanza of the second chorus of Thyestes as Stand Whoso List upon the Slipper Top; Dean Nowells copy of a preface to Hippolytus in his notebook, which may have been played at Westminster in the Christmas of 1546; and an undated fragment of the opening chorus of Hercules Oetaeus attributed to Queen Elizabeth. Trinity College, Cambridge, produced a version of Troas, probably one by Seneca, in 155152: G. C. Smith, 1923, 53; Records, 966. On Hippolytus, see Baldwin, 2:560. On Elizabeths translation, see Renaissance Drama by Women, 612. 5 In the 1560s there were three recorded performances of plays by Seneca at Cambridge: Oedipus, Troas, and Medea at Trinity College. See G. C. Smith, 1909, 26970; 1923, 5658; Boas, 387; Records, 2:96870. In addition, there was a performance of a play titled Hecuba at Trinity which may be Senecas Troas, although Nelson suggests that it is Erasmuss 1506 translation of Euripides The Trojan Women: Records, 208, 968, 1214. Boas, 387, records a performance of Medea at Queens in 1563, but Nelson (Records, 989) explains no such record has been found and Boas may have misread the word comoedia in the college records. At Oxford, there was no recorded performance of Seneca until the production of the Pseudo-Senecan Octavia at Christ Church in 1585: Boas, 38590.
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(all 1566), and Hippolytus (1567), as did Thomas Nuce (ca. 15451617) with Octavia (1566?), the erroneously attributed drama that stars Seneca as a counselor to Nero.6 At the same time, many authors wrote original plays, such as Thomas Sackville (ca. 15361608) and Nortons (1530/3285) Gorboduc (performed 1562) or the multiauthored Gismond of Salerne (performed 156768), which imitated more thoroughly than later Elizabethan tragedies the form of Seneca: the five acts each divided by a chorus, the lengthy deliberative speeches, and the quick verbal exchanges. In essence, while playwrights in the second phase wanted their Seneca in parts his sentences, rhetoric, devices, and structures the ones in the first wanted their Seneca whole in the form of complete translations and extensive imitations. Or, to extend the imagery of Nashe, while later playwrights drew upon the tragedies to add life to their drama, the early Elizabethans aimed to animate and sustain the tragedies themselves.7 Any account of Seneca in early modern England must heed this distinction. Yet few studies address this first phase, and those that do concentrate either on the aesthetic qualities of the translations and adaptations or on their contributions to the progress of English drama: the early Elizabethans supplied and reworked classical models in ways that spurred later dramatic developments.8 Why such works were important for those who composed them remains unclear.9 The purpose of this essay, then, is
Although Nuces Octavia was published in 1566, it is likely that it was written earlier, perhaps about 1562 (as suggested by OKeefe, 93), since in the preface he describes the work as the first fruits of my yong study: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 41:249. 7 Braden, 1985, argues that later Elizabethan dramatists did engage with larger themes and issues of Senecan tragedy, adapting Seneca because he represented a certain autarchic style of selfhood represented by its will, self-sufficiency, and ambition which Elizabethans found compelling as they faced the possibility of absolutist rule. Even so, he does not consider why English authors took so long to become interested in Seneca, nor does he account for the differences between earlier and later Elizabethan ways of working with the tragedies. 8 Recent accounts of Seneca in the Renaissance by Braden, 1985, and Boyle barely mention the early Elizabethans. For studies of style, see Spearing, 1912 and 1920; Eliot, 1932; OKeefe. For studies of the contributions of early Elizabethan translations to English drama, see Rees, 133, who calls the translators midwi[ves] assisting at the birth of English drama; Kiefer, 1978b and 1983; B. Smith, 1978; Green; Miola; Norland; Helms; Goldberg. 9 B. Smith has begun this work, examining the role that Senecan drama played in shaping and defining the private communities of the Inns of Court, but he bases the majority of his conclusions on Nevilles Oedipus, and does not address the reasons for Senecas popularity in these communities in the 1560s in particular: see especially part 1 of chapter 5 on tragedy, 20339.
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to explore this first phase, focusing mainly on the translations, a group of works that for the most part preceded and influenced the adaptations, and that therefore should be examined first if we are to understand the early Elizabethan interest in Seneca overall. As the following shows, the translations should be read against the background of the social, political, and literary culture of the universities, and particularly the Inns of Court, in the 1560s. In this context they look less like forms of dramatic invention than kinds of writing that facilitated the translators Latin learning, personal interactions, and their political thinking and involvement. 2. SENECA AT THE INNS OF COURT It may seem peculiar to consider the social function of translation. Unlike performed dramas such as Gorboduc or Gismond of Salerne, which were produced for social occasions and entertained groups of men at the Inns of Court, translations may strike us as scholarly productions, undertaken in stoic isolation. While the translations of Seneca may well have been composed in seclusion, they nevertheless emerged out of and responded to a current literary scene. Early in the preface to his translation of Thyestes Jasper Heywood indicates that he works with other authors in mind, praising eight contemporaries including Thomas Sackville, Thomas Norton, and Thomas North, as well as a great nombre more for their achievements in poetry and translation.10 Others also imagine the translations within and against their immediate intellectual surroundings. In a prefatory poem in Studleys Agamemnon, one T. B. lauds the translator, comparing him with recent writers including Thomas Phaer, Barnabe Googe, and Arthur Golding, as well as, in a phrase that echoes Heywood, a great sorte more whose works favorably with Heiwood [do] compare.11 In short, the translations were written and read as contributions to a contemporary literary community. The largest and most prominent literary community in the 1560s was connected with the Inns of Court, places where, in the words of Heywood,
Heywood, 1560, *7v*8r. For ease of reference, the early translations of Seneca are listed in the bibliography under the names of the translators: Heywood, Neville, Studley, and Nuce. 11 Studley, 1566a, 8vA1r. OKeefe, 93, suggests that T. B. may be Thomas Blundeville, which is plausible, since Blundeville was a member of the Inns of Court, and himself a translator of essays by Plutarch in 1561 including How to Profit from Ones Ennemies and of the treatise Of Counsels and Counselors in 1570.
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Minervaes men, / And finest witts doe swarme.12 To be sure, the Inns primarily provided legal training for the sons of aristocrats and the gentry, but in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they also served as something like finishing schools, where ambitious men came to gain useful legal training while acquiring a cosmopolitan sophistication that would allow them to function at court and in other exclusive social circles.13 Beginning in the 1560s the law schools also developed as the center of a large community of writers, which, extending to the universities, included most of those authors mentioned from the prefaces above Sackville, Norton, North, and Googe other poets and translators such as George Turberville and George Gascoigne as well as the translators of Seneca: Heywood, Neville, Studley, and Nuce. Indeed, several networks link the translators to this broad literary circle. Heywood praised writers at the Inns in his preface to Thyestes and moved to Grays Inn himself in 1561. Neville became a member of Grays Inn in the early 1560s, when he wrote Oedipus and exchanged poetry with fellow Inns of Court authors Googe and Gascoigne. John Studley produced his translations at Cambridge, but later came to the Inns of Court, and the commendatory verses in Agamemnon highlight his connections with writers from the law schools. Thomas Nuce translated Octavia while at Cambridge, and although not a member of the Inns, he was a friend of Studleys and wrote two commendatory poems for Agamemnon.14 The reasons for the coalescence of this community are complex, but can be traced to the educational backgrounds and professional aspirations of those who attended the schools at this time. In the 1560s the Inns of Court were attended by a generation of men whose lives had a similar
Heywood, 1560, *7v. Marotti, 25. 14 Nevilles admission to the Inns of Court is not recorded, but he is one of the five gentlemen of Grays Inn who required Gascoigne to write verses on set themes upon his return there in the early 1560s. The verses appear in Gascoignes Hundreth Sundrie Flowers; his poetry to Googe appears in Googes Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (1563). Studley attended Cambridge, receiving his BA in 1566, and likely moved on to the Inns of Court. Conley, 133, places Studley at Barnards Inn ca. 1566, but offers no source for this claim. Even so, Richard Robinson in his Rewarde of Wickedness (1574) mentions Studley among a list of writers associated with the law schools, and Spearing, 1913, xii, xxii, has found additional evidence to support Studleys connection to the schools. Studleys Agamemnon contains commendatory verses by Thomas Peend (admitted to Middle Temple 1564), a translator of Ovid, and William Parker (admitted to Lincolns Inn 1566). Nuce, 2r, emphasizes his friendship with Studley in his prefatory verse in Agamemnon, beginning his verse Sith frends to frends do frendly graunt in frendly cases muche. Biographical details on each translator appear in Spearing, 1912; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
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shape: born in the 1530s or 1540s, they were for the most part educated in those English grammar schools newly influenced by continental humanism and steeped in the humanist civic rhetoric that urged students to put their learning and linguistic skills to good use by becoming servants to the state. Having studied at the universities, they moved on to the Inns of Court (or their affiliated Inns of Chancery), and then often sought to live up to the expectations of their educations by finding positions in the Elizabethan court and government as secretaries, ambassadors, members of Parliament, and sometimes as counselors to the monarch herself. In other words, the Inns were filled with men who were rhetorically trained, critically minded, professionally ambitious, and politically aware. As this group of men moved from the universities, through the law schools, and on to careers, they tended to write and share poetry, translate classical and continental works, and compose and perform plays. Although it might be tempting to think of such writings as diversions, they were rather very much of a piece with the professional and political interests of their authors, helping them interact with each other and with potential patrons, and, more crucially, to understand and shape the political world they sought to join and to participate in and reflect upon it.15 As with many of the writings at the Inns in this decade, the translations of Seneca helped to foster personal connections, as well as political expression.16 To be sure, Heywood, Neville, Studley, and Nuce made different sorts of contacts and responded to a number of concerns in their works: sections 4 and 5 below illustrate this point in discussions of two representative translations, Heywoods Troas and Nevilles Oedipus. Before moving to these, however, it is crucial to consider more deliberately why a generation of men at the universities and Inns were so interested in Seneca. As the next section shows, such interest was hardly natural or inevitable but grew out of a specific nexus of circumstances: the backgrounds and interests of the translators, the political nature of Senecas writings, and the popularity of one contemporary work, the Mirror for Magistrates (1559). 3. S E N E C A N P O L I T I C S One striking aspect of the early Elizabethan interest in Seneca concerns the reverence with which the translators view the texts of the plays themselves.
On the culture of the Elizabethan Inns of Court, see Prest, especially 2127, 13743; Finkelpearl, especially 131; Marotti, especially 2595. 16 For a discussion of this trend with reference to one of the most famous texts from the Inns, Sackville and Nortons Gorboduc, see Winston, 2005.
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In his preface to Thyestes Jasper Heywood dreams of receiving a master copy of the drama from the author. Alexander Neville shows similar admiration, writing in Oedipus that he aims at what Seneca hymself in his invention pretended.17 It is true that veneration only goes so far. In the process of turning Seneca into English, the translators often altered phrases, passages, and scenes. Neville, for instance, seeks not to be to precise in folowynge the author worde for worde: but somtymes by addition, somtymes by subtraction, to use the aptest phrases in giving the sense.18 In Troas Heywood lengthens speeches and inserts a ghost; in Thyestes he puts in a closing soliloquy for the title character. In Oedipus Neville expands several speeches and substitutes one of his own; in Agamemnon Studley also replaces a chorus with one of his own devising. Such alterations are common in the works of early Elizabethan translators, who frequently adapted ancient texts in order to make them relevant to their own time.19 Yet however much the authors of Seneca altered the tragedies, they nevertheless chose primarily to follow them as their source and aimed to provide what they saw as faithful reproductions of Seneca in English: what Seneca hymself in his invention pretended. The grounds for such admiration are not obvious. Members of the Inns and universities translated many classical and continental works, and Seneca was one of the authors put into English as part of this trend.20 The tragedies do not fit comfortably with these other texts. Leaving Seneca aside, the two most frequently translated classical authors in the 1560s were Ovid and Cicero.21 The popularity of the two is understandable. Both were viewed as sources of ancient learning mythology and philosophy, respectively and as masters of literary and rhetorical style. By putting Ovid and Cicero into English, translators were able, in their view, to make
Neville, 1563, a3v. Ibid., a3va4r. 19 As Boutcher, 46, proposes, Renaissance translations are usefully viewed as original works by authors who happen to be translating. 20 Conley, 34, provides a useful (if dated) overview of what he terms the early Elizabethan translation movement. For a more recent account of the character and nature of translation in the 1560s and throughout the Renaissance, see Boutcher. 21 Based on a survey of published works listed in the STC from 156070, there were seven new translations of Ovid published in the 1560s, and six of works by Cicero. Virgil, Plutarch, and Horace follow with five, four, and three new editions, respectively. For a listing of English translations in this period and throughout the Renaissance, see the Chorological List of Translations in Lathrop, 31118.
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important classical and rhetorical models widely available in their own country.22 Seneca is more difficult to explain. His works were translated more frequently than any other classical author in the period; yet while he took up the subjects of mythology and philosophy, he was not considered a great source of mythological learning, and his philosophical works received only passing attention at this time.23 Moreover, while Heywood praises Seneca for his regall stile he is not described for instance, in educational treatises nearly as often as Cicero (or even Ovid) as the sort of master of language whom educated men should most try to imitate.24 Indeed, Neville states that Senecas style has little to do with his reasons for translating, writing in his preface to Oedipus that he removed [Seneca] from his naturall and loftye style to our corrupt and base, or as al men affyrme it: most barbarous language in order to convey something of the content, the substance of the tragedies that is, to reflect something of Seneca hymself.25 What about Seneca himself was so important? An outline of his life and works is instructive. Seneca was an author and politician whose plays reflected his observations about the nature of governance, kingship, and tyranny. For this reason, the translators were drawn to the political nature of his works, viewing the plays as stories that could usefully help them to respond to the politics of kingship and power in their own day. Seneca was born ca. 41 BCE in the Roman colony of Cordoba, Spain. When he was young he was brought to Rome, where he studied rhetoric and philosophy before pursuing a senatorial career. In the 30s CE he became an advocate and quaestor (a kind of treasurer) while developing a reputation as an orator, one significant enough that he had to withdraw from public life when he incited the jealousy of Caligula. Seneca briefly held a place at the court while Claudius was emperor, but in 41, when he was accused of adultery with a member of the royal family Caligulas
For instance, in his translation of Ciceros Tusculan Disputations (1561), Dolman, 2v, claims that he produced the work so that the unlearned [that is, those who dont know Latin] also, might have some fruicion therof: and, that our countrey, might at length flowe with the workes of philosophye. On the motives and aims of Elizabethan translators, see Hatcher; Ebel, 1967 and 1969; Wright. 23 Nicholas Haward translated Senecas De Beneficiis in 1569. 24 Heywood, 1560, *5v. The moral and rhetorical training of the sixteenth-century English grammar school centered upon Cicero. Seneca was present, but not in an extensive way. It was not until the later sixteenth century that Seneca replaced Cicero as the more popular model of Latin style and moral teaching. See Palmer, 1718; Costa, 3536. 25 Neville, 1563, a3ra3v.
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sister, Julia Livilla he was exiled to Corsica. He was recalled in 49 and became a tutor to Nero. When Nero came to the throne in 54, Seneca became a close political advisor. As the emperors rule progressed he lost influence, and in 62 asked to retire. He was later implicated in the Pisonian Conspiracy to assassinate the emperor and committed suicide, possibly at Neros urging, in 65.26 Seneca, in other words, lived through the reigns of five rulers Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero witnessing the machinery of imperial rule at closer and closer range while also suffering the fortunes of one near the center of power. Of course, in addition to his involvement with various imperial regimes Seneca wrote the tragedies, as well as a number of ethical treatises and moral essays. Despite his public career and substantial body of writings, the relationship between Senecas life and works remains a matter of considerable speculation.27 It is nevertheless likely that the tragedies reflect his very real experiences with the imperial court. As C. J. Herington writes, Seneca himself lived through and witnessed, in his own person or in the persons of those near him, almost every evil and horror that is the theme of his writings, prose or verse. Exile, murder, incest, the threat of poverty and a hideous death, and all the savagery of fortune were the very texture of his career.28 In works such as Oedipus Senecas plots show his fascination with these topics, yet such subjects are related to and develop a central set of issues concerning governance, despotism, and regal responsibility. The tragedies, as J. P. Sullivan observes, confront the nature of kingship and tyranny, along with such themes as regal clemency; the adaptability and insecurity of courtiers; the dangers of public life; the inevitable corruption, instability, and evanescence of power; the treachery that surrounds it; the resentment bred by arbitrary rule; and the constant possibility of assassination.29 Thyestes illustrates how such subjects help to develop a line of political analysis in the plays. The familiar plot concerns the feud between the brothers Atreus and Thyestes over the throne. Before the play begins, Atreus obtains the crown, while Thyestes seduces Atreuss wife and steals a golden fleece that ensures control of the empire. For this crime Atreus banishes Thyestes and, as the play opens, vows revenge. By the end he has
26 This biographical information closely follows the entry on Seneca, Lucius Anneaus The Younger in the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 51618, and is supplemented by information from Griffin, 1974. 27 For an overview of this debate, see Griffin, 1976, 19. 28 Herington, 430. 29 Sullivan, 157.
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it, baking his nephews in a pie and serving them to Thyestes at a banquet. The revenge is ghastly but not gratuitous, serving as the culmination of a series of scenes depicting Atreus as a tyrant whose success grows from his indifference to moral strictures and public opinion. Seneca develops this idea in act 1, where a conversation with an attendant reveals the kings notions of authority. As the dialogue opens, Atreus contemplates revenge. His attendant asks whether he fears public opinion: Does public disapproval deter thee not?30 Atreus responds with an axiom on kingship: The greatest advantage of this royal power, that their masters deeds the people are compelled as well to bear as praise. The attendant retorts that such a style of leadership will fail: Whom fear compels to praise, them, too, fear makes into foes. Atreus responds that nothing should compel or limit the king: Where only right to a monarch is allowed, sovereignty is insecure.31 As the scene continues Atreuss opinions remain fixed, and in the end the attendant himself agrees to keep the kings vengeful plans secret.32 Overall, the scene explores the relationship between Atreus and his servant, providing critical commentary on Atreuss notions of kingship even as it shows his success in winning the attendants complicity and silence. At the end of act 1 the chorus raises the subject of the kings authority again: Ye know not, for high place greedy, wherein true kingship lies. A king neither riches make, nor robes of Tyrian hue, nor crown upon the royal brow, nor doors with gold bright-gleaming; a king is he who has laid fear aside and the base longings of an evil heart; whom ambition unrestrained and the fickle favour of the reckless mob move not.33 Riches, robes, crown, and castle do not make kings, but indifference to fear, base longings, ambition, and fickle popular sentiment. Such ideas are laudable, but just as the first act airs the servants views even as it fails to support them, so, too, the play as
References to works by Seneca (as opposed to the early Elizabethan translations of them) will be to Frank Justus Millers Loeb Classical Library (LCL) edition, Senecas Tragedies. Millers translation is based on a different manuscript tradition from the one the Elizabethans knew: even so, it is common practice to cite his version in discussions of the translations of the 1560s, as the LCL is widely available. See, for instance, Kiefer, 1978b and 1983; B. Smith, 1978 and 1988. I have compared the LCL with those Latin editions most probably used by the translators and, in the passages I discuss, the differences between the versions are negligible. J. Smith provides a useful overview of the two manuscript traditions of Senecas works and the differences between them. On the sources of the early Elizabethan translators, see Spearing, 1913, xii; Vocht, xxivxxvii; and Daalder, xxxviii. 31 Senecas Tragedies, 2:107. 32 Atreus orders, And do thou conceal my plans, to which the attendant answers, No need to admonish me; both fear and loyalty shall shut them in my heart, but rather loyalty: ibid., 12021. 33 Ibid., 121.
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a whole provides space for the opinions of the chorus but does not demonstrate their accuracy or veracity. As Thyestes reaches its horrifying conclusion, one sees that riches, crowns, ambitions, and evil hearts do make kings: Atreus successfully avenges himself on Thyestes and secures the throne.34 Overall, the play denounces Atreuss brand of tyranny, while exposing it as an effective way to shore up his hold on power. Although not always with the same analytical clarity, Senecas other plays also explore the nature and privileges of kingship. In Hercules Furens, the tyrant Lycus meditates on successful governance, describing his chief skill as a ruler: Tis the first art of kings, the power to suffer envy.35 The subject emerges in Agamemnon as Aegisthus convinces Clytemnestra that the Greek general should be deposed: he is a tyrant who, as king, cannot be constrained by law: whateer to others is unlawful is lawful to them alone.36 The topic even appears in plays not explicitly about the fortunes of a king. In Medea, Creon banishes the title character, asserting A kings commands, just and unjust, thou must obey.37 As these examples suggest, the tragedies explore the liberties and responsibilities of monarchy. Senecas motives for composing such works are unclear. J. P. Sullivan considers it likely that they served as a form of advice to Nero; the plays illustrate the necessities and dangers of tyranny.38 J. David Bishop alternatively proposes that they were written for those who opposed Neros rule, aiming to produce a decisive effect: the removal of Nero.39 Both views cannot be right, but such readings underscore that the plays were deeply relevant to Senecas political moment. In the words of William Calder, Seneca sought in the heritage of Greek tragedy situations where he could with safety depict the dilemmas of his own day.40 The early Elizabethan translators knew well the political nature of Senecas life and works. In addition to their probable familiarity with
Thyestes abandons his desire for revenge, leaving this to the gods. As he states, The gods will be present to avenge; to them for punishment my prayers deliver thee: ibid., 181. It is interesting to note that Seneca still continues the story in Agamemnon, where the ghost of Thyestes appears, demanding that Aegisthus, another of his sons, kill the Greek general Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, thus continuing the cycle of revenge and retribution. 35 Ibid., 1:31. 36 Ibid., 2:25. 37 Ibid., 1:245. 38 Sullivan, 158. 39 Bishop, 24. 40 Calder, 9. For other criticism linking Senecas tragedies to the politics of his time, see Braden, 1970; Williams; D. Henry and B. Walker; D. Henry, B. Walker, and E. Henry; Fantham; Boyle, 96102.
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Seneca from the Annals of Tacitus, they knew Octavia, the classical tragedy mistakenly attributed to Seneca in the sixteenth century that features Seneca himself as a character. The plot concerns Neros divorce from his wife, Octavia, and subsequent marriage to Poppea, a move that prompts a popular riot. Early in the action Seneca appears as a version of the attendant in Thyestes, opposing Neros sentiments about rule. Hence, in Nuces translation of ca. 1566 the emperor and counselor discuss their different ideas about kingship:
Nero: Full meete it is that Caesar dreaded be. Seneca: More meete of subjects for to be belovd. Nero: From subjects mindes feare must not be removd. Seneca: What so by force of armes you do wring out, A grievous worke it is to bring about.41
The conversation portrays Seneca as a close but oppositional advisor. Like the attendant in Thyestes, he offers ineffectual counsel and after this scene disappears, making it difficult to know how to interpret his advice as subversive, or merely unheeded, political admonition. Still, the play indicates how the early translators likely viewed Seneca and Senecan tragedy. In it he is an outspoken advisor and his drama a form of political commentary. Against this background the interest in Senecas drama in the early Elizabethan period makes sense. Seneca was an orator, lawyer, and counselor: in other words, a classical version of the sort of rhetorician and politician that those at the universities and Inns of Court were trying to become. By translating his works the translators could in a sense translate themselves into a sphere in English society similar to that which Seneca himself occupied in Rome. More concretely, the central concerns of the plays were relevant to the early years of Elizabeths reign. Like Seneca, the translators lived at a time of quick and dramatic shifts in leadership three changes of monarch in little over a decade an unsettled and contested succession, and, with each new reign, the repeated and growing threat of tyranny. As Seneca did with his Greek sources, the early Elizabethan translators looked to the Roman tragedies for a compelling set of fictions that could reflect the crises and uncertainties of their time. Neville, for one, makes this connection when he claims in his preface to Oedipus that the play shows the just revenge, and fearful punishments of horrible crimes, wherwith the wretched worlde in these our myserable daies pyteously swarmeth.42
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Nuce, D4v. Neville, 1563, a3v.
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Such similarities, though, do not fully explain the preoccupation with Seneca. Concerns about tyranny and the succession existed before Elizabeth came to the throne; and such issues appear in a variety of classical texts, including the Greek tragedies that Seneca used as sources.43 Indeed, as we aim to understand the political nature of the translations, it is important to recognize that the interest in Senecan tragedy was spurred also by the popularity of counsel literature at the Inns, especially the recently published Mirror for Magistrates (1559).44 Compiled by William Baldwin, the Mirror contains a series of tragic didactic poems on the downfall of English kings and magistrates between the reigns of Richard II and Edward IV, and aims to encourage virtue in rulers and counselors by showing them the results of tyranny, ambition, and pride. The Mirror was extraordinarily influential and admired, particularly at the universities and Inns. Heywood claims in the preface to Thyestes that at the Inns one will hear a great reporte, of Baldwyns worthie name, / Whose Myrrour dothe of Magistrates, proclayme eternall fame.45 Moreover, two members of the law schools, Thomas Sackville and John Dolman, added tragedies to the Mirror for a new edition in 1563. For men already interested in participating in the political life of the state, the Mirror provided an immediate and compelling example of the way that authors might use literature to think through, and comment upon, contemporary political questions.46 Many of the translators saw Senecan tragedy as a classical version of advice-to-princes poetry. Indeed, as they worked Heywood and Neville overtly shaped their tragedies into mirrors for the prince. In lines added at the end of act 1 of Troas the chorus speaks to princes and magistrates, saying that Hecuba that was so late, of high estate a queene / A Mirrour is, to teache you what you are / your wavering welth, O princes, here is seene.47 Similarly, in a chorus added to Oedipus readers learn that the king
Many of the Greek tragedies were available in Greek, Latin, and Italian language editions published in Italy: Charlton, 3151. 44 The popularity of counsel literature stems from the general political interests of authors at the Inns. Other works of counsel literature by men associated with the law schools in this period include Thomas Norths The Dial of Princes (1557), William Bavands The Good Ordering of the Commonweal (1559), Thomas Nortons translation of the Orations of Arsanes (1561), and Thomas Blundevilles translation of several essays of counsel by Plutarch (see n. 11 above). 45 Heywood, 1560, *7v. 46 For a discussion of this idea, see Winston, 2004. Kiefer, 1996, provides a helpful overview of the authorship and politics of the Mirror. 47 Heywood, 1559, B3v.
43
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is A mirrour meete. A patern playne, of princes carefull thrall.48 Such passages were all the more relevant since the two translations were dedicated to the queen and a member of her Privy Council, respectively that is to say, to magistrates themselves.49 For those who translated Seneca, then, the tragedies reflected the dilemmas and problems of their own time. Nevertheless, the plays became visible and useful as glasses of governance in the context of the publication of the Mirror.50 Translation, however, was not solely a political undertaking, but also a way for the translators to associate with friends and potential patrons, and to sharpen their Latin skills and literary abilities. Moreover, despite the similarities in their backgrounds, interests, and aims, those who translated Seneca were not an entirely homogeneous group. Heywood, for instance, was Catholic, while Neville and Studley were supporters of the Protestant government. Each one produced works in order to respond to specific circumstances and concerns. It is to these particular circumstances that this essay now turns. An extensive discussion of all nine translations is not possible in the space of this article. Because the aims and aspirations of the translators come out most clearly in the most loosely translated works, the following explores Heywoods Troas and Nevilles Oedipus, the two texts that most noticeably rework their sources. The two men certainly aimed to reproduce Seneca himself, but together their works provide concrete examples of the subtly changing personal, social, and political significance of the tragedies as they aimed to represent what they could see of Seneca in the plays. 4. HEYWOODS TROAS: A MIRROR FOR ELIZABETH The first translation of Seneca, Heywoods edition of Troas in 1559, provides the earliest and clearest illustration of the complex and shifting social
Neville, 1563, D2v. Five of the remaining seven translations were also dedicated to members of the Privy Council. The dedicatees of the other two Studleys Hippolytus and Hercules Oetaeus are not known, since their first editions are now lost. 50 One complication of this argument is that Troas was most likely published before the Mirror. Troas is not listed in the Stationers Company register, but the printer of the play, Richard Tottel, received a license to print a treates of Seneca early in 1559, which since no treatise by Seneca is known to have been printed in this year probably refers to the play. The entry licensing Thomas Marshe to publish the Mirror appears several lines later, and hence presumably later in the year: Transcript, 1:32v33r. Despite this order of publication, Heywood still could have known the Mirror, since it was originally published in 1554, and although printed copies were suppressed and destroyed, versions of some of the poems could have circulated in manuscript. In any case, the explicit mirror language in Heywoods Troas strongly suggests that Heywood had the work in mind.
49 48
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function of Seneca in the period. Heywood states in his preface to the translation that he began for his owne private exercyse, that is, to practice his Latin.51 Even so, he later turned the text into a form of political expression, offering it as a salutary gift of cautionary advice for the new queen. A version of Euripides The Trojan Women, the play presents the sufferings of the women of Troy Helen, Andromache, and especially Hecuba at the conclusion of the Trojan War. As the drama opens Hecuba laments the loss of her son Hector and husband Priam, and over the next five acts endures the sacrifice of her daughter Polyxena, as well as the murder of her grandson Astyanax. The plot is wrenching but not sensational, serving to foster in the audience sympathy for those primary victims in the aftermath of the war, the women. Heywood was clearly drawn to the figure of Hecuba, since in his translation he made a number of changes that intensify the portrait of her as a victim of fortune. A look at these changes shows how Heywood used his Latin exercise to shape the play into an ambiguous commentary on the nature of rule one that, when given to Elizabeth, served both to question and affirm her authority. The emphasis of Heywoods translation is evident from the opening act, where Hecuba and her women mourn the loss of Hector. Here he reassigns a speech, given in the original to the women, to Hecuba. In Senecas version, the chorus describes its grief, beginning We have all loosed our locks at many a funeral torn; our hair has falln free from its knot, and hot ashes have sprinkled our faces. They then describe what they will do: From our shoulders our garments fall and cover only our loins with their folds. Now naked breasts invite our hands.52 The passage emphasizes the communal nature of grief, and the extent of the womens suffering as they tear out their hair, begrime their faces, rip off their garments, and beat their chests. In his translation, Heywood transfers the speech to Hecuba, modifying the description of grief into a command: Let downe your garmentes, from your shoulders bare / and suffre not, your clamour so to slake. / Your naked breastes, wayt for your handes to smight.53 With this shift the mourning focuses on Hecuba, singling her out as the one whose intense anguish the women must match. Hecuba also becomes a manager of the scene, commanding, rather than contributing equally to, the grieving. Heywoods shift is important: Hecubas privileged
51 52
Heywood, 1559, A3v. Senecas Tragedies, 1:13132. 53 Heywood, 1559, B1v.
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position here emphasizes her loss of agency during the remainder of the play. As Heywood continues he develops the premise that individuals, especially Hecuba, have no control over the ultimate course of their lives, and introduces a chorus at the end of act 1 on the subject of chance and the ephemeral nature of power. The chorus concludes:
If prowes might eternitie procure, Then Pryame yet should live in lykyng lust Ay portly pompe of pride, thou art unsure Lo learne by him, O kinges ye are but dust. And Hecuba that wayleth now in care, That was so late of high estate a queene A mirrour is, to teache you what you are Your waveryng welth, O princes, here is seene.54
Heywood writes that prowes and pride cannot secure the state of rulers. Rather, in a speech showing the influence of the Mirror, we learn that Priam and Hecuba are mirrours that reflect the true state of monarchy: kings are but dust and suffer waveryng welth. The speakers also emphasize the unexpected nature of reversals of fortune, continuing: Whom dawne of day, hath seen in high estate / before sonnes set, alas hath had his fall.55 Hecuba not only has little control, she is a pattern of the effects of fortune. In act 2 Heywood enhances the presentation of Hecuba as a victim of circumstances. The original opens with a messenger recounting a recent appearance of the ghost of Achilles, who vengefully calls for the sacrifice of Polyxena. (According to legend, she revealed the secret of Achilles vulnerable heel, and hence caused his death.) Heywood reworks events, introducing a new scene featuring the ghost of Achilles himself. In so doing he embodies and renders more vivid those supernatural forces that control Hecubas life. The translator reinforces this state of things later when he removes a speech in which the women ask Hecuba What fate, what lord waits for thee, Hecuba, or to what land will he lead thee to be a public show? In whose kingdom shalt thou die?56 In its place Heywood introduces a passage that returns to the subject of chance:
Regardyng not the good mans case, Nor caryng how to hurte the ill
54 55
Ibid., B3v. Ibid. 56 Senecas Tragedies, 1:197.
45
Chaunce beareth rule in every place, And turneth mans estate at will. She geves the wrong the upper hande The better parte she dothe oppresse, She makes the highest lowe to stande Her kingdome all is orderlesse. O parfit proofe of her frailtie, The princely towres of Troye bet downe The flowre of Asia here ye see With turne of hand quight overthrowne.57
In the source, the questions What fate, what lord waits for thee? and In whose kingdom shalt thou die? imply that Hecuba might have the capacity to answer: that she might be able to decide her future, or at the very least know something of it. In the new speech the chorus develops general rules about fortune. Individuals cannot control or even know about their futures: Chaunce beareth rule in every place, especially in Hecubas case. According to Frederick Kiefer, Heywoods changes inconsistently accentuate capricious fortune on the one hand, and vengeful justice on the other: [T]he strict cause-and-effect relationships dictated by the operation of retributive justice are undercut by the exploits of an arbitrary fortune. The one implies the existence of a reasonable, vigilant, and fundamentally benign deity; the other suggests irrationality and caprice on a cosmic scale.58 Even so, Kiefer shows that such alterations highlight a tension inherent in Seneca, where the chorus speaks of overarching cosmic design even as it confronts evidence of apparent disorder.59 Kiefers argument is persuasive, and points to a larger pattern in the translation whereby Heywood intensifies themes from the source. Indeed, the alterations reinforce another aspect of the story the suffering of the queen underscoring Hecubas lack of agency in the face of human and supernatural forces and emphasizing that she has no power to stop her downfall. Why did Heywood alter the play in this way? As we heard earlier in his preface, Heywood states that he began the translation for his owne private exercyse. Although he may have begun the work to exercise his Latin, he soon put the book to another use, dedicating his published version to Elizabeth, the new queen, as a New Years gift. As he explains, I thought it should not be unpleasant to your grace to se some parte of so excellent an author in your owne tong (the reading of whome in laten I understande
57 58
Heywood, 1559, E2rE2v. Kiefer, 1983, 71. 59 Ibid., 7172.
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delightes greatly your majestie), as also for that none may be a better judge of my doinges herein, then who best understandeth my author.60 Heywoods motives for offering the play are uncertain. In part, the translation is an obvious effort to make contact with Elizabeth by giving her a book by an author whom she enjoyed reading and translating herself.61 Even so, it is likely that Heywood also offered the translation as a kind of political commentary. Hecuba shadows a number of contemporary leaders and groups: Elizabeth herself, who had to maintain the fragile political consensus that had brought her to power; Mary I, Elizabeths sister and the previous queen, whose reign lasted only four short years; and Catholics such as Heywood, whose fate was, like the women of Troy, subject to a new leader. Of course, that Hecuba signifies so many individuals and groups points to a weakness in any specifically topical reading. Still, she most obviously figures Elizabeth: in those passages added by Heywood, the chorus explicitly describes Hecuba as a mirror for the prince, and she offers an alarming representation of the insubstantiality of a womans royal power. The presentation of Hecuba thus involves a sort of functional ambiguity, to use Annabel Pattersons term.62 Heywood comments on Elizabeth but protects himself from censorship by representing his concerns indirectly through a narrative of historical and mythological events. In the play, then, Heywood figures Elizabeths precarious authority perhaps to urge humility and compassion in the new queen in part by reminding her of the reversals of fortune she suffered in her youth. In addition he cautions that her new privilege will not insulate her from those reversals that continue to affect her subjects. Although the play offers what must have been a troubling bit of cautionary advice, it is worth noting that Heywood is not hostile toward the queen, and even uses the translation to foster his connection to her. In this regard Troas is similar to Heywoods other translations, which also manifest his unexpected treatment of authority. Thyestes, as we saw above, appears to vindicate tyranny, even as it demystifies its workings for an audience. Moreover, in Hercules Furens the title character, having just returned from the underworld, mistakenly slaughters his wife and children, thinking them the family of the tyrant Lycus. Rather than celebrating Hercules, Heywood translates a work that skeptically depicts heroism and heroic resistance to tyranny.
60 61
Heywood, 1559, A3r. See n. 4 above. 62 For a fuller discussion of the notion of functional ambiguity, see Patterson, especially 18.
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It is tempting to look to Heywoods biography to explain his blend of bold self-assertion and fractious criticism. The son of John Heywood author of early Tudor courtly interludes Heywood grew up at court, and his attempt to connect with Elizabeth may have developed from links he had with her when he was, by various accounts, a page for, or fellow student with, her as a boy.63 At the same time he was a Catholic, and the great nephew of Thomas More; his concern for the sufferings of the women of Troy may stem from his personal awareness of the difficulties that men and women could suffer at the hands of royal power. Furthermore, Heywood characteristically had an irreverent attitude toward those in authority deliberately missing, for instance, his doctoral exam and such a tendency is consistent with his bold counsel of Elizabeth and members of the Privy Council.64 Of course, for this essay it is not entirely necessary (or even possible) to describe the full range of Heywoods motives. Whatever his intentions, his works offer the earliest examples of the complex social function of Senecan translations. Heywood clearly did not write out of a desire to jumpstart English tragedy. Rather, the text provided Latin language exercise, and at the same time allowed him to offer some disquieting commentary on the precarious authority of the queen, even as it connected him to her and affirmed her status. 5. NEVILLES OEDIPUS AS MORAL AND POLITICAL COUNSEL With Troas Heywood established his reputation as a translator. He was praised over the next two decades for his perfect verse with its smouth and fyled style and ability to make even Seneca hymselfe to speke in Englysh.65 Troas also helped to popularize Seneca: the play was printed more often than any other Senecan tragedy in the century: four times according to the Short Title Catalogue, twice in 1559, again in 1562, and in 1581. The next translator of Seneca, Alexander Neville, used the text as a thematic and stylistic guide for an English edition of Oedipus. Next to the discussion of Heywoods Troas, Nevilles Oedipus provides a contrasting, but equally telling, illustration of the social and political significance of Senecan translation in the period.
63 Vocht, viii, claims that Heywood was a page, while Flynn, 4546, n. 2, suggests with more evidence that he was instructed along with her by the same tutor, probably Richard Cox (before 1544), William Grindal (154448), or Roger Ascham (1548 or 1549). 64 On Heywoods general irreverence and conflicts with authority, see Flynn, 4547; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 26:968. 65 Studley, 1566a, 8v, A7vA8r.
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Like Troas, Oedipus features a central character suffering from circumstances beyond his control. And like Heywood, Neville adapts the play in a number of ways in order to paint this character as a mirror of the misfortunes of princely life. Still, as much as Neville follows Heywood, their plays functioned in different ways in their original social contexts. While Troas is a manifestation of Heywoods independence and unconventionality, Oedipus illustrates Nevilles use of literary production to establish his similarities with others, to affirm common concerns and ideals with associates at Cambridge and the Inns of Court. Early in his time at school, he exchanged poetry with Barnabe Googe, responding to his friend and cousins verse on the dangers of lust and idleness with poems supporting the aptness of such advice.66 As with this verse, Oedipus was a coterie work written to be shared, allowing Neville to confirm the collective principles and united moral values of his circle of friends, and to facilitate their political thinking and engagement. When Neville later printed the play he turned it to a new purpose, using it to offer advice to a member of the Privy Council and to turn himself into counselor as well. The dedication to Oedipus illustrates its original occasion and intended purpose. Neville explains that he began, [O]nely to satisfye the instant requestes of a fewe my familiar frendes, who thought to have put it to the very same use, that Seneca hymself in his invention pretended: Whiche was by the tragicall and pompous showe upon stage, to admonish all men of theyr fickle estates, to declare the unconstant head of wavering Fortune, her sodaine interchaunged and soone altered face, and lyvely to expresse the just revenge, and fearful punishments of horrible crimes, wherwith the wretched worlde in these our myserable daies pyteously swarmeth.67 Nevilles observation that the play was upon stage is intriguing, providing the only concrete evidence of a performance of Seneca in English in the 1560s and indicating that some Elizabethans thought Seneca wrote the tragedies to be performed.68 In addition, he asserts that the translation is intended for a few familiar friends, highlighting that the performance
Barnabe Googes collection of poetry, the Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (1563), contains several examples of these exchanges. For instance, in one Googe writes To Alexander Nevile to counsel him to banish idleness. In The Answer of A. Neville to the Same, Neville agrees with the advice, writing that lack of labour maims the mind. The answer poetry is another instance of what Neville does in Oedipus, using literature to affirm his shared values with his friends. See Googe, 94, poems 29 and 29a. 67 Neville, 1563, A3v. 68 Critics today continue to debate whether Seneca was performed. For useful overviews of and interventions in the debate, see Fitch; Goldberg.
66
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took place in a coterie setting, either at Cambridge or the Inns of Court.69 Crucially, Neville also describes the attraction of the play: it satisfies his friends taste for morally stringent, didactic drama, admonish[ing] all men of theyr fickle estates and showing fearful punishments of horrible crimes. On a first reading, the two purposes seem contradictory, suggesting, on the one hand, that the tragedy illustrates the workings of fortune or chance and, on the other, that it shows the inexorable operations of divine revenge and retributive justice. Of course, as Kiefer observes of Troas, the contradiction exists in Senecas tragedies. But the aims are not as contradictory as they seem: the translators put both wanton caprice and the most severe retribution at the very center of the tragic experience.70 Bruce Smith echoes this point, observing that both forces lead to the same conclusion: [T]he universe of tragedy can be a place either of arbitrary shifts of fortune or of ineluctable moral laws. Either way, it is the end of tragedy that counts, and either way that end remains the same: to warn men to put no trust in their own power.71 Like Troas, Oedipus shows the weakness of individuals in the face of natural and supernatural forces. As he worked, Neville adapted and altered the original in order to bring out such moral teachings. In part, he did this by eliminating passages that give mythological and historical specificity to the drama, deleting a chorus on ancient religious practices (a prayer to Bacchus at 1:46369) as well as one on Oedipuss family (which describes the legendary curse on the house of Labdacus at 1:48993). With such changes he reduces the particularity of the story, shaping Oedipus into a generally representative man who suffers the vicissitudes of fortunes and operations of justice. At the same time, Neville substitutes passages in order to underscore his two themes. In act 4, he replaces a passage on fate and the via media
69 It is difficult to know where Oedipus was performed. It may have been performed at Cambridge. In the preface to the second edition of Oedipus (1581), Neville asserts that he composed the work when he was sixteen, which would have been in 1560, shortly after he matriculated at Cambridge: Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, 187. Still, it is also possible (and, I think, more probable) that Neville wrote the play for friends at the Inns of Court. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 40:482, there is no evidence that Neville resided at Cambridge, and most of his literary activities, including his poetic exchanges with Googe and Gascoigne, involved members of the Inns of Court. Moreover, an Inns of Court provenance for the play would explain why Neville and his friends performed the play in translation. Until the late sixteenth century, plays at the universities were most often performed in Latin (Records, 709), while those at the Inns of Court were usually in English or in English translation. 70 Kiefer, 1983, 76. 71 B. Smith, 1988, 206.
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with one on fortune. In the original the chorus laments, Were it mine to shape fate at my will, I would trim my sails to gentle winds, lest my yards tremble, bent neath a heavy blast. May soft breezes, gently blowing, unvarying, carry my untroubled barque along; may life bear me on safely, running in middle course.72 In place of this, Neville offers a discussion of chance:
Fortune that Dame of present lyefe doth all thynges chaunge at wil A styrryng styl, procureth grief suche mysers minds to fyll. Which careful ar theyr states to kepe when boystrous stormes do ryse, And blustring winds and daungers depe setts death before theyr eyes. Who saith he doth her fawning feeele? And chaungeth not his mynde, When fickle flight of Fortunes wheele doth turne by course of kynde. Thes grevous plags from privat hous to princely thrones do flow. And oft theyr minds with cares thei sous and thick upon them strow.73
In the original the chorus considers the possibility of controlling life, lamenting that were it [in his power] to shape fate, then he would aim for the middle course. The new passage responds to the uncertainty indicated by the conditional statement were it mine. Neville shows that one cannot shape fate, since chance doth all thynges chaunge at wil. He also emphasizes the ubiquity of fortune, which affects everyone from privat hous to princely thrones. With this innovation, Neville affirms that it is impossible to control ones existence: neither fate nor certain styles of living will determine the course of a life. Fortunes wheele affects all. While Neville highlights fortune, he also underscores the operations of justice and vengeance. He reinforces the issue early in the play, describing the plagues suffered by the people of Thebes and linking such disorder to Gods vengeance. Neville first lengthens the description of mayhem in the city, adding a passage describing Thebes in turmoil: Nothyng alas remaynes at all, in wonted old estate, / But all are turned topsey downe, quight voide and desolate.74 He also explicitly relates such desolation to divine retribution. The chorus hopes that the storms are punishments for sin, begging the gods: Powre downe on them diseases fowle, that them deserved have.75 At the end of the drama Neville shows that the Oedipus story concerns the just punishment of a crime and should encourage the audience to live virtuously. Thus a messenger recounts Oedipuss selfinflicted punishment the gouging out of his eyes urging the
72 73
Senecas Tragedies, 1:509. Neville, 1563, D8v. 74 Ibid., A7v. 75 Ibid., A6v.
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audience: Beware betymes, by hym beware, I speake unto you all. / Learn justice, trueth, and fear of gods, by this unhappy fall.76 Like Troas and the preface to Oedipus, Nevilles translation appears contradictory, suggesting sometimes that individuals cannot control their fates, and other times that virtuous living learning justice, trueth, and fear of gods will prevent unusual suffering. Still, as Smith writes of the preface, both morals point to similar conclusions: individuals cannot predict the ultimate direction of their lives. In light of this ending, one might wonder why Neville and his friends took pleasure in the tale. For it presents a potentially disturbing notion: everyone, presumably including those in Nevilles circle, leads a precarious existence. Moreover, it evokes a bizarre sort of self-righteous pity for Oedipus, asking the audience to sympathize with his plight and at the same time to affirm the justice of his punishment. Smith implies that the pleasure of the drama, and of all sixteenth-century revivals of classical tragedy, makes sense in the context of the grammar schools, universities, and Inns of Court where they were performed: For all its fiery poetry, for all its fierce portrayal of social disaster and intense human suffering, classical tragedy was produced so as to confirm, not challenge, the values of the closed societies, the private sixteenth- and seventeenth-century households, who watched it. Pointing to protagonists such as Oedipus, he continues: [T]he insistent individuality of these heroes was seen as a threat to the established social values of moderation, obedience, and rationality and thus was not allowed to engage an audiences sympathy for long. Hence in performance such tragedies became a ritual in which indomitable individuals were ceremonially exorcised from the social order.77 Oedipus promoted a complex sense of communal belonging, helping to confirm the social connections and moral values of the circle that watched it. Smiths account is provocative, but does not fully explain why Neville enhanced the mirror element of the drama, counseling the audience to learn from the unhappy fall of the protagonist. Why encourage others to see the relevance of Oedipuss story if the pleasure of the drama derives mainly from his banishment? One possibility is that Neville aimed to promote humility, serving to remind his ambitious, politically savvy friends that those who live humbly cannot suffer the dramatic falls of the rich and powerful. Yet another significant possibility is that the fall of Oedipus fostered a kind of political awareness, allowing Neville and his friends to think through issues concerning the nature of governance and rule.
76 77
Ibid., E4v. B. Smith, 239.
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Indeed, there is evidence for this possibility in another set of changes, especially in an added passage that connects the issue of fortune with the instability of princely power. Midway through the translation Neville replaces a chorus with another one on the unfortunate state of princes. In the original the chorus excuses Oedipus for his crimes, blaming instead a family curse: Not thou [Oedipus] the cause of our great perils, not on thy account do the fates assail the house of Labdacus.78 In its place he introduces another issue echoing Heywoods Troas on chance and governance.
See, see the myserable estate, of prynces careful lyfe. What raging storms? What bludy broils what toil? What endles strife Do thei endure? (O God) What plags? What grief do they sustayne? A princely lyfe: No. No. (No doubt) An ever durynge payne.79
Princes live careful lyfe[s], beseiged by stormes, broils, toil, and strife. With his substitution, Neville develops Senecas concern with the nature of kingship, showing in this case the grief and dangers that attend rule. At the same time he shifts the emphasis of the drama, making the theme of fortune one of the two focal points of the play. The purpose of the shift becomes clear at the end of the chorus, which introduces a didactic moral: Let Oedipus example be of this unto you all, / A mirrour meete. A Patern playne, of Princes careful thrall.80 The play is an example to you all that is, to Nevilles friends of the unstable position of princes, their carefull thrall. Like Heywood, Neville explores princes carefull thrall, but he does so for different reasons. Heywood had no place in the new Protestant government, and left England in 1562 to become a Jesuit priest in Rome. Neville, by contrast, was a firm supporter of the queen, later becoming an able part of the Elizabethan establishment, serving as secretary to Archbishops Parker, Grindal, and Whitgift, and even writing a critical description of Ketts rebellion, a treatise that was necessary for the malcontents of our time, for their instruction, or terror.81 In Nevilles case, the theme reflects his civic, religious, and political interests, as well as those of his university friends, helping them to consider a major issue: the instability inherent in the political world they would eventually join.
Senecas Tragedies, 1:489. Neville, 1563, D2r. 80 Ibid., D2v. 81 From the title page of Neville, 1615, an English translation of Nevilles Latin description of the rebellion, De Furoribus Norfolciensium Ketto Duce (1575).
79 78
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Neville may have written the text to cultivate communal social and political involvement, but when he published the play it became significant in a new way. Like Troas, Oedipus became a real form of political counsel. Neville dedicated the translation to the Privy Councilor, Dr. Nicholas Wotton, and in this context the play was like Heywoods gift to Elizabeth a subtle form of admonition, encouraging a powerful and influential person to practice humility and compassion by showing that those in positions of authority cannot escape fortunes reach. Overall, in the early production history of the translation of Oedipus first in coterie performance and then in print it is possible to see another example of Senecas variegated social significance. The translation of Oedipus helped Neville to develop into a counselor. He began as an advisor to friends, and later made his entrance onto the public scene. By ventriloquizing Seneca he turned himself into the very sort of counselor and civil servant that he was aiming to become. 6. C O N C L U S I O N The two other translators, John Studley and Thomas Nuce, return to the major themes of fortune, fate, and governance that Heywood and Neville raise. For instance, in his translation of Agamemnon John Studley invents a final chorus on the nature of kingship. After the Greek general is killed, the chorus concludes the play with a description of his life as a lesson on fortune: Lo here how ficle fortune gyves but brytle fading joy.82 Even in his other translations of Seneca, which are far less free than Troas and Oedipus or even Agamemnon, Studley tellingly keeps passages on the fortunes of kings; Nuce does the same in Octavia. Senecan tragedy, then, provided a vehicle for men at the universities and Inns as individuals and as members of an intellectual, ambitious, and politically savvy group to represent anxieties about the nature of kingship. More to the point, the translations allowed them to turn themselves into counselors to power and, in a sense, to participate in the political world they sought to serve. Such an observation returns us to the central argument of this essay: Seneca was popular in the 1560s for a variety of reasons and his plays functioned in a number of complex ways, helping authors to form personal and professional connections and to understand the unstable political world of the 1560s, as well as to participate in and comment upon it. Studies of Senecan tragedy in the Renaissance have sometimes advanced related ideas. On later adaptations of Seneca, Gordon Braden
82
Studley, 1566a, G6v.
54
observes: Senecan tragedy [took] on urgent plausibility in the Renaissance encounter with the prospects and reality of absolutism.83 Writing of the early Elizabethans, H. B. Charlton comments that those at the Inns showed the natural bias of law students looking to the state services for their future, as well as their general concern in a specific political problem which had as many personal as political aspects the anxiety to provide Elizabeth with a husband and the kingdom with an undisputed successor.84 Such criticism, however, glances at the 1560s from the perspective of the 1580s and 1590s, treating the translations swiftly, and mainly as innovative texts that set the stage for later dramatic developments. As this essay has shown, however, the earlier period is a major moment in its own right, and the intent of the translators was not to spur along English drama, but to foster personal and political expression. More important, viewing the reception of Seneca from the perspective of the 1560s underscores a crucial point about the social function of tragedy in early modern England. Numerous studies ranging from Jonathan Dollimores seminal Radical Tragedy (1984) to Jean Howards recent essay on geography in Shakespearean tragedy (2003) establish that later Elizabethan tragedy fostered political thinking and engagement. As Howard shows, Part of the work of early modern tragedy is to desacralize kingship and evacuate dominant ideologies of their power. In tragedy, Shakespeare, in particular, let himself contemplate the undoing of greatness and the fragility of rule.85 Yet, as we have seen, in the earlier part of the Elizabethan period tragedy had a similar importance. The translators, in essence, helped to establish a cultural role for English tragedy that later dramatists built upon. Significantly, then, over the whole of the period Senecan-style tragedy held a relatively consistent social and political role, fostering the political thinking of a number of groups ranging from the homogeneous communities of the universities to the diverse audiences of the popular theaters. To be sure, ways of writing Senecan tragedy changed over time, as authors moved from comprehensive translation to more tactical imitation. As a result of commercial pressures in the public theaters, playwrights could not rely upon Seneca (or upon any other dramatic form) as a template for new drama, and had to continue to innovate combining Senecan sentences and speeches with the dramatic and rhetorical features of other sources in fresh and unexpected ways. In short, they had to rework old
83 84
Braden, 1985, 107. Charlton, 163. 85 Howard, 322.
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(and invent new) kinds of drama that would draw crowds to the commercial theaters of London. Even so, the history of Seneca in the early modern period is not entirely one of generic innovation for the sake of artistically great or commercially viable drama. It is an integral part of a larger trend: the domestication of tragedy as a genre for cultivating political consciousness in Elizabethan England. Having been resurrected in the early part of the period, Seneca may have, as Nashe says, died for our stage. Even so, his works and those who initially translated them gave life to Elizabethan tragedy as a form for raising and sharing concerns about the nature of rule, concerns which affected every subject in the kingdom. IDAHO STATE UNIVERSITY
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Bi bl i o g ra p h y
Baldwin, T. W. William Shaksperes Small Latine & Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana, 1944. Bishop, J. David. Senecas Daggered Stylus: Political Code in the Tragedies. Knigstein, 1985. Boas, Frederick. University Drama in the Tudor Age. Oxford, 1914. Boutcher, Warren. The Renaissance. In The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France, 4555. Oxford, 2000. Boyle, A. J. Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition. London, 1997. Braden, Gordon. The Rhetoric and Psychology of Power in the Dramas of Seneca. Arion 9 (1970): 541. . Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Angers Privilege. New Haven, 1985. Calder, William M. Seneca: Tragedian of Imperial Rome. Classical Journal 72 (1976): 111. Charlton, H. B. The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy. 1921. Reprint, Manchester, 1946. Conley, C. H. The First English Translators of the Classics. New Haven, 1927. Costa, C. D. N. Polonius, Seneca and the Elizabethans. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, n.s., 21 (1975): 3341. Cunliffe, J. W. The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy: An Essay. London, 1893. Daalder, Joost. Introduction. In Thyestes, by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ed. Joost Daalder and trans. Jasper Heywood), xxlv. New York, 1982. Dolman, John. Those Fyue Qvestions Which Marke Tullye Cicero, Disputed in His Manor of Tusculanum. London, 1561. Ebel, Julia. A Numerical Survey of Elizabethan Translations. The Library, 5th ser., 22 (1967): 10427. . Translation and Cultural Nationalism in the Reign of Elizabeth. Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969): 593602. Eliot, T. S. Introduction. In Seneca His Tenne Tragedies Translated into English, comp. Thomas Newton, 1:vliv. London, 1927. . Seneca in Elizabethan Translation. In Selected Essays , 65 105. London, 1932. Fantham, Elaine. Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius. Baltimore, 1996. Finkelpearl, Philip J. John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting. Cambridge, MA, 1969. Fitch, John G. Playing Seneca? In Seneca in Performance (2000): 112. Flynn, Dennis. The English Mission of Jasper Heywood, S.J. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 54 (1985): 45 76. Goldberg, Sander M. Going for Baroque: Seneca and the English. In Seneca in Performance (2000): 20931. Googe, Barnabe. Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets. Ed. Judith M. Kennedy. Toronto, 1989. Green, Douglas E. Newtons Seneca: From Latin Fragments to Elizabethan Drama. Colby Quarterly 26 (1990): 8795. Griffin, Miriam T. Imago Vitae Suae. In Seneca (1974): 138. . Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics. Oxford, 1976. Hatcher, O. L. Aims and Methods of Elizabethan Translators. Englische Studien 44 (1912): 17492. Helms, Lorraine. Seneca by Candlelight and Other Stories of Renaissance Drama. Philadelphia, 1997. Henry, D., and B. Walker. The Oedipus
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of Seneca: An Imperial Tragedy. In Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama, ed. A. J. Boyle, 12839. Berwick, 1983. Henry, D., B. Walker, and E. Henry. The Mask of Power: Senecas Tragedies and Imperial Rome. Warminster, 1985. Herington, C. J. Senecan Tragedy. Arion 5 (1966): 42271. Heywood, Jasper. The Sixt Tragedie of the Most Graue and Prudent Author Lucius, Anneus, Seneca, Entituled Troas, with Diuers and Sundrie Addicions to the Same. London, 1559. . The Seconde Tragedie of Seneca Entituled Thyestes. London, 1560. . The First Tragedie of Lucius Anneus Seneca, Intituled Hercules Furens. London, 1561. Howard, Jean. Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage. Modern Language Quarterly 64 (2003): 299322. Hunter, G. K. Seneca and the Elizabethans: A Case-Study in Influence. Shakespeare Survey 20 (1967): 1726. . Seneca and English Tragedy. In Seneca (1974): 166204. Kiefer, Frederick. Senecas Influence on Elizabethan Tragedy: An Annotated Bibliography. Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 21 (1978a): 17 34. . Seneca Speaks in English: What the Elizabethan Translators Wrought. Comparative Literature Studies 15 (1978b): 37287. . Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy. San Marino, 1983. . Senecan Influence: A Bibliographic Supplement. Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 28 (1985): 12942. . A Mirror for Magistrates. In The Dictionary of Literary Biography: Sixteenth-Century Non-Dramatic Authors (3rd ser.), ed. David Richardson, 167:11627. Detroit, 1996.
Lathrop, H. B. Translations of the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman, 1477 1620 . 1933. Reprint, New York, 1967. Lucas, F. L. Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy. Cambridge, 1922. Manly, John Matthews. The Influence of the Tragedies of Seneca Upon Early English Drama. In The Tragedies of Seneca, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, 310. Chicago, 1907. Marotti, Arthur. John Done: Coterie Poet. Madison, 1986. Mendell, Clarence W. Our Seneca. New Haven, 1941. Miola, Robert S. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca. Oxford, 1992. Neville, Alexander. The Lamentable Tragedie of Oedipvs Sonne of Laivs King of Thebes out of Seneca. London, 1563. . Norfolkes Furies, or a View of Ketts Campe Necessary for the Malcontents of our time for their Instruction, or Terror . . . . Trans. R[ichard] W[oods]. London, 1615. Norland, Howard B. Adapting to the Times: Expansion and Interpolation in the Elizabethan Translations of Seneca. Classical and Modern Literature 16 (1996): 24163. N[uce], T[homas]. The Ninth Tragedie of Lucius Anneus Seneca Called Octavia. London, [1566?] OKeefe, Jack. Innovative Diction in the First English Translations of Seneca: Jasper Heywoods Contribution to the English Language. English Language Notes 18, no. 2 (1980): 9098. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. M. C. Howatson. Oxford, 1989. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 61 vols. Oxford, 2004. Palmer, Ralph Graham. Senecas De Remediis Fortuitorum and the Elizabethans. Chicago, 1953.
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Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison, 1984. Prest, Wilfrid R. The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 15901640. London, 1972. Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge. Ed. Alan H. Nelson. 2 vols. Toronto, 1989. Rees, B. R. English Seneca: A Preamble. Greece & Rome, 2nd ser., 16 (1969): 11933. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. Ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies. London, 1996. Seneca. Ed. C. D. N. Costa. London, 1974. Seneca His Tenne Tragedies Translated into English. 1581. Ed. Thomas Newton. Reprint, London, 1927. Seneca in Performance. Ed. George W. M. Harrison. London, 2000. Senecas Tragedies. Ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller. Rev. ed. 2 vols. London, 1917. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475, 1640. 2nd ed. Ed. Alfred W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave et al. 3 vols. London, 197691. Smith, Bruce. Toward the Rediscovery of Tragedy: Productions of Seneca on the English Renaissance Stage. Renaissance Drama, n.s., 9 (1978): 337. . Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500 1700. Princeton, 1988. Smith, G. C. Moore. Plays Performed in Cambridge Colleges before 1585. In Fasciculus Joanni Willis Clark Dicatus, 26573. Cambridge, 1909. . College Plays Performed in the University of Cambridge . Cambridge, 1923.
Smith, John H. Senecas Tragedies: A Tentative Checklist of Fifteenth-, Sixteenth-, and Seventeenth-Century Printings. Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 10 (1967): 4974. Spearing, Evelyn M. The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca s Tragedies . Cambridge, 1912. , ed. Studleys Translations of Senecas Agamemnon and Medea. Louvain, 1913. . Alexander Neviles Translation of Senecas Oedipus. Modern Language Review 15 (1920): 35963. Studley, John. The Eyght Tragedie of Seneca. Entituled Agamemnon. London, 1566a. . The Seuenth Tragedie of Seneca, Entituled Medea. London, 1566b. Sullivan, J. P. Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero. Ithaca, 1985. Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 15541640. Ed. Edward Arber. 5 vols. London, 1875 94. Vocht, Henri de. Jasper Heywood and His Translations of Senecas Troas, Thyestes, and Hercules Furens. Louvain, 1913. Williams, Gordon. Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire. Berkeley, 1978. Winston, Jessica. A Mirror for Magistrates and Public Political Discourse in Elizabethan England. Studies in Philology 101 (2004): 381400. . Reforming the Political Nation: Gorboduc at the Inns of Court and Succession Revisited. Early Theatre 8, no. 1 (2005): 1134. Works of Thomas Nashe. Ed. Ronald B. McKerrow. 5 vols. London, 190410. Wright, Louis B. Translations for the Elizabethan Middle Class. The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1933): 31231.
Writing and the Paradox of the Self: Machiavellis Literary Vocation*

by J O H N B E R N A R D
The respective roles of virt and fortuna, never resolved in his political writings, are critical to understanding Machiavellis literary evolution. As his letters suggest, in the years between the fall of the Soderini republic and his reentry into public life with Mandragola, Machiavelli came to understand the power of language to impose order on the anarchy of events. The fragmentary LAsino records his discovery that writing can achieve an agency denied to princes. Mandragolas dialectic between the author and his protagonist demonstrates that the inventive plasticity of the writer is grounded in the inherent stability of the creative self.
1. T H E P R O B L E M A T I C S E L F
ne need no longer apologize for thinking of Niccol Machiavelli (14691527) as preeminently a writer. Though the ghost of the coolly analytical theorist still occasionally haunts the critical scene, for more than thirty years the consensus has viewed him primarily as an inventive genius, a man of passionate imagination.1 This view has sometimes led to a split between Machiavelli the father of political science and Machiavelli the artist, or even between politics and ethics.2 But this dichotomy easily resolves itself into a more coherent image of Machiavelli as the inventor of a prose of the world, expressing a consistent view of human affairs in a variety of styles across his chosen genres. In a more narrowly writerly vein, Ricardo Bacchelli argues that even in his theoretical writings Machiavelli conceives of freedom as the inherent exercise of artistic power. For example, in the analytic structures of The Prince or The Art of War historical facts per se entail no order, no scientific rules. Instead, these are provided by passionate conceptualization, the artists capacity to create fictions that have the ring of truth (or at least the force of desire). In this perspective, whether he is deploying the shrewd antitheses of The Prince, unwinding the self-ironic narrative of LAsino, or shaping the biting dialogue of Mandragola, Machiavelli comes across as a man of fertile imagination who
*
This essay is an expansion of a paper delivered at the 2003 RSA conference in Toronto. The author wishes to thank his fellow panelists, Donald Beecher, Olga Zorzi Pugliese, and Raymond Waddington, as well as members of the audience, for helpful suggestions and corrections to his arguments. 1 Caretti, 50; for an overview of critical views down to 1969 of Machiavelli as a writer, see Clark. 2 Zanini, 3536.
Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 5989
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wields the resources of language to forge, in one of his key words, an ordine, a way of understanding the world in short, a narrative.3 In the more blatantly political works this plastic imagination may also help him, as Gramsci believed, to bring to light the latent ideology, or hegemony, of Machiavellis Florentine or Italian citizenry.4 Central to Machiavellis posture as a writer is the question of Fortune as the field of human freedom or, as he typically views it, the respective roles of virt and fortuna. To what extent, Machiavelli repeatedly asks, are mens natures fixed, to what extent can they be refashioned for success? Underlying this question is another, farther-reaching one: What is the nature of the human individual? Is the self a given, a hand one is dealt and must play, or can one reshuffle the deck and deal oneself a better one? In our present cultural discourse we are accustomed to thinking of this question as one of Renaissance self-fashioning. But from the outset this conceit has been fraught with ironies and ambiguities. In his epochal study, Stephen Greenblatt queries the actual, as opposed to hypothetical, autonomy in the process of creating a self for presentation to others.5 As I will argue, Machiavellis struggle with the problem already foreshadows the ambivalences and contradictions displayed by later writers such as Marlowe (156493) and Shakespeare (1564 1616).6 On this subject Machiavelli has, I think, often been misunderstood. Even in The Prince, while his ultimate ideal is, in Victoria Kahns words, to be as flexible and capable of change as Fortune herself, the text fails to produce such a figure because, as Machiavelli himself notes in chapter 25, men are innately incapable of adjusting their natural inclinations to radical changes in their circumstances.7 The conviction that while adaptability to circumstances is maximally effective there are no exemplars of such a virtue is already articulated in the famous Ghiribizzi of 1506.8 Here, after conceding that the man of total self-possession could control the stars and
See Whitfield on Machiavellis use of this crucial term. Gramscis appropriation of Machiavelli informs Struever in her recent study of Renaissance ethical thought: see especially 21024. See Fontana for a sustained exploration of Gramscis debt to Machiavelli. 5 Greenblatt, 89. 6 It is notable that Taylor, the classic modern study of the subject, makes no mention of Machiavelli and, indeed, gives short shrift to the Renaissance. 7 Kahn, 70; Machiavelli, 1982, 188: N si truova uomo s prudente, che si sappi accomodare a questo [modo di procedere] . . . perch non si pu deviare da quello a che la natura lo inclina. On the aporia of chapter 25 of The Prince, see Najemy, 20507. 8 This letter, written by Machiavelli to Giovan Battista Soderini, Pieros nephew, while the writer was with the pope in Perugia, has traditionally been known as the Ghiribizzi (whims, fantasies, caprices). As Atkinson and Sices note (Machiavelli 1996a, 117), it has
4 3
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the Fates, Machiavelli concludes that such wise men do not exist. 9 In addition, as Michael McCanles has argued, the very notion of political power as self-presentation in a public arena implies that the political agents will is checked by, and therefore depends on, the will of others. Far from emerging as an integral subject, by his reliance on public opinion for validation Machiavellis prince becomes the predicate of others, thus proving that political power rests ultimately in the minds of men who believe in it.10 Timothy Lukes has attempted to reduce these tensions between Machiavellis basic anthropology and his nascent political theory to a radical discontinuity in his writings between a purely theoretical fatalism and a more practical need to avoid . . . defeatism.11 As chance or circumstance, Fortune can be defeated via adaptability and audacity; as human finiteness, she cannot.12 In a similarly tendentious approach Richard Greenwood argues that whereas Machiavellis humanistic rationalism leads him in the Ghiribizzi to stress the inherent weaknesses of human nature, especially mens lack of foresight and their inability to control their own nature, in The Prince he no longer thinks the achievement of foresight an insurmountable problem.13 In this reading, the implicit selfcontradiction is ultimately subsumed in the call for a strong leader to redeem Italy from its foreign oppressors.14 In the Discorsi Machiavellis inconsistencies with respect to individual freedom, if less important, are even more blatant. In the first chapter of book 1, where the subject is Romes acquisition of an empire, he refutes
long been considered an essential document for understanding . . . the germination of ideas that blossomed forth in The Prince seven years later. 9 Machiavelli, 1984b (hereafter cited as Lettere), 244 (121): [i]l savio comandassi alle stelle et a fati . . . di questi savi non si truova. In citations of the Lettere, the numbers indicate, respectively, page and letter (in parentheses); translations are mine. On redating the Ghiribizzi from 1512 to 1506, see Ridolfi and Ghiglieri. Accepting their argument, Gaeta (Lettere, 239) reverses the position he held in Machiavelli, 1981a, 228, reassigning its destinario from Piero to Giovan Battista Soderini, and its place of origin from Ragusa to Perugia. 10 McCanles, 106: The prince never is this or that, he uses this or that quality, or rather he has this or that quality predicated of him by others: a discourse that is full of predicates but lacks a subject, a substantive person. . . . The prince exists only to the extent that he is the grammatical subject of sentences that are uttered and written about him. 11 Lukes, 35. 12 Ibid., 47. 13 Greenwood, 199200. 14 Pocock, 181, sees this solution as a cynical reduction of Florence to inert matter on which legislators may impose form and permanence.
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those who attribute it to Fortune, emphasizing Roman prudence and concluding that the fortune which Rome had in this respect, all rulers would have who proceeded like the Romans and would have the same virt as they.15 Hence, the next chapter will show how much more virtue did than fortune to help the Romans to acquire their empire by demonstrating the kind of people the Romans had to overcome.16 In 2.29, however, Machiavellis thesis is that men may second fortune but cannot oppose it.17 Here the rehearsal of the historical facts regarding Romes early encounter with the Gauls suggests a providential pattern driven by an overarching design by heaven that encompasses even the virt of individuals. Having made the Fabii arouse the Gauls ire by violating the ius gentium (law of nations) and then ordained an atypical Roman passivity in the face of their attack, Fortune showed that she had decided . . . to scourge Rome, in the process singling out men of virtue and providing them the occasion to display it.18 On balance, though, here as in The Prince Machiavelli privileges virt, for the following chapter concludes by asserting that where men have little virtue, fortune makes a great show of her power. Hence, states go on changing till a lover of antiquity arises to rule her, so that from one day to the next she does not have a chance to show what she can do.19 Individual virt can trump fortuna, at least within the parameters of a larger, quasi-providential plan. In light of such evidence, it seems fair to conclude that in his political writings Machiavelli is at the very least ambivalent, if not incoherent, on the role of freedom in human affairs. In his nonpolitical writings, however, he goes a long way toward resolving this internal contradiction. Here, if he does not achieve a lucid theoretical solution of the problem for it is the nature of fictions to seek dramatic, not analytic, consistency he does appear to arrive at an existential one. It seems likely that Machiavellis
Machiavelli, 1984a (hereafter cited as Discorsi), 295 (book 2, chapter 1, no. 28): In modo che io credo che la fortuna che ebbero in questa parte i Romani, larebbono tutti quegli principi che procedessono come i Romani, e fossero della medesima virt che loro. 16 Ibid. (2.1.33): quanto possa pi la virt che la fortuna loro ad acquistare quello imperio. 17 Ibid., 374 (2.29.24): Affermo . . . che gli uomini possono secondare la fortuna e non opporsegli. 18 Ibid. (2.29.19): la fortuna per fare maggiore Roma e condurla a quella grandezza venne, giudic fussi necessario batterla. 19 Ibid., 37778 (2.30.32): e perch la varia, variano le republiche e gli stati spesso, e varieranno sempre infino che no surga qualcuno che sia della antichit tanto amatore che la regoli in modo che la non abbia cagione di mostrare, a ogni girare di sole, quanto ella puote.
15
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thinking on this question reflects his own personal circumstances. The progress he made toward resolving the dilemma of individual freedom during his enforced withdrawal from public life under the Medici restoration suggests that a personal imperative may be driving his intellectual shift. In any case the key texts the unfinished LAsino and his comic masterpiece, Mandragola as illuminated by his correspondence during the same years, reveal the outline of Machiavellis philosophical evolution as he comes to terms with his vocation as a writer. These texts repeatedly (and, I will argue, revealingly) focus on the mystery of the self, especially to others. At the heart of the conflict lies Machiavellis radical selfconsciousness about the act of writing. Writers depend on imagination, which thrives on the capacity to occupy other selves and enact their lives, thoughts, and being. The informing paradox that emerges from this sustained display of writerly self-consciousness is that the inventive plasticity of the writer is grounded in the inherent stability of the creative self. 2. W R I T I N G A S M E T A M O R P H O S I S However persistent the issue of individual autonomy is in Machiavellis political writings, it becomes more sharply focused in his literary work. This is particularly true in the critical years between his exclusion from public life in Florence following the fall of the Soderini republic in 1512 and his reentry into that life in a different mode six years later with the composition, and subsequent production, of Mandragola.20 Indeed, in the very period when Machiavelli was writing The Prince, we see him wrestling in his private correspondence with the value and even the possibility of a fungible self, frequently going out of his way to proclaim his own ingrained inflexibility. At the end of his best-known letter to Francesco Vettori (1474 1539) he proudly asserts his personal integrity: Whoever has been faithful and good for forty-three years, as I have, must not be able to change his nature.21 This implicit stain or dye of human personality, as
20 Ridolfi, 1963, 165, identifies a distinct literary phase of Machiavellis life between 151319, sandwiched between his twenty-nine years of continual reading and fourteen-and-a-half of active political engagement, on the one hand, and the seven of his last eight years devoted to writing the Histories, on the other (199). In a note on Mandragolas date of composition, Rodolfi infers (30103) from an allusion to a feared Turkish invasion of Italy that the play must have been written after the beginning of 1518. For more on the date(s) of the comedy, see below, n. 79. 21 Lettere, 428 (224): chi stato fedele et buono 43 anni, che io ho, non debbe poter mutare natura. For a somewhat reductive reading of this ending that stresses the need for a fluid human nature, see Saxonhouse, 7576.
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Montaigne (153392) will call it, is the essence of Machiavellis underlying sense of selfhood.22 In a clear allusion to his torture in the Medici prison, another letter to Vettori extols the pleasure of knowing that I have borne my afflictions so freely that I pride myself on it and hold myself to be more than I had thought, a boast that ironically provokes a mild warning from his friend to be more flexible in the face of misfortune.23 Typically, this stability of the self is perceived as part of a larger order of things. The capitolo Di fortuna, which is roughly contemporaneous with The Prince, begins by evoking the transitory role of virt in a world governed by the capricious anarchy of the voluble creature, Fortuna, goddess of instability and constant change.24 Twice the poem puts forth the desirability of conforming to fortunes changes, a posture that Jerome Mazzeo has called the ethical irrationality at the heart of Machiavellis anthropology.25 On both occasions Machiavelli immediately goes on to question the happiness such a posture may bring.26 At its philosophical climax the poem details a hidden virt implanted in each of us that makes it impossible to alter our ingrained natures to conform to Fortunas changes: And since you cant change your nature / nor leave the place Heaven assigns you, / in mid-journey she will abandon you.27 The Dantean echo in the last line implies Machiavellis adoption of his models disengaged Fortune as Heavens beneficent agent, an idea he will flirt with again in LAsino.28 Machiavellis ordine seems to be an untranscendable internal principle implicitly opposed to the disorder of events sponsored by Fortuna. That a fundamentally stable self may also be the locus of inventive freedom emerges as a major theme in Machiavellis literary output in the years following The Prince and the Discourses. Significantly, in these works
Montaigne, 2:813: Ce nest pas macheure; cest plutost une teincture universelle qui me tache. 23 Lettere, 363 (206): io stesso me ne voglio bene, e parmi essere da pi che non credetti; see also ibid., 365 (207). The key phrase in the two letters, which will recur in Machiavellis later literary works, is volgere il viso alla fortuna, which Machiavelli insists he has done in spades; whereas Vettori, while admitting that he has urged his friend to do so, concedes he himself has not been able to follow his own counsel. 24 Machiavelli, 1996b, 330 (line 10): volubil creatura. 25 Mazzeo, 59. 26 Machiavelli, 1996b, 333 (Di fortuna, l. 106): non per che fidar si possa in lei; ibid., 336 (ll. 16667): pur nondimanco al disiato porto / lun [Caesar] non pervenne e laltro [Alexander] . . . fu . . . morto. 27 Ibid., 334 (l. 119): occulta virt; 33435 (ll. 11214): e, non potendo tu cangiar persona / n lasciar lordin di che l Ciel ti dota, / nel mezzo del cammin la tabbandona. 28 For Machiavellis debt to Dante, see Fido, 1974, 3.
22
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he becomes more reflexive about his vocation. Moreover, it is specifically when the victim of Fortuna and the Medici considers himself as a writer that the informing paradox begins to emerge. Plasticity is of the essence of the literary vocation. In the theoretical writings, as I have noted, coldblooded analysis often reveals the failure of aspirants to power to achieve perfect adaptability. But in the more conventionally literary works imagination (fantasia) can generate a very different order of things, a quality that Ezio Raimondi finds symbolized by his favorite image of the centaur.29 Most important, imagination transcends the limits of identity or nature by inventing or inhabiting diverse possible selves. We may observe the possibility of multiple self-inventions in the exuberant literary playfulness Machiavelli shares in his letters with Vettori and Francesco Guicciardini (14831540). Despite the serious content politics, history, the fate of Italy the conjectures exchanged by Machiavelli and his friends operate in a fertile, if always somewhat suspect, dreamworld of suprarationality. Here words like fantasie, ghiribizzi, favole, and even cantafavola denote the various scenarios and prognostications bandied about when writing about the actions of the powerful.30 In its essence this art is something akin to Keatss negative capability: the gift of entering anothers subjective universe. Machiavelli takes obvious delight in adopting the persona of Pope Leo X (14751521), not to mention his famous self-transmutation into the ancients in his best-known letter to Vettori.31 At his most playful, the political fantast morphs into the deliberate creator of fictions. During a lull in their exchange of serious political commentary, Machiavelli reimagines an amorous scene described by Vettori between himself and one Costanza, entering so far into his friends adventure that he anticipates the visualizing mode later exploited by Pietro Aretino
For Raimondi, 156, the centaur incarnates a quality of impetuous youth and charismatic energy in Machiavelli that enables him to fuse deep thought and fantasia. It is this essential vitality, he believes, that makes Machiavelli himself an actor in a comic theater that separates wisdom from moderation (285). This fantastic ambivalence of the centaur shadows forth the solitude of the writer and the destiny of the intellectual and scientist (286). 30 In Lettere, 239 (208), he describes this discourse as castellucci, glossed by Gaeta here as progetti, and later (Machiavelli, 1984b, 367) as congetture, ragionamenti but translated by Atkinson and Sices (Machiavelli, 1996a, 225) as castles in the air. 31 Lettere, 384 (213): mi sono messo nella persona della papa, et ho esaminato tritamente quello di che io potrei temere adesso, e che rimedii ci farei. . . . ; ibid., 426 (224): rivestito condecentemente entro nelle antique corti degli antiqui uomini . . . e domendarli della ragione delle loro azioni. . . .
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(14921556) I seem to see giving way to the repeated I see32 as well as the adopted Venetians favorite trope of verbal portraiture: If I knew how to paint, I would send him to you painted.33 Several years later, in May 1521, he launches with Guicciardini into the hilarious burla of deceiving the friars he is staying with in Carpi by having his friend repeatedly send dispatches implying that he is an exalted personage.34 But perhaps his most elaborately self-conscious act of epistolary creativity involves his reinvention of his friends Filippo da Casavecchia and Giuliano Brancacci.35 In the course of discussing his affair with Costanza, Vettori lets drop that the two friends have fallen out because Filippo has embroiled himself with a goldsmiths boy. Two weeks later Machiavelli responds with a brilliant novella containing a ridiculous metamorphosis . . . concealed beneath a parable.36 Adopting the fowler trope frequently found in both Roman and Italian comedy, Machiavelli relates how Brancacci ministers to the hind feathers of a tender thrush, tries to foist off the assault on Casa, and is ultimately exposed by the latter, to Brancaccis own disgrace. In Florence in this carnival season, the letter concludes, you hear nothing but Are you Brancaccio or Casa? adding, in Ovids Latin, And this story was notorious all over heaven.37 By announcing his novella as a metamorphosis and concluding it with the
Ibid., 442 (229): E mi pare vedere il Brancaccio raccolto . . . Io lo veggo gestire . . . veggolo, parlando seco . . . Veggo voi, signor oratore, essere alle mani . . . veggovi rispondere generalmente loro . . . Veggo, alla giunta vostra, Filippo, il Brancaccio, il garzone, la fanciulla rizzarsi. See also Aretino, 66271 (letter 321: to Vasari); ibid., 40405 (194: to Michelangelo). 33 Ibid, 443 (229): se io sapessi dipignere, vel manderei dipinto. On Paolo Giovios use of this rhetoric, see Zimmerman, 20607, who also notes (169) that Giovio visited Aretino at least once in Venice. For Giovios relations with Machiavelli in the early 1520s at the Orti Oricellari and his praise of Mandragola, see Travi. 34 At one point (Lettere 522 [270]), Machiavelli pauses in his report of its success lest he overwork my imagination (Io vi scriverrei ancora qualche altra cosa, se io volessi affaticare la fantasia). 35 This feat needs to be contextualized with Machiavellis famous allusion a few months later to the laudable variety of the friends epistolary discourse, veering as it does from the great matters (cose grandi) appropriate to serious men (huomini gravi) to the vain matters (cose vane) of erotica (Lettere, 374 [163]). On cose vane, see Ferroni 1972a; on the letter as a whole, see Najemy, 31934. 36 Lettere 447 (231): io desideravo intendere meglio il vero di una novella che io vi scriverr qui dappi . . . Egli accaduto una cosa gentile, o vero, a chiamarla per il suo diritto nome, una metamorfosi ridicola. . . . E perch io non voglio che persona si possa dolere di me, ve la narrer sotto parabole ascose. 37 Ibid., 450 (231): Se tu il Brancaccio, o se il Casa?; et fuit in toto notissima fabula coelo. Machiavelli quotes Ovids Metamorphoses, book 4, line 189.
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quotation from the Metamorphoses, Machiavelli vaunts the multiple transformation he has effected. First, in retelling the event he has reversed the sexual orientation of his two friends.38 More significantly, his translation of Brancacci and Casavecchia from Rome to Florence implies that for him the latter may have become a unique scene of writing. While it is true that Machiavellis exclusion from public life makes Florence the place where amid my lice . . . I am rotting away, it is also and famously the site of that communion with the ancients that nurtures his political-historical imagination and will shortly inspire his poetic one.39 For Machiavelli, Rome is an emblem of the active life, a life he putatively seeks to reclaim by writing The Prince. To go to Rome is to return to action, and he repeatedly resists Vettoris exhortations to do so without some assurance of real agency. When he finally relents a dozen years later, it is only at the invitation of the Medici themselves and with the (as it turns out) illusory expectation that they will heed his advice. Conversely, the metamorfosi letter implicitly identifies Florence as the locus of that acceptance and redemption of the private life in the practice of theory ascribed to him by Nancy Struever.40 His imaginative resistance to the lure of Medicean Rome enhances the letters status as a token of the transformative activity of Machiavellian writing, with metamorphosis as its quintessential literary mode. This escape from the dilemma of the self most emphatically manifests itself in the fragmentary LAsino, written at this time. Machiavellis most Dantean production reflects his discovery that writing can help fashion an autonomous self and thus achieve an agency denied the princes of this world. Here the persona of a braying beast whose scherzi asinini will expose the follies of his times is joined with a bold acceptance of fate as
As Guido Ruggiero has pointed out to me in a personal communication. Lettere 46162 (236): Starromi dunque cos tra miei pidocchi. Throughout the letters of this period, Vettori tries repeatedly to lure Machiavelli to Rome and Machiavelli resists without a firm expectation of employment. This contrasts with the period immediately following his release from prison, when he seemed to believe Vettori could use his influence with Giuliano de Medici to find Machiavelli employment in now-Medici Rome; see Ridolfi, 1963, 13843. The significance of the two cities may be seen in Vettoris already-cited account of his life in Rome, parodied by Machiavelli. As Najemy, 223, has argued, in proposing that his friend visit him in Rome, Vettori associates it with his own resignation to the life of otiose study, a motif Machiavelli will recast in his letter as a sign of action. In his parodic version of Vettoris privileged life in Rome Machiavelli overcomes the external deprivations of his exile by means of his constructive reading of the ancients. 40 Struever, 166, argues that Machiavellis project is to establish a sense of useful knowledge [that] contributes to rich and compelling hypothetical textures, to the conduct or practice of theory. The kind of moral discipline proffered is a kind of mental discipline, a discipline which is internal, self-referring: Machiavelli, in sum, counsels us to theorize.
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a salutary medicina, an affirmation that is flanked by discourses on Machiavellis own (and his countrys collective) misfortunes. This epiphany anticipates both his turn to the theater and the peculiarly agonistic structure of his greatest comedy. Reconstituted as the mandragola, LAsinos medicina foreshadows the power of fiction to conquer, and hence transcend, personal misfortune. In his more conventional comedies the protagonists tend to bear out the authors existential privileging of men (and women) of character, whose virt implies a stable self. But in Mandragola it is the manipulative mimic-trickster Ligurio who embodies the authors strong sense of his own vocation as the preeminent mode of resolving the paradox of the self at the heart of his classic political texts. 3. A S I N I N E S E L F - F A S H I O N I N G Nowhere is writing more clearly an act of self-transformation than in the fragmentary LAsino. The composition of this text which has recently been called Machiavellis most complex, ambivalent, and moving work remains shrouded in mystery.41 Most of what we know, or may conjecture, about its place in Machiavellis oeuvre derives from his famous letter of December 1517 to Ludovico Alamanni (14951556) in praise of the first edition of Ariostos Orlando furioso. Here he registers his disappointment at not being included among the gallery of poets waiting to greet the voyager at the end of his poetic journey literally, he has been left behind like a prick and promises not to do the same to Ariosto (1474 1533) in his LAsino.42 As it turns out, there is no mention of the Ferrarese in the poem (perhaps because it is unfinished), and it has even been conjectured that it was the achievement of the Furioso itself that
Harvey, 121. Richardson, 137, characterizes LAsino though both ambitious and original as artistically the least successful of [Machiavellis] poems as well as, at 1,000-plus lines, his longest. 42 Lettere 383 (170): Io ho letto a questi d Orlando furioso dello Ariosto, et veramente il poema bello tutto, et in di molto luoghi mirabile. Se si truova cost, raccomandatemi a lui, et digli che io mi dolgo solo che, havendo ricordato tanti poeti, che mhabbi lasciato indietro come un cazzo, et chegli ha fatto a me quello in sul suo Orlando, che io non faro a lui in sul mio Asino. Radcliff-Umstead, 100, implies that the concept of Fortuna in Ariostos Lena may have been influenced by chapter 25 of Machiavellis Principe. Coincidentally or not, Ariostos first play, Cassaria, is an imitation of Terences Andria, translated by Machiavelli. On the possibility that Machiavelli and Ariosto may have met, see Ridolfi, 1963, 168, 300, n. 11.
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discouraged Machiavelli from continuing beyond the completed eight capitoli, turning him instead to comedy as his principal genre.43 Be that as it may, the poem as we have it is a fascinating document and, in its first half at least, a brilliant entre into Machiavellis evolving poetic imagination. A freewheeling pastiche in terzine of Dantean, Apuleian, Homeric, Ovidian, and Plutarchan elements just to mention the most obvious strands it offers an unusual insight into Machiavellis emerging view of the writer as a self-creating entity and of writing itself as both a stabilizing and liberating activity. For our purposes, the poem is especially helpful in showing how this activity converts the inevitable historical defeat of individuals and states into a creative personal triumph. Machiavellis vision culminates in the bitter medicina administered to the poems protagonist at the midpoint of the completed text, a potent symbol of the constructivist power of a fiction to constitute the stable selfhood of the writer. Like the epistolary novella discussed earlier, LAsino hinges on a series of generic metamorphoses. After proleptically defining his asinine persona in the first chapter (to which I will return shortly), in the second the narrator employs the conventional vocabulary of medieval dream-vision narrative When the nice season returns, and so on only to shift abruptly to the Dantean fall into a dark wood.44 His expected rescuer, however, turns out to be not a Virgilian precursor poet but a Donna who blends features of Dantes Beatrice with menacing aspects of her own mistress Circe before settling into a version of Apuleiuss feisty, accommodating maidservant. In capitolo 3 the Lady confirms the narrators suspicion that he is the victim of a cruel and unmerited Fortune, who will in time inevitably turn in his direction but whose blows he must bear for now if he is to earn her favors. Following the long section in which the Ladys moral exhortation is capped by their lovemaking, and a chapter in which the narrator muses on the variation of worldly things, the poem mutates into a long pageant of men-turned-beasts, culminating in the speakers interview with an unrepentant Plutarchan pig.45 What generic twists might have
Dionisotti 1993, 38. Inglese, 23031, has noted that Machiavelli could have had Ariosto in mind as the referent of one of the satirical beasts in chapter 7. 44 Machiavelli, 1996b, 365 (2.1): Quando ritorna la stagione aprica [lit.: open (to the sun)] / allor che primavera il verno caccia, / a ghiacci, al freddo, a le nevi nimica, / dimostra il cielo assai benigna faccia. . . . All subsequent citations of LAsino are from this edition. Page numbers are followed by chapter and line numbers (in parentheses). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 45 Ibid., 380 (5.36): del variar de le mondane cose.
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occurred next well never know. But it does feel as though at this juncture Machiavelli, like his porcine persona, got stuck in the mud. Before this happens, though, the poem richly exhibits the authors existential struggle. Its account of the protagonists liberation addresses the more philosophical side of Machiavellis own quest, his longstanding interrogation of Fortuna. Doomed to his ruin by his vain hopes and vain opinions as he explains to his mentor or would have explained if he could have found his voice he finds in her ministrations both spiritual liberation and sexual solace.46 The former occupies the heart of LAsino as we have it and centers on two transformative moments. The first concerns fate. Once in the Ladys camera the Narrator asks about his future. The resulting Dantean parody begins by defining a harsh, irreversible fate or fortune and goes on to ascribe his innocent sufferings to the malignant instability of things.47 Just as the flux of war, peace, and civil dissension arises because nothing on earth remains in the same state, these same humors will continue to pursue the Narrator till they have played themselves out and his days have turned felicitous.48 Viewed in this light, fate metamorphoses into providence, as the typically Machiavellian view of a hostile Fortuna takes on the Dantean color of a benign force that imposes this harsh star on him while promising untold rewards.49 One of these is in fact told: the vainglory of reporting all that he is about to experience if he undertakes to bear the burden of his fate.50 At the outset of their relationship, the Lady had warned the traveler to shun at all costs the transforming eye of Circe. But under the revolutionary dispensation of a Fortune-turned-Providence, he is now invited to undergo voluntarily his own physical metamorphosis as a condition of accepting his fate. Presumably, as the prologue implies, this would have happened in the completed poem. It is worth noting that in this pivotal passage the metamorphosis of Fortuna into providenza is given a specifically literary inflection. If the Narrator is willing to take upon himself the unmerited whips and scorns of Fortune, he will be rewarded with the sanction to castigate those who
Ibid., 368 (2.8687): Arei voluto dir: Mio senno poco, / vano sperare e vana openione / mhan fatto ruinare in questo loco. 47 Ibid., 373 (3.80, 86): sorte, fortuna. 48 Ibid., (3.9293): nulla in terra / vien ne lo stato suo perseverando; ibid., (3.103): umori. 49 Ibid., 374 (3.118): providenza; ibid. (3.12426): N pu mutarsi questa dura stella; / e per averti in questo luogo messo, / si diferisce il mal, non si cancella. 50 Ibid. (11214): Forse chanchor prenderai vanagloria / a queste genti raccontando e quelle / de le fatiche tue la lunga istoria.
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have been the agents of fate, including his own misfortunes, in the form of what the prologue refers to as the asinine jokes his poem will produce.51 Implicitly, the heroism celebrated here, even if ironically qualified as vainglory, is that of the intrepid satirist exposing the vices of his age. This challenge to embrace a willed, virtuoso freedom is the key to the ensuing action of the poem. Though confused, the narrator takes the Ladys exhortation to heart. Refusing to blame heaven or other men for his misfortunes, he agrees to make his Dantean descent through the infernal gates under her conditions, challenging Fortune to do her worst because I know well she never cared about me.52 The Lady in turn foresees a voyage worthy of being sung . . . by historian or poet : precisely, of course, Machiavelli himself, who in an October 1525 letter to Guicciardini will sign himself historian, comedian, tragedian.53 At the end of the chapter, the Narrator blesses her and prays that she find pleasing the things he has done and written.54 Prior to that consummation, the wine that the Lady proffers in the erotic consolazione that prefaces the journey stands as a metonym of Machiavellis new, almost Stoical version of fate. Let us enjoy ourselves, she proclaims, anticipating the return of good fortune and the fall of those now in power: [A]nd when evil comes, as it must, / gulp it down like medicine; / for he is crazy who [merely] tastes or savors it.55 The consoling wine of misfortune bravely quaffed like medicine is a token of Machiavellis bravado in defying a hostile fate; his vigorous embrace of his miseries is reinforced by the rendering of the ensuing sexual encounter in a mood of
Ibid., 365 (1.111): gli scherzi asinini. Ibid., 37475 (4.112): Poi che la donna di parlare stette, / levami in pi, rimanendo confuso / per le parole chella aveva dette. / Pur dissi: Il ciel n altri i non accuso, / n mi vo lamentar di s ria sorte, / perch nel mal pi che nel ben sono uso. / Ma sio dovessi per linfernal porte / gire al ben che detto hai, mi piacerebbe, / non che per quelle vie che tu mhai porte. / Fortuna dunque tutto quell che debbe / e che le par, de la mia vita faccia; / chio so ben che di me mai non le ncrebbe . 53 Ibid., 375 (4.1618): Alma discreta[,] / questo viaggio tuo, questo tuo stento, / cantato fia da istorico o poeta; Lettere, 568 (300): istorico, comico e tragico. 54 LAsino, 37879 (4.13335): Sia benedetta lora, quando io missi / il pi nella foresta, e se mai cose / che ti fossero a cor, feci n scrissi. Emphasis mine. 55 Ibid., 376 (4.3742): Godiamo adunque; e come fanno i saggi, / pensa che ben possa venire ancora; / e chi dritto, al fin convien che caggi. / E quando viene il mal, che viene ognora, / mandalo gi come una medicina; / ch pazzo chi la gusta o lassapora. The phrase Godiamo adunque clearly echoes the well-known Latin hymn, Gaudeamus igitur.
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(for him) rare erotic harmony.56 Moreover, the elected trope is closely associated in the passage with Machiavellis vocation as a writer, who will reward and please his benefactress-muse with his record of their encounter. Tellingly, the sequence suggests that writing itself may be a way to overcome Fortune. Already in Di fortuna Machiavelli had challenged the goddess to turn her eyes upon him and read the truth about herself that he dares to sing.57 And even earlier, in his prison sonnets to Giuliano de Medici, he insists on his unique identity as one of the poets.58 If the present sequence fails to achieve a systematic solution to the dilemma of the self in its quest for existential freedom, it does suggest that a writerly turning of ones face to Fortune may constitute an asinine fashioning of both the self and its adversary through the exercise of the literary imagination. And the fact or demonstration of this exercise in LAsino implies the paradox that such a stable identity may indeed must underwrite the chameleon-like self-fashioning that is the essence of writing. Machiavelli underscores the broader significance of his personal conversion by explicitly linking it to his interrogation of historical change. In the fifth chapter the pilgrims meditation on his favorite theme of the variation of worldly things shows that events on the macrocosmic level project those in the human world. All states, he muses, fall because the powerful fail to be satisfied by their power.59 Conversely, a state will thrive more or less in ratio to its good laws and order.60 This formulation introduces a typical panorama of Fortunes ceaseless motion: virt brings about tranquility, which leads to leisure, which causes ruin; the ensuing disorders in turn foster virtue, and so forth.61 In short, it is, and always was, and always will be / that evil follows good, and good evil, and the one
Harvey, 129: The poignanacy of LAsino is that it provides a tantalizing glimpse of a kinder world than the one that Machiavelli inhabits, a world of mutuality and friendship between men and women, where men can gain virt through friendship rather than solitary conquest and through equality of relations rather than seduction and violent assault. 57 Machiavelli, 1996b, 33031 (Di fortuna, ll. 1924): E lei, diva crudel, rivolga intanto / ver di me li occhi sua feroci e legga / quell chor di lei e del suo regno canto. / E, bench in alto sopra tutti segga / comandi e regni impetuosamente, / chi del suo stato ardisce cantar vegga. 58 Ibid., 425 (A Giuliano di Lorenzo de Medici, l. 17): io non sono il Dazzo, ma sono io; ibid., 423 (ll. 34): le alter miserie mie non vo contalle, / poich cos si trattano e poeti! 59 LAsino, 380 (5.3839): i potenti / di lor potenza non son mai satolli. 60 Ibid., 381 (5.7678): Vero che suol durar o pi o meno / una potenza, secondo che pi / o men sue leggi buone e ordin fieno. 61 Ibid., 382 (5.9499): tranquillit, ocio, disordini, and virtute.
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is always the cause of the other.62 Clearly, the historico-political situation replicates the pilgrims personal one, already rehearsed by the Lady. In both cases, stability and chaos are subsumed into an overarching order of things, ordained by him (or her) who governs us.63 But coming after the pilgrims liberation, the macrocosmic revelation underscores a crucial difference. Both individuals and states are trapped in the eternal cycle of rise and fall, good and bad fortune. But whereas states cannot escape the cycle because men of ambition, greed, and power will always supply the virt that fuels it, privileged individuals can learn to transcend it by capitalizing on the opportunity provided by their personal misfortune to understand its universal laws. In a sequence that seems to encapsulate Machiavellis understanding of his own experience during the preceding five years, the pilgrim, freed by the Lady from his bondage to desire and from his resentment at its frustration, is now ready to descend. At this point in the narrative, Machiavelli plunges into his bizarre fusion of the tenth book of the Odyssey with Plutarchs Gryllus. In a room presided over by the notorious court buffoon Baraballo (Abate di Gaeta), the pilgrim sees various beasts that symbolize diverse passions and, presumably, represent members of the papal court. These perfunctory descriptions serve as a prelude to his final encounter with a fat pig who justifies his refusal to resume his humanity by delivering a conventional defense of the superior life of beasts. Though manifesting all the human virtues, he explains, animals do so without desire for praise or renown; on the other hand, humans, out of ambition and avarice, pervert their virtues and immodestly give all in the service of their senses. Therefore the pig will remain contented among the other noble beasts. Here the poem ends, the pigs oration having echoed much of the pilgrims own thinking on the desire for fame and material goods that drives men and sustains the inexorable turning of Fortunes wheel.64 Did Machiavelli at this juncture drop the project in the face of an
Ibid. (5.10305): , e sempre fu, e sempre fia / che l mal succeda al bene, il bene al male, / e lun sempre cagion de laltro sia. 63 Ibid., 382 (5.10002): Questordine cos permette e vuole / chi ci governa, acci che nulla stia / o possa star mai fermo sotto l sole. 64 Examining the changes Machiavelli works on his Plutarchan model which gives animals some moral equity with humans without ever questioning mans superiority Fazion, 121, argues that Machiavellis aim is to refute the idealizing vision of the official [Humanist] culture of figures such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola exemplified thirty years later in Gellis Circe. For both, man alone lacks measure (123); but here, as in Discorsi 1.1, 1.3, 2.33, Machiavelli radically redefines virt as unattainable because of his incapacity to achieve happiness by apportioning his desires to the order of things (124).
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irrefutable reductio of his own meditations on human history? Or, on the other hand, was it his reading of the Orlando furioso at this time that persuaded him to turn to another genre? Id like to propose an alternative explanation of Machiavellis abandoning LAsino. Regardless of the order of composition, the opening chapter which I believe he wrote last already seems to foreshadow the authors turn to comedy. Referring in the poems opening lines to his travails in the form of an Ass, echoed later in his seeking the world beneath a new skin and thus implying the metamorphosis that presumably would have occurred had the poem been finished, the speaker builds a case for a poetics of speaking evil.65 Preferring the asss braying to the standard emblems of humanist poetry the waters of Helicon, Apollos lyre he embraces the formers conventional ingratitude as a proper response to his own treatment by others and by the heavens, which have poured new scorn on him.66 Already his rhetoric implies the disdain for Fortuna that he will develop under the Ladys tutelage, explicitly linking it to the renewal of his old habit of asinine speech. The blows of fortune no longer bother him because he has acquired the nature of [the ass] of whom I sing.67 The compulsion to respond in kind by exposing the defects of others is underscored by the novella that follows, in which a young Florentine feels compelled to run whenever he sees an alluring roadway. Despite his alleged cure, the sight of the Florentine Largo sparks his imagination which, whirling in his head, would break even the restraint of Christ and he returns to his obsession.68 At the end of the novella this obsession is sealed with the stamp of indelible selfhood: Because our mind, always inclined / toward its natural bent, does not grant us / any defense against its habit or nature.69 This commonplace of Machiavellian anthropology, often associated in his political writing with the compensating need for either a strong leader or a strong communal bond of legge (law) or buon ordine (good order), is here closely bound to his emergent view of his own creative
LAsino, 361 (1.12): I vari casi, la pena e la doglia / che sotto forma dun Asin soffersi, / canter io, pur che fortuna voglia; ibid., 374 (3.117): cercando il mondo sotto nuova pelle; ibid., 364 (1.101): dir male. 66 Ibid., 362 (1.25): nuovi sdegni. 67 Ibid., 36162 (1.1618): Morsi o mazzate io non istimo tanto / quanto io soelva, sendo divenuto / de la natura di colui chio canto. 68 Ibid., 364 (1.8084): di correr gli torn la fantasia, / che mulinando mai non si riposa; / e giunto in su la testa de la via, / lasci ire il mantello in terra e disse: / Qui non mi terr Cristo ; e corse via. 69 Ibid. (8890): Perch la mente nostra, sempre intesa / dietro al suo natural, non ci consente / contrabito o natura sua difesa.
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fantasy. And that view is patently anarchic: in the poet-satirists persona, Machiavelli casts himself as similarly tainted with an asinine compulsion to run, compelled by the time, abundant in matter.70 Just as the giovanetto throws off his hard-won cure and returns to his obsession, so the speaker has come to recognize his own fantastic vocation as an ingrained habit because human character always reverts to its natural bent. Like the Florentine youth, the speaker has tried an altro modo, but the times are such that he must resume his habit of speaking evil.71 The force of this commitment is marked by the capitolos final aggressive gesture to the reader: And let whoever doesnt like it beshit himself !72 In the passage leading up to this gesture, the reader is warned to keep his distance lest he feel the full force of the poets scherzi asinini. In the guise of a comically rendered compulsive paranoia, Machiavelli has invented a volatile, yet paradoxically solid, persona through which he can confront and chastise an inherently unstable world. 4. S T A G I N G V IR T LAsino, I have been arguing, may be viewed both formally and substantively as a transitional moment in Machiavellis evolution as a writer. The texts oscillation between personal self-interrogation and theoretical discourse hints at its authors struggle to find an appropriate objective correlative for his convictions about the human condition. This struggle can be intuited in the poems generic instability, as he invests his intentions now in allegory, now in parable, now in quasi-philosophical discourse. The theater furnished what must have been an inviting avenue of escape from this generic uncertainty, one more suited both to the writers basic passion for the conduct of human affairs on the stage of public life, and to an ear attuned to the inflections of everyday speech. Hence in his comedies Machiavelli could explore the perennial issues that engage him,
Ibid. (10002): onde, salquanto or di veleno spargo, / benchio mi sia divezzo di dir male, / mi sforza il tempo di materia largo. L. F. Benedetto is probably right, as cited in ibid., 364n, that Machiavellis largo alludes to the via Larga, where the youth goes berserk in the preceding novella. In the parallel between the youthful runners obsession and that of the narrator the times amplitude sends the latter off on his scherzi asinini. 71 Raimondi, 245, sees dire male as the keynote of the Attic or Aristophanic Machiavelli of Mandragola, who can hide his poisons and his bitternesses (250) in antique diversion. 72 LAsino, 365 (121): e chi lo vuol aver per mal, si scinga. A more polite translation might be, So much the worse for him! which is how Blasucci (in ibid., 127, n. 1) translates Nicias almost verbatim use of the same obscene expression in Mandragola 2.1. There the editor glosses, si cali le brache (e si vuoti il ventre).
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exploiting to the full his sense of the absurdities of human intercourse. Of course, any comic playwright must exercise negative capability if he is to bring his characters to life. But Machiavellis comic mirror is held up to a nature in which his personages wrestle with the same issues of identity and flexibility as do Machiavelli himself and the denizens of his historicopolitical world. As Lanfranco Caretti has argued, while the epitome of Machiavellis style is achieved in his purely literary prose, and especially in Mandragola, the same intellectual fervor [and] . . . furor surface from beneath the appearance of logical coldness in the political and historical works. Hence, whether in dialogic or novelistic discourse, the comic is the true Machiavellian muse.73 This being the case, it is surprising that, instead of indulging the inconsistencies and contradictions of peoples behavior, on balance Machiavellis plays celebrate the intractable stubbornness of human nature. This is true across the span of his extant comedies. Indeed, one might conjecture that on the threshold of his literary inauguration Machiavellis decision to translate Terences Andria had something to do with the stability of his heros mentor, Crito, a man who has held on to [his] old character.74 His last comedy, Clizia, similarly foregrounds the persevering Sofronias restoration of the wayward Nicomacos order of life.75 Paradoxically, the one play that seems to contradict this claim and the
Caretti, 56. Machiavelli, 1996b, 97 (Andria, 4.5, Miside to Crito): Tu . . . ritieni il tuo costume antico. The key word costume echoes the tricky slave Davos earlier warning to Panfilo that nobody will ever give a wife to someone with your character (75 [2.3]: nessuno dar mai moglie a cotesti costumi). But the character invoked in this instance is really one fashioned by Davo himself, who counsels the young hero to mask his noble nature in the service of his own ill-advised plot. The true Panfilo is the conventionally faithful lover, who has sworn, and intends, to be true to his love and to acknowledge and raise their child. 75 Ibid., 195 (Clizia, 2.4): ordine della . . . vita. On Clizia as a conventionally moral comedy, see Andrews, 57. Martinez, 1993, 121, views the play as centering on the question of harmonizing human desire with Fortune and Necessity, more specifically with the issue of the stability of the self. The self-referentiality of the protagonists name Nic(c)o(l) Mac[o](hiavelli) is self-evident and has often been noted; Cope, 98, and others have linked it to Machiavellis own infatuation with Barbara Raffacani Salutati. The connection is underscored when Sofronia muses on Nicomacos recent mutazione (Machiavelli, 1996b, 194 [2.4]), describing the former orderliness of his life in language that seems to echo Machiavellis own in his December 1513 letter to Vettori, except that it lacks the culminating bookish communion with the noble ancients. Regarding the eponymous heroine, Martinez, 1993, 127, n. 19, associates her name with the inclinations of nature that make it difficult for even the man of virt to meet the changing circumstances of fortune.
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greatest of Machiavellis comedies provides its most emphatic corroboration. In the brilliantly original Mandragola Machiavelli utterly transforms the classic comic paradigm. Seen through the lens of Andria, virtually all of the characters are infinitely plastic. Thus the virtuous (if absent) heroine Glicerio becomes Lucrezia, a naive victim turned paragon of prudent selfgratification; and the romantic hero Panfilo is transformed into Callimaco, the determined seducer-become-surrogate-husband. Moulding this pliable material seemingly to his will is that paragon of ferociously clever amorality, Ligurio, a highly developed scion of the stock trickster of Roman comedy. How the author perceives these characters relations is one of the chief cruxes of the play. We get a clue in the prologues sardonic apology for his slight material.76 In language reminiscent of a well-known letter to Vettori in which huomini gravi stoop to cose vane (l. 247), the prologue links Machiavellis descent to comedy with his own enforced incapacity to demonstrate a different virtue in other undertakings and then proceeds to extrapolate from his personal situation to the general falling-off of his age from ancient virtue.77 Like the prologue (capitolo 1) of LAsino, the passage ends with a sharp warning to carping critics to beware the playwrights power to hurt. He knows how to speak evil too and is no respecter of persons when attacked.78 Machiavellis intentions are further clarified by the canzone added for the aborted 1526 Faenza production of the play. The pastoral pursuit that it projects of simple pleasures in the country serves as an appropriately deceptive guise for the urban setting of the sardonic comedy to follow. The chorus even echoes the pig in LAsino: pastoral otium is put forth as one extreme, Epicurean alternative to the vanity of self-aggrandizing aspiration. Here the genteel tone of aristocratic pastoral comedy clearly acts as a foil for the more equivocal innuendo of the (earlier-written) prologue and should alert us to the complex, if evasive, stance of its author. If in LAsino Machiavelli could not surmount the logic of the pigs argument against the vanities of heroic virt and complete his intended portrait of a personal conversion to other, more writerly endeavors, in Mandragola he will at
Machiavelli, 1996b, 115: leggieri. Ibid.: ch gli stato interciso [ed.: precluso, impedito] / monstrar con altre imprese altra virte, / non sendo premio alle fatiche sue. . . . Di qui depende, senza dubio alcuno, / che per tutto traligna / da lantica virt el secol presente. On cose vane and huomini gravi, see n. 35 above. 78 Ibid.: io lo ammunisco e dico a questo tale / che sa dir male anchegli.
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least represent other virtues by wielding his destructive pen at the expense of his fallen century. The literary posture of LAsinos prologue leads ineluctably to Mandragola. Indeed, if I am correct in assuming that the first chapter was in fact written last, it may well have led to it directly; for in all probability Mandragola was completed by September of 1518 and may have been begun as early as May of that year.79 In any case, absent a literal metamorphosis LAsinos speakers essential asininity lies in the defiantly hostile truth-telling he threatens there. This stance is repeated, as Giorgio Inglese has noted, in the Mandragola prologue, where dire male is identified as the authors first art.80 This posture may help us to understand how the comedy encodes Machiavellis new writerly understanding of the individuals triumph over Fortuna. The sequence of these pivotal texts is not without its hermeneutic perils. In this connection one must confront the strong, if ultimately unpersuasive, reading of the sequence by Giulio Ferroni, specifically with respect to the question of adaptability. Exploring the links between LAsino and Mandragola, Ferroni sees the poem reaching a dead end because the pigs rejection of humanity challenges Machiavellis former image of man as perpetually aspiring to an affirmation of the self and of his own dominion of the world. If our author privileges adapting oneself to nature or Fortune, then the pig is the perfect incarnation of the Machiavellian savio (wise man).81 In effect, Ferronis Asino replays the existential aporia of the major political texts discussed earlier. Fully embracing the bestial, Machiavelli is trapped in his own logic.82 Faced with this hermeneutical
Though the first documented performance is that referred to by Battista della Palla in a letter to Machiavelli from Rome, 30 April 1520 (Lettere, 507 [260]), Ridolfi, 1963, 173, asserts that the play was performed at the Florentine wedding festivities of Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, (the original dedicatee of The Prince) and his French bride in September 1518. Following Ridolfi, Parronchi, 62, n. 1, argues that Machiavelli started writing the play shortly after the couples wedding in France on 2 May of that year. On the date of the first edition there is less unanimity. Flaumenhaft (in Machiavelli, 1981b, 6) asserts it was 1518 but gives no evidence supporting this date. Colimore, 5556, records that no place or date exists for any edition of the play before 1531. Contra Ridolfi, 1954, 9293, Bertelli, 321, argues that the discovery of a 1519 manuscript of the play, ms. Laurenziano-Rediano 129, proves that it could not have been published in 1518, as no one would copy a printed book, and further infers that it was therefore not written and printed to celebrate Lorenzos marriage (my emphasis). Ibid., 32526, concludes from internal evidence that at least part of the comedy must have been composed as early as 1504. 80 Machiavelli, 1996b, 115: questa fu la sua primarte; Inglese, 231. 81 Ferroni, 1975, 34344. 82 Noting that Ferroni wants to see the Pig in LAsino 8, as supporting, like Lucrezia,
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impasse which, one should note, replicates that attributed to Machiavelli Ferroni blinks, reaffirms the necessity of adaptation, and shifts his attention to Mandragola, where, not surprisingly, he finds Lucrezia to be the perfect incarnation of the alleged ideal of riscontro / mutazione (mimetic compliance).83 But what if we take seriously Machiavellis repeated insistence that in the real world no one is wise enough to adapt to every circumstance? How can we reconcile such a view with the putative heroines or, in other readings, heros epiphany in the play? The answer, I believe, lies in the authors implied attitude toward his own emerging vocation as a writer. The argument for plasticity of character must be transposed to the imaginative dimension. To see why this is so requires revisiting the conventional view of the plays personages as stock figures in a presumed Machiavellian power struggle. To begin with Lucrezia: rather than a paragon of princely adaptability, Machiavelli goes out of his way to present her as the male protagonists ultimate victim. Though she does not share the total invisibility of her precursor Glicerio in Andria , Lucrezia is nearly as impenetrable. She does not appear in the play till the end of the third act. Up to that point we have heard from her husband Nicia about her earlier unsettling experience with lustful friars, which had also been triggered by Nicias desire for a pregnancy, as well as her extreme piety (3.2). But her first speech in the play, addressed to her mother, reveals her sense of honor and her revulsion from sacrificing an innocent stranger in the process of losing it (3.10), while her passive role in the combined assault by Timoteo and Sostrata in the next scene shows her departing from a familiar moral world taken on faith into an unknown one Where are you leading me, father? identified in her own mind with death.84 The crisis of Lucrezias development is nearly buried in her offstage bedroom conversion. And it is in keeping with Machiavellis sense of the mystery of human motivation that her change of heart is mediated to us by her lover. The few hints we get of the nature of her metamorphosis are thus
an hypothesis of the savio capable of mutare coi tempi, Inglese argues that he turns the poem upside down: While the myth of superiority of animals does represent an antihumanist ideal, the context the mud the Pig wallows in reveals his function of discouraging any nostalgia for a regenerative reconciliation with nature (23536). 83 Ferroni, 1972b, 8187. 84 Machiavelli, 1996b, 145 (3.11): A che me conducete voi, padre?, which echoes her immediately preceding Che cosa mi persuadete voi? Pressed by her mother and the friar, she proclaims herself contenta: ma non credo mai essere viva domattina.
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ambiguous enough to allow full play to interpretation, as subsequent criticism has shown. Lucrezias last words before her fall are a simple prayer to God and the Virgin to preserve her from harm; her next are those reported by Callimaco after their tryst, in which she inserts a newly discovered self into a world that she enters under his protection. Here, after a few sighs, she acknowledges that the combined forces of her lovers shrewdness, Nicias stupidity, Sostratas simplicity, and Timoteos wickedness have led me to do what I never would have done by myself. Then, in a sardonic parody of the Narrators metamorphosis in LAsino, she infers from this improbable event the workings of a heavenly inclination that she lacks the power to resist.85 Is the irony Lucrezias or Machiavellis? As Jackson I. Cope has warned us, one should tread lightly in projecting an after-curtain life on to this innovatively open-ended comedy.86 Much has been made of Lucrezias rebirth as a Machiavellian New Woman whose worldliness stems from a sexual initiation that liberates her own suppressed desires.87 But Lucrezia confesses to no such transfiguring pleasure, either to Callimaco as he reports it or to the audience in the following scene. Callimacos passing allusion to the tenor of her surrender implies a resignation to a moral universe controlled by others. When Lucrezia reappears in person in act 5, scenes 5 and 6, we find a few swift traces of an assertive young wife who will probably exact a more painful price than mere cuckolding from her dottering husband for the production of his heirs. But on balance it seems likely that the new Lucrezia is intended to appear no more a self-creation
85 Ibid., 163 (5.4): doppo qualche sospiro disse: Poi che lastuzia tua, la sciocchezza del mio marito, la semplicit di mia madre e la tristizia del mio confessoro mi hanno condotto a fare quello che mai per me medesima arei fatto, io voglio iudicare che e venga da una celeste disposizione che abbi voluto cos, e non sono sufficiente a recusare quello che l cielo vuole che io accetti. 86 Cope, 11. 87 Echoing Ferroni, Barber, 45758, observes that Lucrezia, having live[d] in harmony with her environment (though without control), counters [Fortune] with a true mutazione and regains control. Similarly, Martinez, 1983, 40, argues that by submitting to Callimacos masculine power, Lucrezia ironically exchanges sexual natures with him; hence the ambiguous female power of Fortuna-Natura triumphs over traditional male virtue. Not all recent critics share this view of Lucrezia. For example, Behuniak-Long, 265, sees her as herself a figure of Fortuna, a fickle woman of questionable character who raises men in order to enjoy their fall (in short, a whore [272]); Tonelli, 42, reads Callimacos return from Paris as a move from a politically detached to engaged life in Florence, where he executes an allegorical rape of Fortune-woman. In a more explicitly political reading, Lord, 15556, views Lucrezia as representing the Florentine popolo, which, though fit to govern a kingdom, is incapable of governing itself because it is shackled by religion.
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born of disillusionment than is her precursor. She has simply adopted a different, and perhaps more gratifying, set of moral values from other characters, who command little of our respect. Her eye-opening discovery that the mandragola was a hoax neither adds to nor detracts from her sense that the moral stage on which she moves is constructed by others. For this reason, perhaps, more than as a result of her initiation into sexual pleasure, she tells Callimaco he will henceforth be her lord, master, guide.88 For all that, it is equally difficult to see Callimaco as embodying the authors ideal of personal power, as is often claimed. Such a view might have worked in the ambiance of The Prince; and Callimaco has been viewed as a Machiavellian prince under the tutelage of his adviser Ligurio. But the young seducer is something of a chameleon, who at times reveals a surprising lack of purpose and, at best, proves himself adept at taking Ligurios instruction, as when he adroitly picks up and runs with the latters cue about the mandrake root (2.6).89 But driven as they are by a derived or mimetic desire for Lucrezia, his metamorphoses first into a doctor, then into the supposed garzonaccio (young stud) are always passive and imposed, as the crucial invention of the mandragola in 2.2 shows.90 On the deepest level, he may reflect Machiavellis abiding sense that eros always drives men outside their true selves and hence represents a threat to stable identity. In his defining soliloquy in 4.1 he acknowledges himself to be poised between Nicias stupidity and Lucrezias virtue and foresees his own disappointment in the pleasure he desires. Echoing the words shared by Vettori and Machiavelli after the latters prison ordeal, he urges himself to face up to destiny.91 But unlike Machiavelli (and like Vettori himself), he is incapable of bearing his fate like a man, embracing instead a womanish passivity before the forces that assault him, as Lucrezia herself has already done with her mother and Fra Timoteo. The trickster Ligurio, on the other hand, comes closer to representing
Machiavelli, 1996b, 163 (5.4): signore, padrone, guida. Though there is always the possibility that he has been coached offstage. On Ligurios annihilation of Callimacos personality, see Ferroni as cited in Barber, 453. Sparacio, 79, sees Callimaco as virtually a pawn (pedina) of Ligurio. For a more Machiavellian Callimaco, see di Maria, 22, who insists on the protagonists control of both Ligurio and the plot, thus qualifying as a Machiavellian prince reclaiming his lost state (of happiness). 90 In the tradition of Livys ur-Lucretia narrative, Callimacos desire is generated by the praise of her he hears in Paris from Nicias kinsman, Cammillo Calfucci (Machiavelli, 1996b, 118 [1.1]). On mimetic or triangular desire, see Girard, 4152. 91 Ibid., 148 (4.1): Volgi el viso alla sorte, fuggi el male, o non lo potendo fuggire, sopportalo come uomo (see n. 23 above). See also Lettere, 363 (206) and 365 (207): Volgere il viso alla fortuna.
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the more active, if refined, Machiavellian agent of these transitional years. Though we should take care not to reduce him to a stand-in for the author, we might nevertheless taking our cue from the echoes of LAsino in the prologue of Mandragola reconsider Ferronis dismissal of Ligurio as a merely mechanical animator of events. It is true that, in a sense, Machiavellis parasite operates at a tangent to the action of the play, thus functioning as an agent of defamiliarization (straniamento) vis--vis the audience.92 As such, he oscillates between two competing paradigms: Wayne Rebhorns ubiquitous fox, the con man par excellence, and a more subtle constructor of others realities.93 Although the difference between these types may seem nugatory, it turns on a series of crucial distinctions. Is Ligurio primarily a manipulator or an inventor? Are his interlocutors the materia on which he imposes forma his victims or his (even if unwitting) collaborators? Finally, and most important, is the entire interaction to be viewed as the hostile encounter of adversaries evoked in the two prologues, or as an ultimately positive social engagement? The answers to these questions rest on our understanding of Ligurios motives. The quickness of his ingegno is indisputable. Besides the mandragola itself, he gratuitously invents a deaf Nicia, coerces Timoteos collaboration in a fictive abortion to earn Nicias alms, and torments the latter by repeatedly ratcheting up the price (3.4). He then uses the abortion in a bait-and-switch maneuver, first to test Timoteos pliability, then to steer him to the real task of persuading Lucrezia through her credulous mother to go through with the mandragola scheme (3.6, 8), leaving him feeling totally (if profitably) swindled.94 Finally, he improvises a solution to the problem Callimaco has created when he says that hell help the others nab the sacrificial victim, himself: Ligurio will get Timoteo to disguise himself as Callimaco (4.2). As a plot device, the mandragola itself betokens this dimension of his character. When Callimaco, having won Nicias total trust with his command of Latin, is forced in 2.2 to pick up Ligurios improvisations with respect to the mandragola, we begin to associate the innocuous root with the power to control others perceptions of their world. By metonymy, then, the mandragola already embodies the human capacity to construct reality. More elusive is the ethical valence of this posture. As Ferroni and others have argued, Ligurio appears to stand totally outside the events he
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Ferroni, 1972b, 68. Rebhorn, 5660. 94 Machiavelli, 1996b, 142 (3.9): giuntato.
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is orchestrating. At one point, observing Callimaco nearly swoon in gratitude to Timoteo and Sostrata in anticipation of sexual pleasure, he apostrophizes, What kind of guy is this? an apposite variation on Davos What kind of tale is this? in the translated Andria.95 Undoubtedly, a large part of his energy derives from the action itself. Like Machiavelli among the friars of Carpi, Ligurio takes evident pleasure in the sheer execution of the plot. He even manages to slip Nicia some foultasting camphor, in gratuitous payment for the latters gullibility (4.9). Yet beyond the pure joy of imposing his will on the world, his complex character encompasses the artists insidious ability to enter into others psyches. When Callimaco admits his distrust of the parasite, Ligurio counters that he can be trusted because your blood flows with mine so that I want to satisfy your desire almost as much as you do.96 The implication is that Ligurio has the capacity to easily imagine himself in anothers skin. On the eve of Callimacos triumph, Ligurio reminds him that once he gains Lucrezias bed hell still have to earn her complicity (4.2). When he learns that his protg has heeded this advice and effected a permanent change in the plays social configuration, he says nothing more about a material reward. On one level, then, Ligurio seems to incarnate the Machiavellian ideal of an intense but disinterested amorality. On this reading, he incarnates the authors aggressive dedication to deceiving his audience, as Rebhorn argues. But there are implicit disclaimers of this ideal in the text. In arguing for a Pirandellesque humanizing contrarian sentiment at work in the play, Franco Masciandaro has pointed out that it is Ligurio who in the finale thinks to ask if anyone will remember Siro.97 Has the trickster a soft spot in his heart for the lowly servant, or does his image of an emerging ordine perhaps prohibit exclusions? If there is a positive ideal informing the parasite, it is one that centers in the power of fantasia to transcend the limitations of our fixed natures, even to the extent of imagining a more functional community. Precisely because he seems to operate imaginatively outside the arena of human actions and desires, Ligurio signifies the ultimate in human potentiality. Only by adopting such a mask as Ligurios and imaginatively penetrating the various guises of humanity, including the bestial, can one express it fully.
95 Ibid., 149 (4.2): Che gente questa; ibid., 94 (4.4): Che favola questa? On favola here (and fabula in Terence) as stuff or nonsense, see Machiavelli, 1985, 78. 96 Machiavelli, 1996b, 124 (1.3): Non dubitare della fede mia, ch quando e non ci fussi lutile che io sento e che io spero, ci che l tuo sangue si aff col mio, e desidero che tu adempia questo tuo desiderio presso a quanto tu. 97 Masciandaro, 194.
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The ambiguous resonance of Ligurios function is captured in his name, which evokes the equivocal stance of his author. As Donald A. Beecher has written, though the animateur . . . has tainted the moral atmosphere of the entire play with his aberrant nature, as a figure of the satirist he emerges as an ironic public benefactor whose genius is for the construction of the comedy of the inverted world, a sardonic-satirical version of Northrop Fryes new society.98 Ligurio implicitly gloats over (ligurire) the plays other personages, fulfilling the dire male threat of the two prologues. But he also binds (ligare) them into a new social order that reflects their true moral values.99 It is hard to resist reading Machiavellis own virtues into Ligurio. Acknowledging the absence of ancient virt in his fellow citizens, yet denied by his evil fortune any possibility of active virtue, Machiavelli adopts the alternative literary mode by reverting to his first art of braying at his compatriots. Through the persona of Ligurio he exposes the whole instability and hollowness of their social and psychic ordini. Far from empowering Lucrezia to seize the occasion and overthrow Fortune, Ligurio subjects all of the plays characters, in Jane Tyluss words, to the vulnerable posture of the early modern woman.100 Through his superior intelligence and grasp of human motive, he conquers and reshapes his world. If this reading of the play has any merit, the ultimate key to its understanding may lie in the elusive mandragola itself. More than merely a word without substance by whose virtue people can be manipulated rhetorically to believe in anothers reality, as Rebhorn defines it, the mandragola is, as we have seen, emblematic of the mysterious self, mirroring each characters beliefs, desires, and prejudices.101 Upon those who control it, however, it bestows the gift of self-knowledge, sharing the power of the Asino Ladys draught of evil. It is an elixir for the knowing that underscores the unique virtues of the literary imagination. Inoculated by reality, its true master is immune to its destructive power. By this final metamorphosis of the metaphoric medicina to the symbolic mandragola, Machiavelli the writer completes the transcendence of his personal misfortune through fantasia, producing at last an exemplar of the Machiavellian wise man. In addition he offers his newfound wisdom as an ambiguous gift to his compatriots if he can only castigate them into partaking of his vision.
Beecher, 179, 184. The significance of Ligurios name is a commonplace of criticism of the play. See, for example, Flaumenhafts note in Machiavelli, 1981b, 57. 100 Tylus, 676. 101 Rebhorn, 67.
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5. THE MACHIAVELLIAN EXCHANGE Is comedy, then, Machiavellis true genre, as Caretti believes, or is Riccardo Bacchelli more correct in claiming that Machiavelli truly is, as he says, istorico, comico e tragico?102 On balance, I think the former. While the historian observes that the individual always loses, in his literary incarnation Machiavelli believes that men create their reality by framing their own stories. Thus the writers essential freedom to invent epitomizes each individuals struggle to attain his desires or, when he fails, to construct an acceptable narrative.103 This applies to himself as well, as his letter of December 1509 to Guicciardini narrating his humiliating encounter with an old Veronese whore, or those of 1521 detailing the Carpi prank, suggest.104 Even the eponymous Nicomacos humiliation in Clizia, reminiscent of Machiavellis own in these and other episodes, may be read as a literary recreation of his autores imaginative self-redemption. Without pushing Machiavellis text into the shadowy domain of allegory, when Damone advises the old lecher to put himself and his honor in Sofronias hands (5.2) as, returning to himself, he soon does we may be forgiven for discerning a reflexive nod toward the act of writing as the construction of wisdom. In the pages above I have tried to argue that the resolution of Machiavellis internal conflicts occurs in the crucial period of his life between his release from prison and his theatrical debut in Florence. Commenting on this gestation, Raimondi implies that the writer internalizes his long duet with Vettori in their correspondence, transforming it into a private competition between the political writer and the exuberant fictional narrator of his literary works. One of these voices, he adds, may conceal an extravagant and provocative will to paradox.105 On the stylistic level, this conjecture captures well our sense of the dynamic of this stage in Machiavellis literary development. The sardonic glint in the portraits of
See p. 76, above. Most of Sullivans contributors, as well as Caretti, opt for comico; for the exceptional, tragic Machiavelli, see Martinez, 2000. 103 Najemy, 33637. 104 For the whore, see Lettere, 32123 (178). Contrary to the usual positive view of this letter as a self-deprecating joke, Schiesari, 17879, sees the anecdote as stag[ing] the fear of a feminine symbolic order, one where the distinctions between political economy and sexual economy, subject of exchange and object of exchange, masculinity and femininity, are blurred and revealing Machiavellis inherent suspicion of women as well as his inability to theorize economic functions. 105 Raimondi, 196: Lo scrittore politico tace o si confonde con il narratore giocoso del lungo duetto col Vettori in una sorta di gara a due voci, che forse nasconde anche, per una delle due parti, una volont di paradosso o di esasperata stravaganza, quasi di sfida.
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our author and the exuberant fantasy of both his letters and the pranks they frequently relate suggest the plasticity of the synthetic imagination always lurking near the surface of Machiavellis political analyses. What the texts queried in this essay add to this intuition is the writers growing conviction that the imaginative (re)construction of reality may furnish the key to resolving the agon between freedom and necessity, virt and fortuna, that bedevil the political theorist on the level of abstract analysis. The social fabrications represented in his great comedy, and his own analogous act of creating them glanced at in its prologue, come closest to articulating the virt demanded by the new Medicean epoch into which history plunged him in 1512. Whether or not this view of writing as a self-redeeming stabilization of external chaos is, as Struever has proposed, part of a broader early modern relocation of inquiry in a personal and interpersonal realm of theory as practice is a conjecture worthy of further debate.106 Such an argument might begin by acknowledging that, contrary to the consistent philosophical position on the Self and the Other so often sought by his critics, Machiavelli enacts human freedom in discrete moments of imaginative writing. Viewed in this perspective, his entire literary production is what Struever calls a conversation or exchange with his reader inviting the exercise of imaginative freedom by which one fashions a self.107 This emphasis seems more apt, and in the final analysis more convincing, than Rebhorns brief for a more antagonistic and confrontational version of self-fashioning.108 Moreover, on the historical plane invoked by Struever (following Gramsci), this self, ever open to expanding human possibility, is both a private answer to the question of virt versus fortuna and the public foundation for a hegemonic culture a republic of free citizens.109 UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON, THE HONORS COLLEGE, EMERITUS
Struever, 16. Ibid., 17581. 108 The crux of Rebhorns overall argument is the radical, unstabilizing view of both self and society (25) that he implicitly attributes not only to Machiavellis con men but to Machiavelli himself. The issue, for me, is whether Machiavelli does in fact endorse such a view or merely acknowledges it as inherent in the type. By connecting the con man with Renaissance self-fashioning (26) Rebhorn usefully raises the crucial issue of the malleability of the self in Machiavelli. The deep personal investment in the ideology of selffashioning (28) that he attributes to the writer seems to me instead to be a literary motif: a possibility of human life that Machiavelli can embrace as a writer even as he denies his own capacity and (implicitly) the desirability of such total moral freedom. 109 Struever, 214.
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Bi bl i o g ra p h y
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Seneca in Early Elizabethan England*

Nuce, D4v. Neville, 1563, a3v.

Heywood, 1559, A3v. Senecas Tragedies, 1:13132. 53 Heywood, 1559, B1v.

Ibid., B3v. Ibid. 56 Senecas Tragedies, 1:197.

Heywood, 1559, E2rE2v. Kiefer, 1983, 71. 59 Ibid., 7172.

Ibid., E4v. B. Smith, 239.

Studley, 1566a, G6v.

Braden, 1985, 107. Charlton, 163. 85 Howard, 322.

Writing and the Paradox of the Self: Machiavellis Literary Vocation*

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