ABSTRACT

AN ANALYSIS OF THE MOTIF OF DEATH AND REVIVAL
IN THE TRAGICOMEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE,
DANIEL, AND FLETCHER

BY

Peter James Zacharias

The motif of death and revival has three basic func-
tions in the English and Italian plays analyzed in this
thesis. Accordingly, each of the first three chapters
traces the history and discusses the specific meaning of
one of the functions, and the last three use these con-
clusions to elucidate the appearance of the motif in the
pastoral tragicomedies of Lyly, Shakespeare, Daniel, and
Fletcher, in the romances of Shakespeare, and in four heroic
tragicomedies of Fletcher.

A death or a near death and then a sudden revival has
a didactic function in the sixteenth century English and
Italian humanist plays. The first of these, Grimald's

Christus Redivivus and Giraldi's Altile teach the doctrines

 

of salvation. Later plays are more secular. In R.B.'s

Apius and Virginia, Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra,

 

Edwards' Damon and Pithias, and Greene's The Scottish

 

 

Peter James Zacharias

History 9£_James the Fourth the death or near-death and

 

revival of the protagonist causes a conversion from vice
to virtue in the magistrate or king who ordered his death.
In Italy Tasso's Aminta portrays a conversion from indif-

ference to love. With Guarini's El Pastor Fido the motif

 

loses its didactic function. He thinks a tragicomedy
should only purge the audience of its melancholy.

The motif has an aesthetic function which it
acquires when Boccaccio and Sannazaro first use it to
structure their pastoral eclogues and romances. After
Politian, who includes the motif in his pastoral drama,
grfgg, it becomes an integral part of the combined Ovidian
mythological and pastoral worlds. Tasso in the Aminta
weaves the grace and delicacy of the pastoral and the
simplicity and beauty of the Ovidian tale around the motif
of death and revival, forming a delicate and artfully
constructed fable which celebrates a mystery of love.
Besides reinforcing the spectator's awareness of observing
a created artifice, the motif contributes to the balance,
the grace, and the loveliness of the work. In I; Pastor
Fido Guarini combines elements of the heroic world with
Tasso's awsthetic landscape. This combination adds the
self-conscious artist's ingenuity to the qualities intended
to be appreciated by the audience.

The motif can also have an anagogic function which

originates in Gottfried's Tristan where, in the image of

Peter James Zacharias

a dying knight being revived by his mistress, the motif
points to the noble heart's participation in divine love.
Gottfried's chief stylistic embellishment, the oxymoron,
symbolyzes the coincidence of Opposites which indicate the
divinity of the noble heart. The troubadours transmitted
the image and the oxymoron to Dante who uses them in the

Vita Nuova to chart the soul's upward journey from the

 

world of the senses to the world of purified spirits who
worship the splendors of God. The Neoplatonists trans-
formed this image of the liege-lady reviving the moribund
knight into a metaphysics which stresses the necessity of
the death of the soul in the physical world, its rebirth
in the spiritual world of the mind, and its union with
divine beauty. Botticelli, Titian, Politian, and Tasso
use the motif to point beyond itself to this mystery of
the soul's death and rebirth.

These three function also appear in the English
pastoral tragicomedies. Lyly, a humanist, uses the Italian
pastoral conventions to ridicule the madness and foolish-

ness of true love. In Two Gentlemen g£_Verona, Love's

 

 

Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It

 

 

 

Shakespeare uses the motif to point to the Ne0platonic
mystery of the union of the soul with divine beauty.
Daniel in The Queen's Arcadia and Hymen's Triumph uses it
to reveal the social and moral evils in his society. And
finally John Fletcher deve10ps the aesthetic uses of the

motif in The Faithful Shepherdess.

 

Peter James Zacharias

In Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The

 

Tempest Shakespeare uses the image of the dying knight
being reborn to inquire into the nature of the perfect
ruler. Perfection is a blend of the heroic and the pas—
toral values which can only be achieved after severe
physical and mental suffering. Exposure to divine love,
represented by the young lovers, is the only experience
that will heal the fragmented soul of the ruler and make
perfection a reality.

John Fletcher continues to use the motif to display

Ids own ingenuity and artistic skill. In The Mad Lover,

 

The Queen 9£_Corinth, The Loyal Subject, and The Laws of_

 

SEBSX the motif retains only its past aesthetic associa-
tions. The always surprising and novel variations of the
motif of death and revival are intended to entertain the
audience and not to teach moral lessons or point beyond

themselves to sacred mysteries of love.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE MOTIF OF DEATH AND REVIVAL
IN THE TRAGICOMEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE,

DANIEL, AND FLETCHER

BY

Peter James Zacharias

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1970

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of
Dr. George Price, who read the entire rough draft and made
many suggestions which substantially improved the quality
of the thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Harry Hoppe
and Dr. Lawrence Babb; their advice on the subject and

organization of the thesis was most gratefully received.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . .
INTRODUCTION 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O 0
Chapter
I. THE DIDACTIC USE OF THE MOTIF OF DEATH AND
REVIVAL IN EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH
AND ITALIAN PLAYS . . . . . . . . . .
II. THE AESTHETIC USE OF THE MOTIF IN THE ITALIAN
PASTORAL TRAGICOMEDIES . . . . . . . .
III. THE MOTIF OF DEATH AND REVIVAL IN RENAISSANCE
THEORIES OF LOVE . . . . . . . . . .
IV. THE FUNCTION OF THE MOTIF IN THE PASTORAL
PLAYS OF LYLY, SHAKESPEARE, DANIEL, AND
FLETCHER I O O O O O O O O O 0 O O
V. THE USE OF THE MOTIF IN SHAKESPEARE'S
ROMANCES O O O O O O O I O I I I 0
VI. THE DEGENERATION OF THE MOTIF IN THE
TRAGICOMEDIES OF JOHN FLETCHER . . . . .
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
BIBLIOGRAPHY O O I O O O O O O O O O O 0

iii

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ii

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165

233

276

313

316

INTRODUCTION

This thesis analyzes the function of a particular
dramatic convention, the motif of death and revival, in the
works of several Renaissance dramatists. A near death and
then a sudden, unexpected revival appeared in a great many
Italian and English dramas throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Because the characters are brought
close to death and sometimes even die, causing a great deal
of sorrow, and yet a short while later return to a happy
and joyous life, the dramatists and contemporary editors
of their works called these plays tragicomedies.

Within this general category, three species can be
distinguished. In the pastoral and mythological tragicomedy
the near deaths and revivals occur in a rustic Arcadian
setting populated with Ovidian gods, goddesses, satyrs,
fauns, and nymphs. The heroes and heroines are lowly
shepherds and shepherdesses whose difficulties with love
cause their near deaths and rebirths. The second species,
which for want of a better name can be called romantic
tragicomedy or just romance, involves the members of a
court and usually pits various people of the royal house-
hold against a cruel and irrational king. The protagonists

always leave the court (sometimes on their own and sometimes

iv

at the king's command) and journey to some wilderness where
they have many adventures which culminate in their near
death and revival. After reviving, they return to the court
and reconcile their differences with the king. Heroic
tragicomedy, the third species, also limits itself to the
aristocracy surrounding the court, but the conflicts in
these plays generally focus upon honor and loyalty instead
of love. In a typical play a famous general or noble
returns from war and is treated unjustly by those at the
court. The various near deaths and sudden revivals help
him to gain his rightful recognition and reward.

The motif is likely to manifest itself in any one of
three forms in these tragicomedies. Sometimes it organizes
the entire work. In Pericles, for example, his death and
rebirth consume the five acts of the play and lend coherence
to the diverse episodes. More often the death and revival
confines itself to one brief scene. Behind this form of
the motif lies the image, found in several medieval ro-
mances, of a dying knight being revivified by his liege-lady.
Finally the motif appears in the rhetoric of a play as the
conjunction of the pair of opposites, life and death. The
early dramatists relied upon this rhetorical figure, called
oxymoron, to enliven the dialogue of their tragicomedies.
The later playwrights, however, failed to see the need for

the figure, so it gradually ceased to appear in their plays.

The three forms of the motif will have a didactic, an
aesthetic, or an anagogic function in any particular play
regardless of its species. When the motif functions didac-
tically, it helps to effect a moral conversion in the
central character, whose behavior is intended by the dram-
atist to be an inspiring moral lesson for the audience. The
anagogic function, or the use of the motif of death and
revival as a symbol that points to a truth existing beyond
the world of the play, is more difficult to recognize.
Generally those playwrights familiar with Neoplatonism use
it to point to the necessary death and revival of the soul
on its spiritual voyage to union with divine beauty. The
aesthetic and emotional function, the opposite of the
anagogic, turns the motif into an end in itself. The
dramatist only wants to please and delight his audience,
and he feels that he can best do this with a display of
his own ingenuity and artistic skill; consequently he
creates a work of art full of conceits and rhetorical
ornaments that call attention to themselves and that pos-
sess so much wit and elegance that no one can mistake them
for the real world. The motif appears in any number of
novel variations, and the dramatist hopes that these new
and always surprising variations will purge the melan-
choly from the hearts of the audience. If the motif is
able to do this, then the dramatist feels that his efforts

have not been in vain.

vi

In England and Italy these three functions aligned
themselves in a rough chronological scheme. First the
humanists concentrated upon the didactic function of the
motif. Then Shakespeare used it anagogically; finally
Fletcher developed the aesthetic and emotional purpose of
the motif. In Italy Giraldi wrote didactic plays; Tasso,
anagogic; and Guarini, aesthetic.

I am mainly interested in the motif's appearance in
English drama, but because the English playwrights borrowed
so many tragicomic conventions from Italy, a discussion of
Italian tragicomedy is most relevant. The desire to include
the Italian works helped to determine the following arrange-
ment of the thesis. The six chapters divide into two
sections of three chapters each. The first discusses the
didactic; the second, the aesthetic; and the third, the
anagogic function. These chapters also concentrate upon
the Italian plays and the traditions that gave rise to
them. Two of these Italian plays, Tasso's Aminta and
Guarini's I_l_ Pastor Eggpossess elements pertinent to the
discussion in each chapter; hence each of the first three
chapters ends with a consideration of an aspect of these
two plays. The conclusions reached about the motif and
its traditions are employed in the last three chapters to
analyze its appearance in the plays of Lyly, Shakespeare,

Daniel, and Fletcher.

vii

CHAPTER I

THE DIDACTIC USE OF THE MOTIF OF DEATH AND
REVIVAL IN EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY

ENGLISH AND ITALIAN PLAYS

In the sixteenth century, humanist schoolmasters
based the plays which they wrote for the edification of
their pupils upon the comic conventions of classical Roman
drama. They applied an ancient and appropriate name,

Tragicocomoedia, found in Plautus' Amphitryon, to these

 

 

mixtures of farcical action and serious instruction. These
products, however, of the teacher-dramatists' pens, which
were intended to inculcate sound ethical and religious
principles, differed greatly from the species of the same
name which flourished in the beginning of the seventeenth
century and which derived its name from its use of the
motif of death and revival. As we shall observe in this
chapter in greater detail, the early humanist plays, such
as Nicholas Grimald's and Giraldi Cinthio's, concentrated
upon presenting the essential doctrines of salvation.
George Whetstone and R. B. (assumed to be Robert Bower),
humanists of the next generation, helped to secularize the
genre by showing chastity defeating the machinations of

lust; moreover Whetstone, in the second part of his play,

depicted the great magnanimity of the perfect ruler. Other
humanists at this time were also interested in the proper
way to govern the state and in the moral qualities of the
ideal king; hence Richard Edwards and Robert Greene employed
the motif of death and revival to instruct their audiences--
and, incidentally, the main characters in the plays them-
selves--in the proper behavior of the ideal king. Edwards'
play marks the first use of the motif for this purpose, and
Greene's is an interesting development in the same tradi-
tion, appearing much later in the century.

At the same time that the English were improving the
morals of their pupils, the Italian humanists, Giraldi,
Tasso, and Guarini, were altering the significance of the
motif to fit their own special needs. Giraldi hoped to
reveal the nature of divine providence to his audience;
Tasso, to suggest the central mystery of his theory of
love; and Guarini, to please and delight his audience with
the variations that he developed from this simple device.
Influenced by Tasso and Guarini, the English dramatists at
the beginning of the next century made the same alterations
to the significance of the motif. While the English
presented their changes without any critical commentary,
the Italians introduced theirs amidst a great deafening
clash of theories. This continuing quarrel over the value
of tragicomedy provides an interesting glimpse into the

reasons for changing the function of the convention so

frequently. The majority of the nobility at the Italian
courts, the final arbiter in matters of taste, was pleased
by variety and spectacle rather than by substance; con-
sequently in the next century the playwrights ignored the
meanings of the motif and, instead, exploited its theatrical
potential.

Nicholas Grimald's Christus Redivivus (1543), which
belongs to that group of Neolatin plays written by English
humanists, doesn't use the motif of death and revival in
the same way as the playwrights of the 1590's. He says
that the name, Tragicomedy, applies because the play begins
with the sorrow produced by Christ in his tomb and ends
with the joy of his entrance into heaven. As he puts it:

Finally, as far as the treatment of this tragicomedy
is concerned . . . great things had been interwoven
with the small, joyous with sad, obscure with manifest,
incredible with probable. Moreover, just as the first
act yields to tragic sorrow, in order that the subject
matter may keep its title, so the fifth and last
adapts itself to delight and joy; likewise, in order
that variety may be opposed to satiety, in all the
other intermediate acts sad and cheerful incidents
are inserted in turn.
The cheerful incidents interspersed throughout the play
amount to no more than the boastings of the Roman soldiers
in front of the tomb they are guarding and the confused

and pathetic stammerings of these same guards when they

awaken and learn that Christ has disappeared. Grimald

 

1The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, ed. and
trans. L. R. Merrill (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1925), p. 109; also see Plautis, Intro. to Amphitryon.

 

 

feels that anything more riotous would distract from the
serious purpose of the play and then would not contribute
to "the formation of character, to sound learning, or to
the extension of divine praise."2 Ignoring for the moment
the stupefying stuffiness, it does have the slight merit
of being the first play of serious intent to end upon the
joy and happiness of rebirth. Unlike later plays of the
same genre, no young woman saves her lover from near death,
and there is no sudden reversal from sorrow to joy in the
last act; unfortunately for the audience, Grimald takes
the entire five acts to progress from the initial sorrow
to the concluding joy and happiness.

Apius and Virginia (1575) by R(obert) B(ower) takes

 

a step closer to the seventeenth century norm. The death
of the heroine causes the villains to receive their just
rewards. Apius, an unscrupulous judge, tries to get
Viriginius to surrender his daughter to him, using the
fabrication that Claudius, a friend of Apius, is her real
father. Virginia, a goddess-like virgin and the pride of
her parents, pleads with her father to kill her rather than
relinquish her to Apius. In what must have been the most
dramatic scene of the play, the father reluctantly decapi-
tates his daughter. When he shows the severed head to

Apius, he himself is condemned to death. Apius, then, kills

 

2Grimald, p. 103.

himself in a moment of self-revulsion. Haphazard, the Vice
figure who has encouraged Apius along in his folly is
captured and hanged by Justice. Virginia does not return
to life after restoring order with her death, but Fame
appears on stage and promises that her name and heroic
sacrifice will live on long after her. This small com-
pensation for restoring order allows the play to end more
positively than it could if it were a tragedy.

This play has much in common with the older morality
plays even though the frontispiece calls it "A New Tragicall
Comedie." It certainly shares their concern with correct
morals, and R. B. undoubtedly felt that Virginia's actions
constitute an excellent example of chastity. In fact, as
he states in the epilogue, he knows that he has shown all
of the virtues of domestic life:

Of love to wife, of love to spouse, of love to
husband deare,
Of bringing up of tender youth, all these are
noted heare:
(1211-12)
He underlined the importance of these virtues by having them
set to music and sung. The songs are lengthy and cover with
many repetitions the need for those virtues listed above.
His comedy consists in verbal clashes and horse-play between
Haphazard, the Vice, and his friend, Manipulus, all of which
bear no connection with the main plot. In this play

Virginia's death revealed the moral lesson of the play-

wright and caused the change in Apius; in the next play to

 

fluid-Al q .

be considered the complete motif of death and revival has
the same results.

Readers of Measure for Measure will be roughly famil-

 

iar with George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1578)

 

because Shakespeare borrowed the main outline of the plot
for his play. This unjustly neglected play has a compli-
cated and interesting plot and a subplot whose songs and
jokes are fully integrated into the moral lesson of the play.
Furthermore, Whetstone assures us in his dedicatory epistle
that despite the unseemly actions of specific individuals,
the overall trend of the actions exhibits virtue rewarded
and vice punished. Actually, however, the motif of death
and revival permits him to make the necessary last minute
reversals so that there are no evil persons to punish.
Whetstone divides this play into two sections; the
first part shows the despicable actions of a lecherous
magistrate, and the second, the magnanimity of the perfect
king as he rewards the virtuous and forgives the law-
breakers. When Cassandra goes before the magistrate to
make a plea on behalf of her brother, who has been thrown
in jail for fornication, Promos, the magistrate, falls in
love with her. He will allow her only to exchange her
chastity for her brother's life. After much pleading, she
agrees to the conditions provided he will marry her after-
wards. He reneges on his part of the bargain and does not

marry her and even does not free her brother. In fact he

orders her brother to be killed. In order to get revenge
on Promos, she takes her grievance to the king who listens
to her case and orders Promos to marry her, but he still must
die fortaking her virginity and killing her brother. At
this moment Cassandra changes her mind and pleads for her
new husband's life. Just when all appears hopeless, her
brother, Andrugio, speaks up in the audience which surrounds
the king. He tells him who he is and asks for pardon for
Promos and himself. This the king grants, so they all live
happily with their lovers.

Whetstone handled Andrugio's rebirth with a great
deal of realistic detail. A friendly jailer substituted
a mangled head, which allowed him to escape and go into
hiding. This same jailer promised not to tell his sister
or his mistress that he was alive. He lived alone in the
woods until he happened to hear that Promos was going to
die; then he came into town to see his enemy hanged. When
he learned of Cassandra's wishes, he decided to reveal
himself, even if it meant his own death, because he knew
that, if Promos should die, Cassandra would soon follow
suit. His timely revelation earns the king's grace and
pardon, so everyone lives happily.

R. G. Hunter speculates on the reasons for the popu-
larity of the rebirth on the stage:

It is worth noting that the explanation for the

popularity of this device has nothing to do with
any desire on the author's part to astound his

audience . . . . Such scenes were popular with
Shakespeare and his contemporaries because they
expressed what their authors were trying to say and
created the effect which they were trying to achieve
by enabling the author to make a point about the
opposition of mercy and justice.3
Andrugio's rebirth accomplishes more specific things than
these. First it causes Promos' "rebirth" by removing any
crime from his conscience; in the eyes of the king and in
his own judgement he has not sinned, so he does not have
to be punished. Secondly,it gives the king the occasion
to display his mercy and magnanimity by pardoning Andrugio
as well as Promos. These actions of the king are intended
to be contrasted with the harsh and wilful actions of
Promos. When the audience contrasts the general happiness
caused by the king's actions with the sorrow and despair
caused by his magistrate, they will not hesitate to prefer
the king's mercy and charity. They may even wish to see
all public figures display such commendable leniency.

Richard Edwards shares Whetstone's concern about the

moral character of public figures. In Damon and Pythias

 

(1571), a popular tragicomedy, he displays the ideal moral
qualities of the king and inquires into the role of the

intellectual at court.4 Dionysius, the prince of the

 

3Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of For-
giveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 58.

4David Bevington, Tudor Dramaand Politics: A Crit-
ical Approagh to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1968), p.FI64-7.

 

1m ’VLI J

 

central plot, is rescued from his circle of flatterers and
sycophants by the example of true friendship that Damon and
Pithias dramatize for him.

In order to reveal the essential power of friendship
to Dionysius and to the audience, Edwards constructed his
plot to follow the rhythm of death and revival. Damon and
Pithias arrive on shore at Syracuse after a very stormy
voyage. They no sooner enter the city than Carisophus, a
would-be court favorite, has Damon imprisoned on a charge
of spying. When Pithias learns that Damon is sentenced to
die, he offers to give his life in place of Damon's.
Dionysius accepts his offer and frees Damon upon the condi-
tion that if he does not return in two months, Pithias must
die in his place. This prepares the audience for the
climactic scene which dramatizes the moral of the play.

In this, the most powerful scene of the play, the
beauty of true friendship is unfolded before the audience.
Damon does not return upon the appointed hour, so Pithias
is brought forward to be executed. As he is being led
forward, Dionysius taunts him. He believes that all men
are traitors, cowards, hypocrites, or liars, and Damon's
failure to appear is another confirmation of this belief
and a telling blow against Pithias' faith in true friend-
ship. Dionysius further believes that the only way to rule
is with the ruthless application of force. After gloating

over Damon's absence, he insists that the execution be

10

carried out. Then, just as the executioner is about to
deliver the fatal blow, Damon appears and prevents the sword
from falling. Both friends testify before the king that
they are willing to die for each other and expatiate upon
the beauty and practicability of true friendship. The
lesson derived from this demonstration of true friendship
has pierced Dionysius ' heart:

0 noble friendship, I must yield! at thy force I wonder.

My heart this rare friendship hath pierc'd to the root,

And quenched all my fury:
This sight hath brought this about, which thy grave
councel, Eubulus, 5

and learned persuaSion could never do.
From this moment on Dionysius will guide the ship of state
by the stars called trust, faith, and friendship. He now
realizes that the use of force to control people is harm-
ful. Dionysius, rejoicing in his new wisdom, pardons Damon
and offers the hospitality of the court to the two friends.
From the point of death, they have risen to be favorites
and friends of the king: "Myself, my realm, my wealth, my
health, I commit to your charge" (p. 80). The two friends
accept his offer of friendship and, after putting on new
clothes, join Dionysius as the "jewels“ (p. 81) of his

court. The rhythm and the drama of the motif converted the

king, restored and rewarded the two friends, and saved the

 

5Damon and_Pithias by Richard Edwards in Early_English
Dramatists, ed. John S. Farmer (New York, 1966), p. 79.

 

 

 

11

country from the curse of a tyrant. Syracuse will enjoy the
advantages of a just and humane king.

This play has several elements in common with various
plays of Shakespeare and Fletcher. All three playwrights
drew upon the romance tradition which they inherited from
the Medieval world. The rough sea voyage, the abrupt
landing on a strange shore, an inflexible king who enforces
an irrational law, and the near death and revival of the
hero or heroine comprise the common elements that are often
repeated in the seventeenth century plays.

Edwards showed these dramatists how to use these
romance motifs in a different way. The near death and
reprieve of Damon and Pithias is meant to instruct not to
entertain. The conversion of Dionysius instructs the
audience by providing both extremes in one character. As
the function of a debate is to clarify two logical extremes
by seeing them juxtaposed, so the technique of conversion
allows Dionysius to display both of the emotional con-
traries in the same scene. The sudden alteration only
helps to emphasize the conflicting positions that were
being debated by the other characters. When the audience
can clearly see both positions, then, of course, it is that
much easier to choose the desirable course of action.

In the speech quoted above, Dionysius explains, as
well as possible, the mechanisms that make conversion

possible--if not entirely probable. Dionysius is filled

12

with wonder by the force of the example of their friend-
ship. In a sudden, magical moment, he changes from the
enemy to the friend of these two visitors.. As he said to
Eubulus, the dramatic presentation of friendship has had
more influence upon him than all of his learned advice.

The dramatic moment of near death and revival possesses a
power to influence men that rhetoric and learning cannot
hope to equal. The usual defenses of the mind and soul are
powerless to stop this visual image from having its in-
tended effect.

Edwards introduced the motif upon the stage to teach
Dionysius and his audience a moral truth, and often, when
it appeared in this and the following century, it served a
didactic function. While in many cases the function
remained the same, the moral lessons to be taught changed
so radically that it is doubtful if Edwards would have been
able to recognize what was being taught with this motif.

The Scottish History of James the Fourth (pub. 1598)
by Robert Greene also employs the motif to impress a moral
upon the audience. Again a near death and revival, this
time of the king's wife, Dorothea, causes a complete emo-
tional and intellectual about-face in the king. King James
the Fourth allows his passions to rule his reason; conse-
quently he gradually isolates himself from the other
members of his family and from his kingdom until he has

to face the powerful king of England alone. No sooner is

13

the king married to Dorothea than he declares his love for
Ida, the daughter of one of the nobles at court, and wooing
her soon absorbs all his time and energy. The Bishop con-
fesses his concern about his replacement of his sage council
with a group of flatters, who pander to his every whim and
encourage his passion for Ida. The king takes offence with
the bishop's concern and summarily dismisses him. This
leaves only the courtier and part—time necromancer, Ateukin,

l

to advise the king. He immediately suggests that the king
have his wife killed if he wants to marry Ida. When Dorothea
hears of the plan, she too leaves him alone by fleeing the
court disguised as a page. By this time Ida has married
another man and refuses to have anything to do with the
king. Dorothea's father, hearing that she is dead, vows

to kill the king and immediately invades Scotland to do just
that. The nobles of the realm abandon James to his fate as
the forces of the King of England draw near. Because of his
foolish actions, motivated by his lust for Ida, he now has
to face England's soldiers without the assistance of any
spiritual or military forces. As James is about to be
defeated, Sir Cuthbert, one of the nobles.of the court,
enters the battlefield with Dorothea. Since she actually

is alive, the king of England doesn't have any reason to
kill James; so he stOps the war. James repents his past
actions, accepts Dorothea as his loving wife, and recon-

ciles all his differences with her father.

 

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14

The near death of his queen, Dorothea, effectuates his
reversal; hence her role, even though completely passive, is
still necessary to the moral of the play. Dorothea's pro-
blems begin when she learns of her husband's love for Ida.
She excuses his action as just an excess of youthful vigor.
Not until she learns of the plot to kill her, does she
take the advice of her friend, Sir Cuthbert, and flee the
court as a page. Jacques,the killer hired by Ateukin to
dispatch her, finds her in the woods, wounds her with his
sword, and leaves her to die, thinking that no one is
around to help her. Just at that moment, however, Sir
Cuthbert arrives on the scene and takes the wounded queen
home to be healed. While recuperating at Sir Cuthbert's,
she hears that everyone believes her to be dead and that
her father has vowed revenge. As soon as the two kings
see that she is alive, they are immediately reconciled to
one another.

Besides restoring the lost harmony to the kingdom,
she impresses a moral lesson upon the soul of her husband.
She forgives his errors--but not the ones we would expect.
She does not mention or even appear to resent his passion
for Ida. His mistake was to listen to Ateukin, the self-
seeking courtier. He, like Dionysius, was led astray by
sycophants. Blinded by the corrupt flattery of the court,
they could no longer see how to behave in an honorable and

humane manner. In both instances the force of the example

15

penetrated the wall of error surrounding the king and
revealed a moral truth to him.

Greene would also like the theater audience to be
enlightened by the king's repentance. To insure that the
audience will not overlook the intended moral, Greene
invents two characters, Oberon and Bohan, to present the
story and to act as chorus. They appear at the beginning
of the performance and at the end of each act. Bohan is
a former courtier who became so disgusted with the corrup-
tions of the court that he went to live in the forest.
There he lives in a tomb--his only possession--far away
from the greed, the flattery, and the hypocricy of his
former life. Oberon, the king of the fairies, happens upon
Bohan one day, who presents the play to show him what
life was like in court and why he left. These two char-
acters also supply the merriment. They entertain the
audience with a variety of dances, songs and dumb shows.

Greene, the best dramatist we have encountered so
far, tries to take advantage of the dramatic incidents in
the plot. The action that reveals Dorothea to her husband
is accompanied by a heightening of the rhetoric of the

dialogue and by some kind of stage action.6 ‘While he loves

 

6The stage direction merely says, "He discovereth her"
(V, vi). See The Scottish History of James the Fourth by
Robert Greene, ed. J. A. Lavin (London, 196 7) EVidently
she is hidden in some fashion, and at the proper moment, he
either brings her forward or drops the covering.

16

the comic scenes as much as Edwards, he integrates them into
the plot better. The theater audience must have been both
edified and entertained by the variety of this production.7
Of these four examples, only Greene's contains any
advance in technique over the academic plays, but he is
still far behind the early Shakespeare or even the early
Fletcher. Moving ahead briefly to Fletcher's The Faithful
Shepherdess, an early pastoral tragicomedy, we find that
the greatest difference between the two lies in Fletcher's
indifference to history.8 It does not refer to any known
reality either historical or contemporary. Its characters
and actions owe their existence to the imagination and live
and almost die within the pastoral world of the play.
Greene's play is still partially connected to the world.
He uses the historical personages and melange of historical
incidents to lend an air of historicity to the events in

9

the play. These contrived historical incidents only

obscure the moral purpose of the play. Fletcher does not

 

7Mr. Bevington's statement, "More positively con-
sidered, Greene is the apostle of entertainment in litera-
ture for whom didacticism is a guise necessitated by the
norms of his generation" (p. 208), does a disservice to
the serious moral purpose behind the play. Greene is just
a better dramatist than moralist.

8Only eighteen years separates them. James was
performed 1591 and printed in 1598; Shepherdess was per-
formed 1608 and printed 1610.

9Bevington, p. 208f. He expresses well the exas-
peration of the historian with this "unhistorical" history.

l7

allow any elements that are not harmonious with the rest of
his play into the production. The same cannot be said of
Greene. The mixture of fairies, hermits, courtiers, kings
and tradesmen violates even the most rudimentary notion of
decorum. He tries to distinguish his characters by their
speech, but he cannot handle the different meters well; this
device only calls attention to his poor verse. The audience
never experiences the rhythms of death and revival without
comic or choric or musical interruptions. From the native
playwrights Shakespeare, Daniel, and Fletcher learned that
the motif could be used for didactic purposes, but they
learned how to present it with artificiality, grace, and
style from examples produced on the continent.

They found their models of style and decorum in
Cinquecento Italy, that center of inexhaustible creative
activity. During the same span of years that Grimald,
Edwards, Whetstone and Greene were writing in England,
Giraldi, Tasso, and Guarini were using the motif of death
and revival to create a distinctively new dramatic species,
called the pastoral tragicomedy. Since the examples and
theories of these three Italians supplied so much material
for the English playwrights, a discussion of their use of
the motif will isolate and explain the differences found in
the seventeenth century English tragicomedies.

Altile (1543) by Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio is the

first of the new Italian tragicomedies to use the motif

18

of death and revival.10 This was one of his most successful
experiments, and he himself imitated the pattern in five of
his six later tragedies.ll Horne has high praise for

Altile, believing it to be the best of all Giraldi's plays.12
It is an adaptation of one of his own novelle from his col-

lection called, Hecatommithi.l3

The heroine, Altile, bears
a close resemblance to Dorothea. She comes close to death,
and only at the last minute is she allowed to live; her
near death forces the king to become aware of the existence
and cause of his moral blindness. Altile, the sister of
Tamano, the King of Syria, has secretly married a courtier,
named Norrino. The king discovers it and forces Norrino to
flee the city. Altile thinks that she is abandoned and

contemplates suicide. Her brother, the king, increases her

loneliness by refusing to forgive her actions. He has a

 

10P. R. Horne, The Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio

Giraldi (Oxford University Press,l96§), pp. 63-75. My
discussion relies upon his description and evaluation of
the play.

11Frank H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy: Its Origin
and History_(New York: Columbia University Press, 1910),
p. 30.

12Horne, p. 72.

 

13This collection was very popular among the dram-
atists. Giraldi's Epitia and Ameno ia, Whetstone%;Promos
and Cassandra, Greene 3 James IV, and Shakespeare's Measure
for Measure and Othello find tfieir sources in it. For a
general discussion of Italian works that influenced
Elizabethan plays see F. E. Schelling, Foreign Influence
in Elizabethan Plays (New York and London, 1923), pp. 38-78.

 

 

 

l9

sword and a vial of poison sent to her with instructions

that she is to kill herself by one of these two means or

be burned alive. When she sees that her husband, Norrino,

has been captured, she begs desperately to be allowed to

join him. Just as they are about to die together, King
Lurcone of Tunis, who is also Norrino's father, arrives.

He recognizes his son, and Tamano revokes the sentence and

accepts the marriage.
As in Damon and Pithias and King James the Fourth,
the King has been misled by an unscrupulous favorite.

Astano, however, does not want to advance himself; rather

he wants revenge because Altile rejected his love. Astano

.reveals to the king the two lovers in the act of love;
this sight enrages him, so that he does not forgive Altile.

IIt.takes a stranger to awaken the king to the truth about

Iris sister. Once he learns the truth, harmony is restored

tc> the royal family; when Astano realizes that his plan

has not worked, he commits suicide.

Although.Alti1e, Damon and Pithias, and‘King;JameS'the
EEflgEEELuse an unscrupulous courtier to deceive the king,

Gilhaldi does not share the other playwrights' concerns

about the political evils these flatterers generate. He

ii; Inore interested in religion than in statecraft or the
1deal prince. The motif of death and revival is his chief

means of instructing the audience in the workings of divine

pro"ridence. The last-second rescue of Altile and Norrino

20

illustrates that no matter how severe the reversals of
fortune may be, the destinies of individuals are in the

hands of a benevolent God.14

This is also why Giraldi
insists upon poetic justice. He teaches the audience the
way of God when he rewards the lovers and punishes Astano
with death.15
Giraldi used the motif to delight as well as in-
struct. The plot keeps the issue in doubt until the last
minute, thus building suspense in the audience and cap-
turing their attention so that they will attend to the
message of the play. Fictitious plots are the best,
Giraldi believes, to assist in this praiseworthy activity.
The audience is attracted to the novelty of the tale and

imbibes the moral lesson much more easily.16

This, at any
rate, is Giraldi's justification for bringing stories from
his romances onto the stage. The introduction of the
fictitious plots of the romances is another difference

from the practice of the English playwrights. They used

either traditional or historical stories for the subjects

 

.14Horne, p. 38 n2: A translation from 11. 59-69 of

the Prologue to Altile: "You will see then in this play
of ours, Altile, how great is the inconstancy of human
affairs, and tHat an evil disposition never finds joy
through wrongdoing, and that what is decreed in heaven by
the supreme Mover, who governs all things with His inef-
fable providence, must come to pass."

15Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and
Development in Italy, France, and England (Urbana: Univer-
sity of IIlinois Press, 1962): p. 65.

16Horne, p. 35.

21

of their dramas. Greene tried to have the best of both
worlds by calling his romance a history. None of these
English playwrights, however, were prepared to sever'their
productions from the real world. I
Giraldi, alone, associated the motif of death and
rebirth with the fictitious plot in order to inculcate the
doctrine that no matter how capricious Fortune may be,
events will turn out happily in the end. In order to make
this belief more palatable to his audience, he used the
rhythms of the motif of death and revival to create sus-
pense, fright, sorrow, and then joy. These considerations
of the practical playwright forced him to break with those
dramatists who wrote according to their interpretation of
Aristotle or who wrote plays only for recitation.
Giraldi's defense of his own position discloses a

few more details about the tragedia di_lieto fin. His

 

first statements on the nature of tragedy were made in a
letter addressed to Ercole II (c. 1543), published forty

17 In it Giraldi replies to several criticisms

years later.
against Didone made by an anonymous Aristotelian critic,

viz., Giraldi's play doesn't follow Oedipus Tyrannus; it is
too long; there are too many characters; there should be no

acts or scenes; and the Gods should not enter into the play.

 

l7Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism
in the Italian RenaissanceITChicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961) 2 Vols., pp. 912-13.

22

Giraldi replies that Aristotle does not have to be followed
to the letter because the modern must be able to adapt to

his own times.18

He doesn't dispense with authority com-
pletely, but he does believe that the taste of the audience
should determine what the dramatist puts on the stage.
Weinberg says:

Hence, whenever [Giraldi] finds that the rules or

ancient practices conflict with his notions of

verisimilitude, of audience credibility and audience

pleasure, he chooses the solution of the playwright

and the man of the theater.19
Giraldi objects to comedy that lasts more than an hour for
the simple reason that the audience becomes bored. The
dramatist should listen to the audience first and then per-
haps glance at Aristotle or Horace. The motif of death and
revival, which was the basis of Giraldi's conception of
tragedy, was sanctioned as much by the taste of the audience
as it was by Giraldi's religious beliefs. The audience
accepted it and continued to ask for it in the plays they
watched. While the academicians caviled against it, it
became a part of the cultural milieu and, therefore, some-
thing to be imitated by foreigners.

Giraldi's more comprehensive statement of the nature

of tragedy, entitled Discorso intorno§1_Comp9rre delle

 

 

 

18Ibid.

 

19Weinberg, p. 914.

23

Tragedie (1543-1554),20 continues to stress the importance
of the audience's emotions and morals. Both tragedy and

comedy have the same end:

Tragedy and comedy have their end in common because
both endeavor to introduce good morals.21

They introduce good morals in different ways, however;
comedy uses pleasure and pleasing sayings, while tragedy:
. . . whether it has a happy conclusion or an unhappy
one, by means of the pitiable and the terrible,
purges the minds of the hearers from their vices and
influences them to adopt good morals . . . 2
We have moved a considerable distance from Aristotle's
position. All he said in the Poetics was that tragedy
purged the emotions of pity and terror.23
Giraldi was by no means alone in believing that the
purpose of drama was to effect a moral reversal in the
members of the audience. The humanist critics held this

position throughout the century and never failed to

criticize those plays that they felt lacked the proper

 

20For a discussion of the probable dates of composi-
tion see Horne, p. 25.

21Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to
Dryden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962),

p. 252.

221bid.

238. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and
Fipe Art with a Critical Text and Translation ofthe Poetics
(New York: reprinted by Dover Publications, 1951): p. 25.
"Through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of
these emotions" (1449b 27-8). Horne (pp. 30-1) discusses
the ambiguity of this phrase.

24

uplifting material. The reaction of Dionysius, the tyrant

in Damon and Pithias, is perhaps the ideal that they have

 

in the back of their minds when they speak of a drama
changing the morals of the audience. The act of watching
the near death purged his soul, altering his moral prin-
ciples. This, then, is one reason for the frequent occur-
rence of the motif of death and revival. Behind the
humanists' use of this motif lies a belief about the effect
of drama upon the human soul.

Giraldi describes the imagined process within the
soul of the theater-goer in more detail in his discussion
of the effect of poetic justice upon a member of the
audience:

From this [Oedipus' discovery of his sin] can he

see that ignorance of the sin committed, when the

evil doer incurs punishment for the evil he has

done, causes the greatest horror and the greatest

compassion. And this wonderfully purges the mind

from such errors, because the spectator drawing a

silent conclusion says to himself: if the tragic

character has suffered as severely as he does because

of an involuntary error, what would happen to me if

I should voluntarily commit such a sin? 4
The key, as it were, that Opens the mind to the possibility
of reform is the realization that the hero sinned involun-
tarily, which means unknowingly. Oedipus thought that he
was acting well within the laws of nature when he married

Jocasta. The revelation, however, that she is his mother

forces him to see his action as a sin and precipitates a

 

24Gilbert, p. 255.

25

dramatic reversal of fortune from King of Thebes to a
wandering exile. Although Giraldi thought a great deal Of
this dramatic reversal from good to bad, he prefers to use
another kind that shows the workings of a beneficent deity.
TO be effective a reversal must be sudden, dramatic, and
complete. The most explicit reversals, such as Oedipus',
exchange one state for its opposite, and one of the most
shocking of these is the exchange of life for death because
it acts contrary to our sense of the possible. Giraldi,
then, uses the motif Of death and revival because the
unexpected near death shocks the audience into examining
their consciences, while the revival assures them that God
is indeed good, just, and merciful. The complete motif
also impresses its moral upon the audience with much more
force than words alone could muster.

When Giraldi justifies the means that he employs to
remove the threat of death, he again refers to the emotions
of the audience:

It [the second kind of tragedy] is in its nature more
pleasing to the spectators because it ends in happi-
ness. In this kind Of tragedy the recognition or, as
we prefer to call it, the identification of persons

is especially in place; through this identification
those for whom we feel honor and compassion are taken
from perils and from death.25

‘What he means is that the discovery, as in Altile, that the

one about to die is a prince and not low born, as was

originally thought, is enough to remove the threat Of death.

 

 

25Ibid.

26

Giraldi, the practical dramatist, justifies the motif Of
death and revival by citing’tjmaaudience'slneed for enlight-
enment and delight. In the continuing discussion of the
nature of tragicomedy, he is the last Italian playwright

to emphasize the moral purpose of the motif. After
Giraldi, only its ability to provide entertainment is
singled out for praise.

Giraldi introduced the fictitious plot on the stage,
but even such an enthusiastic champion Of the feigned never
created an entirely artificial world--that was left to
Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Guarini. Tasso and Guarini
blended the pastoral eclogue with the motif Of death and
revival to create a new species of drama called the pastoral
tragicomedy. It had an even more extensive influence upon
the seventeenth century than Giraldi's romantic variety of
tragicomedy because, among other things, it was intimately
connected with the Neoplatonic mysteries.

Tasso, in the play called Aminta (1581) uses the
motif of death and revival in a very different way from
Giraldi. It orders the rhythms of the play, but now it
is in the service Of love and not morality.26 Aminta,

the hero of this play, is neither a king nor a courtier;

 

26Still the critics hesitate to call it a tragicomedy.
C. P. Brand in his book Torquato Tasso (Cambridge, 1965),
p. 39, says that it belongs to no one genre: "It contains
elements of comedy, tragedy, the dramatic eclogue and the
lyric eclogue, and at the end of the last century the debate
of literary origins preoccupied critics of Tasso."

27

he is a shepherd suffering from unrequited love. He loves
Silvia, a beautiful shepherdess who prefers the hunt to
wedded bliss (I, i). The pains of love caused by her
disdain drive him to such distraction that he wants to
kill himself before her eyes (I, ii). At Thirsis' urging,
Aminta goes to Observe Silvia bathing at the sacred foun-
tain. When he arrives, he finds her tied to a tree and a
satyr about to ravish her. After chasing the satyr into
the woods, he returns to free her. Before he can untie all
the knots that bind her, she commands him not to touch her
because she belongs to the goddess Diana (III, I). A
little later, the news that Silvia has been devoured by
a lion plunges him into even greater despair (III, ii).
He finally resolves to kill himself and jumps off of a
cliff, but his fall is broken by some bushes growing at
the base. As he lies senseless, his friends vainly try
to revive him. Silvia, when she realizes who is lying on
the ground, throws herself on his body in a frenzy of
grief (V, i). The tears from her weeping awaken him, and
both rejoice that the other is alive.

This plot holds several disparate elements together.
Tasso includes some effusive praise of court life, a
discussion of the value of marriage and of chastity, praise
of the simple life and of the golden age of lovers, and a
description of the vision of a poet and the reasons why he

became a recluse. Scattered throughout are descriptions

28

of love and speculations on its relation to nature and to
happiness. Most of these elements also appear in the
Renaissance pastoral eclogue, but Tasso had to make some
changes to adapt them to the drama.

In The History of King James the Fourth the near
death of a woman caused the man who was her husband to
change his hate into love. In Tasso's play, the near death
of Aminta makes Silvia repudiate the life Of chastity and
realize that she should have accepted the love of Aminta.
His supposed death has demonstrated to her the depth and
sincerity of his love. When her friend tells her Of his
death, she confesses that until this moment she has lived
completely bound up within herself (IV, i). She wishes
that Aminta were alive now, so that she could live for him.
Since he is dead, she vows to end his funeral rites with
her own death(IV, i). After she finds him at the base of
the cliff, her tears of heartfelt grief, falling on his face,
awaken him again; now they will have an opportunity to be
united, each living his life for the other.

Tasso has made an interesting variation in the usual
motif. He introduces it in the service of love. Aminta
changes Silvia from narcissism to altruism, and she brings
him back to life again with her tears. In both cases the
force of sincerity is powerful enough to cause a reversal
in the soul of the individual. The motif determines the

purity of the love contained in the soul of the one beloved.

29

Furthermore the happiness of the lovers alters the tradi-
tional pattern of courtly love. The worshiped loved-one
does not remain unattainable. She learns to see the value
in her suitor, and his trials and sufferings end joyously
in fulfillment. Tasso completely denies the sorrow implicit
in the Opening situation.

Despite its obvious dramatic defects, this play turned
a great many playwrights in the direction Of the pastoral.
By 1615, thirty-four years after Tasso's Aminta, in Italy
alone at least eighty-five pastoral plays had been written,

27

and by 1700 the number had grown to 200. Definitely the

most famous of these is I1 Pastor Fido by Giovanni Battista

 

Guarini.28 Guarini complicated matters by using a double

plot in the manner Of Terence.29 Two plots begin, develop,
and end which share just a little more than their theme and
location. Each plot centers on a pair of lovers, and each

has a near death and rebirth. Actually Guarini has taken

 

27Brand, p. 277.

28The composition of this play is a curious story.
He began it about 1580, submitted rough drafts to friends
for comment; then about 1586 the plot took final form, and
he continued to improve it until 1590. It is doubtful if
it was ever performed prior to 1596. For further details
see Walter F. Staton, Jr., and William E. Simeone, A
Critical Edition of Sir Richard Fanshawe's 1647 Transla-
tion of Giovanni Battista Guarini's 11 Pastor Fido (Oxford,
1964), p. xi of the Introduction and JOhn Shearman, M327
nerism (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 92-3.

29For Guarini's discussion of his plot see Gilbert,
pp. 506-7.

30

the essential elements of the plots of Altile and Aminta
and so arranged them that they are part of the same pastoral
world; each is a complete tragicomedy in itself. The plot,
which.resemblesthat of the Aminta,presents the trials of
Silvio, a young man who prefers hunting to loving, and
Dorinda, a young woman hopelessly in love with him.
Silvio's rude treatment of her only emboldens her to follow
him into the woods (II, ii). Silvio, in the meantime,kills
the boar that threatened Arcadia, and the people are
grateful (IV, vi). As he exults in the prowess chastity
has lent him, an echo predicts that he will marry Dorinda
(IV, viii). Just then, he sees a wolf in the bushes and
shoots it (IV, ix). It turns out to be Dorinda. The
spectacle Of her dying pierces his heart and forces him

to realize that he loves her. He worships her by breaking
his bow and vowing to hunt no more (IV, ix). He thinks of
a herb that will stop the bleeding and will allow him to pull
the arrow out of her body (V, vii). When she revives,the
lovers have been transformed; both have demonstrated the
sincerity of their emotions to the other; so now both are
united in each other's love.

The second plot, which resembles Altile, is more complex
than this. Mirtillo loves Amarilli but is not loved in return
(I, ii). The two meet at a game of blind man's bluff, but
Mirtillo is only further disheartened by Amarillis' refusal

to love him (III, i). He then sees her enter a cave in

31

which, he thinks, her lover waits. Now his anguish becomes
too much to bear, and he enters the cave to kill her lover
and then himself (III, iv). A priest catches them in the
cave, and he sentences Amarillis to be sacrificed to Diana
because she was unfaithful to her fiance (Her father had
betrothed her to Silvio.) (IV, v). Mirtillo, who was also
arrested, Offers to exchange his life for hers (V, ii).

The priest, Montano, reluctantly consents to the substitu-
tion; moreover he has a very difficult time making the
sacrificial knife move towards Mirtillo's chest. To com-
pound his frustration, two strangers, who happen to be
watching the rite, deduce that Mirtillo must be the son

of Montano. The news of his parentage prevents him from
being killed and leads to other, happier events. Since
both Amarillis and Mirtillo are descended from the gods

via the priestly class Of Arcadians, they can now get
married, and as the Old soothsayer explains, their marriage
will lift the curse from Arcadia. Mirtillo's near death
ends joyously for him and the other Arcadians.

Judging by this bare outline, the motif appears to
have the same purpose that it did in Giraldi's and Tasso's
plays. But a more thorough study Of the play in light of
Guarini's own discussion of the purpose of tragicomedy
discloses a completely new use for the motif--a use that
quickly spread to England in the tragicomedies of Beaumont

and Fletcher. The publication of Il_Pastor Fido occasioned

 

32

a literary quarrel that lasted well into the seventeenth
century. From the start it had the air about it Of the
ancients versus the moderns, except that in this case, the
entire quarrel ebbed and swelled around Aristotle, Plato,
Horace, and Cicero. The principal parties in the dispute
were a humanist critic named Giason Denores and Guarini

himself.30

Denores' position is easily maintained in
theory but very difficult to put into practice. He
believes that all aspects of the work of art should be
subordinated to and determined by moral and social purposes.
The last clause Of his definition Of poetry lists those
ends:

. . . in order to purge them [the listeners], by

means of pleasure, Of the most important passions

of the soul, and to direct them to good living,

to the imitation of virtuous men, and to the con-

servation of good republics.

The purpose of tragedy is a bit more modest; it purges terror

and pity from the spectator and teaches him to hate tyrants

 

30The major documents in this quarrel are: 1.
Giason Denores Discorso intorno a_que principii, cause, 95
accrescimenti, ghg la comedia, la tragedia, et i1 poema
herOico ricevono dalla philosopHia morale, ciViIE, §_de'
governatori delle republiche (1586). 2. Battista Guarini
11 Verrato, overo difesa diiquanto hei scriEto M, Giason
DEnores contra la tragicomgdia, et le pastorale in_un sou
discorso di poesia (1588). 3. Giagan Denores, Apologia—
contra I'Efittor del Verato (1590). 4. Battista Guarini's
ll‘Verato secondo overo replica dell' Attizzato accademico
ferrorese in difesa del Pastor Fido (1593). For a good
blow by b15§ account which inclfides the minor participants
not mentioned here see Weinberg, pp. 1074-1105.

31

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weinberg, p. 316.

33

32 In this he agrees

and to eschew their style of life.
with both the English and Italian humanist playwrights.

All see in poetry and drama a power that can change the

soul and ultimately the behavior of those who witness it.

But Denores, propelled by the logic of the argument,
goes farther than the practicing playwrights would think
necessary. Every part of the poem must in some fashion
contribute to the general moral and political end. If
some part does not contribute, then the critic must call
the author's attention to this major imperfection. This,
he affirms, is precisely the defect of tragicomedy.
Weinberg summarizes Denores' objections for us:

He [Denores] himself, applying the same principles,
declares that such forms as the tragicomedy and the
pastoral are not worthy of attention since they are
monstrous as artistic compositions and, more damaging
still, they cannot possibly teach the kinds Of lessons
which are the province of poetry. Their authors are
not poets; at best, since they seek only the pleasure
of their audience and not its profit, they are like
sophists who pursue a false and deceptive form of
their art.

Guarini sensed a specific attack upon his play in
Denores' general statement and made a hasty reply. In order
to justify his new species of drama, he assumes a point of
view directly opposed to Denores. Guarini never argues

that tragicomedy has a moral function that has escaped

Denores; he prefers to argue that poetry does not have a

 

321bid.

33Weinberg, p. 319.

34

utilitarian purpose.34 Separating Aristotle's Poetics from

his Politics, he maintains that Poetry strives for pleasure

35

through imitation and that Aristotle did not limit poetry

to three rigid genres; rather he approved of the growth of

new forms.36 He also borrows an idea from Giraldi and

says that the taste and the attitudes Of the times demand
new forms of poetry. The Christian religion performs most
ably the functions once delegated to tragic drama, so the

only reason to introduce a tragic action now is to "get

37

delight from it." Contemporary comedies have ceased to

amuse their audiences. Only a new form, tragicomedy, can

raise the level Of comic action and re-awaken interest in

38

the tragic plot. He conceives of tragicomedy as a

mixture Of those elements of the Older forms that are
compatible and that the audience will enjoy. He sums all
this up in his concluding definition Of tragicomedy:

. . . it [the end of tragicomedy] is to imitate
with the resources of the stage an action that is
feigned and in which are mingled all the tragic
and comic parts that can co-exist in veri—
similitude and decorum, properly arranged in a
single dramatic form, with the end of purging
with pleasure the sadness Of the hearers. 9

 

34Weinberg, p. 1078.
352212;

36Weinberg, p. 1079.
37Gilbert, p. 523.
BBEEES:

39

Gilbert, p. 524.

35

Nowhere in his discussion, which tries to imitate the

exhaustive nature of Aristotle's description, does he

mention moral purpose in connection with the formal end

of tragicomedy; furthermore he breaks with Giraldi by

banning poetic justice from the new synthesis:
Punishment, which in the double form of tragedy
comes upon the malefactors, is unfitting to

tragicomic poetry, in which according to comic
customaothe bad characters are not chastised

Tragicomedy no longer enlightens; its only purpose is to
give pleasure to the audience. Any element not contribut-
ing to the audience's delight is expunged.

Hidden within these innocuous definitions is an
entirely new conception of drama, one that will produce
many changes in the plays written in the seventeenth
century. The performance Of a tragicomedy produces only
pleasure, and the audience no longer learns or is purged
or is shown exemplary humans to imitate; consequently the
drama has ceased to refer to anything beyond itself; it
has no point, no meaning. Guarini has reduced the tragi-
comedy to a game and the audience to spectators. The
raison d'etre of a game is pleasure for both participants
and audience; it refers to nothing beyond the confines
of the playing area. All the meaning and artistic signif-
icance that it possesses are contained within the rules

and definitions that create the end and regulate the

 

4OGilbert, p. 527.

36

actions toward that end. The challenge of this form comes
in attempting to construct the work according to the self-
imposed limitations and still create a successful work Of
art. Thus, the motif of death and revival finds a new
function in Guarini's drama. It becomes one of those
limitations which challenge the artist's ingenuity and, as
it were, defines the game to be played.

Viewing the motif of death and revival from this
perspective reveals the extent Of Guarini's ingenuity.
Those readers familiar with both Giraldi and Tasso would
immediately recognize that he has used both of their plots
in his play, but, that in both cases, he has reversed the
sex of those who come near to death and then revive. He
ties the two plots together by having the fathers Of
Silvio and Amarillis agree to their marriage in order to
remove the curse from Arcadia. Also, he has added hints

of Oedipus Tryannus to the death and revival motif.

 

Arcadia is a land with a curse, but this curse can only
be removed by a holy marriage instead of a sacred death.
The identification of the parentage of Mirtillo saves his
life instead of causing his decline as in Oedipus, and a
blind seer is the only one who sees that the marriage of
Mirtillo and Amarillis will lift the curse from Arcadia.
Guarini, by his ingenious complications, manages to
keep his audience in suspense until the last episode.

First Mirtillo substitutes himself for his beloved

37

Amarillis; then Montano fails to plunge the knife into
Mirtillo; next Carino interrupts to discuss Mirtillo's
parentage. Finally Montano decides to kill himself‘instead
of his son. By this time the audiences' anxiety should
have been increased by this variety of incidents that
prolongs the ending Of the play.

Perhaps his neatest trick is the handling of the
Silvio-Dorinda story. Just through the spacing of the
incidents throughout the play, he keeps the audience appre-
hensive about Dorinda's fate. Only in the next to the last
scene do they find out that she has recovered. Then it is
told by Linco, a character from whom the audience did not
expect to hear such news. At the conclusion the audience
must have been impressed by the author's skill with the
motif of death and revival when they realized that the
entire play fit together and that there was a reason--
albeit Often very improbable--for everything that happened.

Two conceptions of the function of the motif of death
and revival were available to the English dramatists in the
last decades of the sixteenth century. The English human-
ists surrounded the motif with a feigned plot derived from
the tradition of the romance in order to convey an ethical,
political, or social truth to their audience. Battista
Guarini in a conscious revolt against this method invented
a new species of tragicomedy that did not refer to any-

thing beyond itself. Anticipating the audience's taste

38

and modern customs, he combined comedy and tragedy together
in such a way that its end was to purge melancholy from the
audience by giving pleasure. The motif now helped to show
Off the artist's skill because it was another of the limita-
tions that he imposed upon himself; the motif became a

concern of aesthetics and not Of education.

CHAPTER II

THE AESTHETIC USE OF THE MOTIF IN THE

ITALIAN PASTORAL TRAGICOMEDIES

Even before the motif of death and revival appeared
on the stage in the pastoral landscapes of Aminta and

I1 Pastor Fido, it had become a permanent part of the

 

Arcadian scene. In fact, the frequent appearance of the
motif in the Renaissance pastoral separates this species
from the earlier classical pastoral eclogues, which were
the parent plant from which the Renaissance grafts were
cut. This chapter, in its endeavor to discover and under-
stand the aesthetic qualities which became associated

with death and revival, traces the marriage of the motif
with the pastoral from Boccaccio to Guarini, who exploited
these qualities for their own sake. The following con-
stitutes a brief outline of what the rest of this chapter
discusses at length.

Boccaccio first blended the motif and the pastoral
together in Olympia and again in Amgpg. In the former, a
pastoral eclogue, he associates the joys of heaven and the
healing powers of Christ with the Arcadian fields, and in
the latter, a longer story in prose and verse, he presents

Ameto's death and rebirth as an initiation into the

39

40

knowledge of true love and true happiness. Sannazaro's
Arcadia, the next significant work, transforms the pastoral
scenery into a self-conscious piece of art, which rein-
forces and counterpoints the hero's inner experiences.
Politian's 95:39, one of the earliest pastoral dramas,
makes the next important addition by placing the Ovidian
mythological world in the pastoral fields. In his hands,
the motif stresses the love and the frustrated desire of
the courtly lover, who has discovered a welcome refuge in
the pastoral hills. Arcadia becomes the symbol of the
inner life Of the emotions. Continuing the same themes
in Aminta, Tasso makes the motif of death and revival the
means to fulfilling all desires in Arcadia; thus he
completes the identification of the aesthetic qualities
of the pastoral world with love and happiness. Guarini
is not particularly interested in the nature Of love, but
he retains all the pastoral qualities of the motif in

I1 Pastor Fido. The motif becomes a device to turn these

 

qualities into heroic action and heroic action back into
the pastoral life, thereby adding another complication to
the game that he is playing. The audience's appreciation
of his complicated aesthetics and its enjoyment of his
elaborate plot constitute the total justification for the
many years he labored on this work.

Giovanni Boccaccio's famous pastoral elegy, Olympia

(c. 1358), uses the conventions of the pastoral eclogue to

41

dramatize his own personal recovery from the sorrow
occasioned by his daughter's death. Boccaccio also com-
bines another, Older form, the consolation, with the
traditional pastoral elegy, and in so doing, he shifts
the center of the elegy from the grief of loss to the joy
of recovery. The greater part of his elegy describes a
momentary vision Of the joys of those reborn into the
heavenly paradise.

Silvius, too grief stricken to leave his hut, asks
his friends to go see what is exciting his dog. Just then
a strange light appears that dazzles the eye, and a voice,
somewhere within it, says that it is his daughter. She
has appeared to dry Silvius' eyes. Skeptical at first,
he slowly is convinced that this unearthly radiance is
his daughter. He then joins hands with her and, delir-
ious with joy, wants to celebrate with a festival to
Bacchus. She joins in the festivities by singing about
the power of Christ to console spirits that are troubled
by death. As he listens to her song, he thinks that no
shepherd ever sang so sweetly as his daughter, Olympia.
When she tells him that she won't be able to live with
him again because she now lives among the gods, he threat-
ens tO die from weeping. Her reply signals the joy that

attends the replacement of grief with happiness:

42

Away with grief! Think'st thou to burst thy fate

With tears? As many as created be,

We all are born for death.1
She then describes the joys of Elysium, the place where
they will meet again after he dies. The scents, the
flowers, the streams, and the gentle and compatible
creatures, recall Virgil's nostalgic creation, Arcadia.
The ruler of this kingdom of Elysium, which knows neither
the ravages of time nor of death, is beyond the grasp of
most men's minds. Man can know, however, that in the
ruler's bosom is a gentle lamb:

Thence comes our weal, and life to those re-born.

And from them both alike there flames a fire,

Wondrous to trow! TO all things spreads that light:

The sad it comforts, purges the mind's eye,

Counsels the wretched, strengthens those thas fall,

With sweetest love informs the souls of men.
Of course, she has just described the purpose of her own
presence in Arcadia. Since she does all these things for
Silvius, she is the agent of his rebirth, providing com-
fort, knowledge, and love to this wretched man. She
continues to describe other aspects of Elysium, and finally
Silvius wants to know how to get there. Good deeds will
raise him up to Elysium. After imparting that knowledge
to him, she returns to Elysium herself. Silvius dries

his tears and energetically orders his boys to drive the

cattle out into the fields. Silvius also has been reborn.

 

lBoccaccio's Olympia, trans. Sir Israel Gollancz
(London, 1904) reprinted in Scott Elledge, Milton's
"Lycidas" (New York, 1966), p. 61.

 

 

 

2Elledge, p. 64.

43

This remarkable elegy blends three elements together
which are Often found in later pastorals and tragicomedies.
The first is the power of spiritual rebirth. This power
emanates from God and Christ and makes a wretched life
happy, a broken soul whole, and ignorance knowledge. The
second, the agency that cures the sufferer, is either a
woman who, having died, returns in a vision or a deity who
descends from on high. The third element is the pastoral
world. The nymphs, the satyrs, the shepherds, the woods,
and the flowers become part of the metaphor Of the Christian
heaven. The pleasure and joyous happiness that was always
associated with the heaven Of Christ, the realm of the
Lord, transfers to the pastoral world. Arcadia, which
before this only allowed a slightly nostalgic sorrow to
disturb its serenity, becomes the scene of ecstatic joy
and happiness.

The Amppp was written about 1341 and was the first
to combine prose and verse in the same narration.3 As
Greg describes the story, Ameto, a shepherd, is struck

4 He falls in love with

by the song of the beautiful Lia.
her, but winter intervenes, and he doesn't see her until
spring during the festival of Venus at whose temple all

the pastoral creatures have gathered. At the festival,

 

3W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama

(London, 1906), p. 40.
4

 

Ibid I

44

Lia proposes that each of seven nymphs tells the story of
her love. Ameto listens to each and falls in love with
each in turn. Then, as they finish, something completely
unexpected happens to him:

When the last has ended a sudden brightness
shines around and "there descended with wondrous
noise a column Of pure flame, even such as by night
went before the Israelitish people in the desert
places." Out Of the brightness comes the voice of
Venus:

Io son luce del cielo unica e trina,

Principio e fine di ciascuna cosa,

Del qual men fie, ne fia nulla vicina.
Ameto, though half blinded by the heavenly effulgence,
sees a new joy and beauty shine upon the faces Of the
nymphs, and understands that the flame-shouded pre-
sence is that, not Of the wanton mater cupidinum,
but of the goddess of divine fire who comes to reveal
to him the mysteries of love. Cleansed of his grosser
nature by a baptismal rite, in which each of the
nymphs performs some symbolic ceremonial, he feels
heavenly love replacing human in his heart, and is
able to bear undazzled the radiance of the divine
purity.5

 

The same basic situation found in Olympia is present in
this work. A goddess descends, and her power causes a
change in the soul of a man. In this instance love is the
agent that refines man's crude nature and purifies it
enough to receive the virtues (represented by the nymphs)6
which enable him to behold the divine essence. Ameto's

soul, having been transformed in the baptismal ceremony,

 

5Greg, pp. 40-1.

6"One nymph breathed between his lips and kindled a
flame in his soul that he never felt before (Greg, p. 41)."

45

enters a new world, which lies on a much higher plane of
existence.

The pastoral world now becomes the site of the‘
sacred Operations of love. The initiation, indicated by
the death and rebirth, amounts to a passage from the gross
material world into the pure spiritual realm, where true
love dwells. Boccaccio centers his death and revival
within the baptismal ceremony to lend the force of the
sacred to his belief about the purifying power of love.
The procedures in his festival are there for didactic
purposes and do not imitate any actual ceremony. In the
following centuries the religious festival in Arcadia
becomes one of the standard activities of the shepherds.
By this time, however, it has ceased to have a heuristic
purpose; all it has is an aesthetic function within the
work.

Giacopo Sannazaro is the man who changed the purpose
Of the pastoral world. In his Arcadia7 the pastoral loses
all allegorical or didactic meaning and becomes instead a
completely aesthetic world whose purpose is only to reflect

the emotions of a poet. It becomes a paradise for poets.8

 

7The dating of this work is only tentative. Chaps.
1-10 were written between 1482 and 1489. See Jacopo
Sannazaro, Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclpgues, trans. Ralph
Nash (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966),
p. 12.

8David Kalstone, Sidney's Poetpy (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 12.

 

 

46

Consequently, the pastoral world as a lost Golden Age or
as an ideal of simple virtue that can be used to criticize
contemporary vices doesn't appeal to Sannazaro. Unlike
Boccaccio's, his eclogues do not describe the happiness
caused by rebirth. His concentrate instead upon a young
lover's melancholy and his rebirth as a poet.

Twelve eclogues comprise the Arcadia; each is
preceded by a prose passage that provides a description
of the scene and establishes the mood of the eclogue.
Many of the eclogues try to present pleasing and compli-
cated verse patterns, but to Greg's taste at least they
fail miserably.9 These twelve eclogues are not primarily
intended to tell a story; rather they reflect a series of
moods that cluster around the existential situation of the
poet. Mr. Nash states this situation clearly when he
says:

It [Arcadia] is the story of a young man's tem-
porary wiEHHFEWal from his normal milieu, his ardent
dedication to poetry, and his return to the world
from which he had exiled himself.10

The first four eclogues dramatize the world into

which the poet has withdrawn. With the exception of the

 

9"The verse is mediocre, and several of the eclogues
are composed in the unattractive sestina form, while others
affect the wearisome rime sdruccioIe“ ( . 48).

loSannazaro, p. 24.

 

47

first, which is Ergasto's melancholic complaint, the
shepherds pursue peaceful and light-hearted activities.
The shepherds laugh, jest, discuss poetry, and sing com-
pliments to their mistresses. It resembles the tradi-
tional Arcadia created by Virgil. In the fifth eclogue,
the elegiac mood appears and continues to dominate until
the end. In this eclogue, Ergasto sings an elegy to a
dead comrade, Androgeo, which causes Sincero (the nar-
rator) to become melancolic himself. The rest of the
shepherds are curious about his sudden melancholy, and at
the behest of Carino, he finally tells his whole story.
Another shepherd, Clonico, also suffers from unrequited
love, and eclogues eight, nine, and ten are pieces Of
good advice from the wiser and more experienced shepherds.
The eleventh eclogue is the emotional climax of the series;
here Ergasto, the best poet among the shepherds, performs
a long elegy over the tomb of Marsilia, his dead love.

The last eclogue presents the poet's return to his city
and family. His journey home begins when he dreams that
his love has died. This affects him so deeply that he
wanders despondently over the Arcadian countryside until
a nymph manages to catch his attention and direct him
under the earth to the stream that flows to his city. He
follows this river, the Sebeto, until he reaches Naples
where he learns that his love has indeed died. In the epi—

logue, he hopes that his verses will immortalize his love.

48

The clue to what is happening here resides in Sincero's
life history, which he reluctantly reveals to his com-
panions. He was born in Naples and was barely eight years
Old when he fell in love with a playmate, the daughter Of
a nobleman. Because he did not dare reveal his feeling for
her, he fell into a deep melancholy and began to look like
the shadow of death. After contemplating and then rejecting
suicide, he left Naples for the Arcadian countryside. Much
to his dismay, distance did not help him. Everything in
his surroundings still reminds him of the girl he knew in
Naples:

Likewise no other thing can I see here that is
not primarily the cause Of my remembering her with
greater fervor and solicitude; and it seems to me
that the hollow caves, the springs, the valleys,
the mountains, with all the forests summon her, and
the tall trees constantly repeat her name.1

Even in Arcadia he can't rid himself of his sorrow. He
still suffers from the symptoms of love and is incapable
of finding pleasure in love or in Arcadia. He completes
his story by asking God to end his misery with either
death or fulfillment. Sincero is not alone in his woe
either; Carino has essentially the same sad tale to tell,
and Ergasto twice sings of his sorrow caused by the death
of his mistress.

Boccaccio provides the reason for these troubled

poets frequenting Arcadia:

 

llSannazaro, pp. 72-3.

 

49

Then, as these pleasures [the sights and sounds
of Arcadia] possess both eye and ear, they soothe the
soul; then they collect the scattered energies of the
mind, and renew the power of the poet's genius, if it
be weary, prompting it, as it were, to long for con-
templation of high themes, and yearn for expression--
impulses wonderfully reinforced by the gentle society
Of books, and the melodious bands of the Muses moving
in stately dance . . . .12
Arcadia itself functions as Olympia or Venus in the poet's
renewal. Sincero came to Arcadia expecting the woods and
streams to heal the sorrow in his soul, but he learns there
that his ailment cannot be cured. He is the traditional
courtly lover, fated to love a woman who can be neither
possessed nor forgotten. His life can only amount to the
sorrow and misery of unfulfilled desire; therefore his
rebirth as a poet presents the only respite from his torments.
Pastoral poetry is only the first stage in the life
dedicated to fame through poetry. In Arcadia the poet
grows to maturity and learns his craft.13 The pastoral
poem cannot be the artless and spontaneous creation that

some think it should be. Every line has to show the poet's

talent and confirm the efficacy of his source of inspiration.

 

12Charles G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry ("Library of
Liberal Arts"; New York, 1956): PP. 56-7.

13"With this I [Carino] trust that you [Sincero], if
it be not denied you by the fates, in the future will sing
in loftier vein the loves of the Fauns and the Nymphs. And
even as up to this point you have fruitlessly spent the
beginnings of your adolescence among the simple and rustic
songs of shepherds, so for the future you will pass your
fortunate young manhood among the sounding trumpets of the
most famous poets of your century, not without hOpe of
eternal fame (Sannazaro, pp. 74-5)."

 

 

50

For this reason the poems and plays in the pastoral tradi-
tion do not lack art. Since the pastoral elegy is essen-
tially an artistic test for the novice craftsman, two
things happen to the Arcadian countryside. The poet
neglects all of the traditional symbolic values, such as,
the ideal of the simple life or the ideal of the spiritual
healer, and concentrates instead upon the physical pro-
perties of the place. Secondly the poet invests these
physical details with those qualities which prove to
others that he is a poet. He has to show others that his
heart is sensitive to the deepest emotions and therefore
noble and that he commands the necessary rhetorical and
metrical skill. The young poet then molds the simple
landscape into a highly refined artistic Object that
reflects the sorrowful emotions in his own noble soul.
The landscape, therefore, receives a great deal Of

embellishment from Sannazaro. As Mr. Kalstone comments:

He magnifies the role of the setting. It draws

attention to itself almost with the force of

independent lyric poems.
A good example of this technique appears in the first
chapter. When Sannazaro describes the trees in Arcadia,
one does not suffice. He has to include at least fifteen.
Along with their beauty and shade, he mentions any
relevant mythological associations. The texture of the

landscape, which in Theocritus and Virgil suggested the

 

4Sannazaro, p. 25.

 

51

simplicity of life with its sparseness, now thickens as
Sannazaro tries to convey the beauty snd the harmony of
this scene. In fact, art and nature mirror one another
so well that his description of a picture resembles the
descriptions of Arcadia itself:

There, when we had climbed a few steps, we saw
painted above the entrance some woods and hills,
very beautiful and rich in leafy trees and a thousand
kinds of flowers. A number Of herds could be seen
walking among them, cropping the grass and straying
through the green meadows, with perhaps ten dogs
about them standing guard, their tracks most real-
istically visible in the dust.15

All the elaborate descriptions of the woods, the temples,
the tombs, and the activities transform Arcadia into a
picture itself. Sannazaro has taken Theocritus' sugges-
tion of the pastoral eclogue as a little picture quite
literally, making Arcadia a picture frozen forever in
loveliness. What activity occurs does not receive
nearly as much descriptive detail. Tranquility is the
dominant mood, and it is made more appealing by the beauty
and the harmony carefully worked into the descriptions.
When the mood of the shepherds changes, the entire
scene also shifts. In chapter five, Opico leads the

shepherds away from their usual haunts to a place that he

knows well. From here to the end of the book the tone

 

15Sannazaro, p. 42. Longus in Daphnis and Chloe is

the classical precedent for describing picturesiin Arcadia.

52

becomes less tranquil and much more sorrowful. The descrip-
tion matches the increased perturbation of the spirit:
We had gone not much over two miles when we came
to the head Of a stream called Erymanthus. Through
a fissure in the natural rock at the foot of a
mountain it hurls itself forth with a mighty and
fearful uproar, and with a kind of boiling of white
spume, onto the plain, traversing which it wearies
the neighboring wood with its murmuring.
Even this description, intended to suggest the fear of the
shepherds, does not destroy the decorum and harmony Of the
work.

Sannazaro's use of allusion also calls attention to
his artistic endeavor rather than to the meaning of his
work. Not again until John Dryden and Alexander Pope will
so many allusions to other writers be woven into one work.
His laments, singing contests, festivals, and games have
analogues in either the pastorals of Theocritus or Virgil.

He even includes a discussion of magic similar to

Theocritus' second idyll, called The Sorceress. After

 

chapter eleven, he begins to allude to the heroic poetry
of the classical world,l7 devoting a good deal Of space to
funeral games suggested by the £l£g§_and the Aeneid.
Boccaccio and Petrarch are the referents of the allusions
in chapter twelve. Sannazaro uses the pastoral motifs to

discuss his own life and to describe himself as the

 

16Sannazaro, p. 57.

17Sannazapo, p. 21.

 

 

53

Petrarchan lover. In the epilogue, he follows the Petrar-
chan tradition by promising to transform the misery that
is his life into beautiful poetry. Mr. Kalstone believes
that these many allusions provide one of the pleasures of

the work:

The sheer pleasure in harmony and in outdoing any
single classical pastoral by echoing many--and this
pleasure is a strength Of the Arcadia—-is also enough
to overshadow, to absorb and rEEEEF_EOintless, the
conventional lover's lament.18

The failure that Kalstone mentions is the failure that
should be expected in a work of art that exists for the
pleasure that can be derived from appreciating the inge-
nuity of the artifice. Meaning becomes the handmaiden to
aesthetics. Sannazaro bequeathed to the writers who were
about to dramatize the pastoral an example of pastoral
motifs combined into a self-conscious, sophisticated,
elegant, and varied masterpiece. These qualities were so
fascinating that Tasso and Guarini wrote their pastoral
tragicomedies completely under their spell.

At the same time that the Arcadia was being composed,
the pastoral drama was slowly developing at several courts
in Italy. The precise history of the pastoral drama
remains a mystery and consequently has occasioned a great

19

deal of controversy. Vittorio Rossi contends that the

 

18Kalstone, p. 32.

19
p. 89f.

Mia I. Gerhardt, La Pastorale (Assen, 1950),

54

pastoral drama evolved naturally out Of the pastoral
eclogue. Carducci believes that the pastoral drama was
created at the Court of Ferrara, using only Cinthio's

Eglg as a model. Theocritus and Virgil, he contends,
played no part in its development. Greg follows Rossi

and maintains that the eclogue had a direct influence upon

the pastoral drama.20

According to Greg, the dialogue of
the pastoral eclogue was recited by actors at the various
courts as part of the pageants and spectacles surrounding
the ceremonies of state occasions. Like Theocritus' idylls,
the pastoral drama developed at the courts of the aristoc-
racy and was designed to satisfy their taste. These early
performances combined a scenic background, which contrasted
sharply with the decor of the court, with the dialogue and

21

action of the regular drama. As Greg points out, there

are very few examples of these early performances remain-

22 It is thought that at the court of the Estensi in

ing.
Ferrara actors took the parts of the shepherds and recited
the speeches and songs of the traditional eclogue. In 1490
at Rome under the patronage of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna an

eclogue that criticized the corruption of the Curia was

 

2ocreg, p. l69f, and pp. 424-5.

21J. A. Symonds, Rennaissance in Italy, Vol. IV:
Italian Literature (New York, 1888), Pt. II, p. 110.

22Greg, p. 170.

 

55

performed.23 In 1506 Castiglione and Cesare Gonzaga wrote

and performed an eclogue called Tirsi for the Duke Guidobaldo
24

 

at Urbino. This production combined songs, pastoral
complaint, and court panegyric into a pleasing whole. The
pastoral imagery was not used to criticize the court;
rather it was intended to be a pleasing veil that only
pretended to hide a compliment. When the pastoral appears
in the Italian courts, more often than not, it pays a
compliment to the luxurious world of the court instead of
Offering itself as a contrasting and preferable ideal.
This probably helps to explain why dramatic eclogues were
included in the festivities of two of the three marriages
of Lucrezia Borgia.25 The guests were entertained by them
in 1493 when she married Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro and in
1502 when she married Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara.
Politian's (Angelo Poliziano) gpggp, usually con-
sidered to be the first pastoral drama, is worth a few
moments' attention because it blends with the pastoral
eclogue a death and revival theme taken from mythology.
Politian wrote this play in two days for Cardinal Francesco

26

Gonzago of Mantua in 1471. When it was printed in 1494,

 

23Ibid.

24Greg, p. 31.

25Louis E. Lord, A Translation_pf the "Orpheus" of
Angelo Politian and the—“Aminta“ of Torquato Tasso (London:
Oxford UniverSity Press, 1931), p. 56.

26Lord, p. 70.

56

it lacked act and scene divisions but included a few stage
directions. In 1776, Antonio Tebaldeo revised the drama
by dividing it into five acts and by removing most of the
topical allusions.27 Greg believes, because the stage
directions indicate some kind Of stage similar to that
used for religious plays, that this play is really a E2252.
rappresentazione on a pagan theme. The pagan theme is the
story of Orpheus as outlined in book ten of Ovid's M2237

morphoses.29

 

In this brief work, Politian creates a world of
harmony and art beyond the grasp of common sense. Neither
practical common sense nor the higher teleological powers
of the intellect that determine the ends and means Of human
existence reside here.

Orpheus is the proper mythological subject of this
world. In the middle ages the mythographers associated him

30

with the pastoral tradition. Unlike Sannazaro's Sincero,

 

27Ibid.

28Greg, pp. 156-7.

29Ibid.,p. 158.

30Caroline W. Mayerson, "The Orpheus Image in Lycidas,"

PMLA, LXIV (1949), p. 190. Miss Mayerson lists several

other qualities which may have contributed to the choice

of this symbol. (1) He was looked upon as a prophet who
harmonized and civilized nature (p. 189). (2) He was

thought to have been a type of Christ (p. 192). (3) He
symbolized the poet who possesses the powers to penetrate

the unknown and sing of creation and of the gods (p. 198).
(4) His story and that of Adonis are virtually the same,

and Adonis was the subject of the first elegies (p. 192).

57

he belongs to the pastoral world, and his power to tame
the beasts, to move stones, and even to open the gates of
Hades became the symbol of the powers of the poet who
draws his energy and inspiration from nature (as Boccaccio
suggested) and then uses these powers to bring order,
harmony, and peace to those very same irrational forces

Of nature.

QEEEQ begins with a pastoral scene whose simplicity
rivals that found in any of Theocritus' Idylls. Two
shepherds meet upon a hillside. The one, Mopsus, is
looking for a lost calf, and the other, Aristaeus, is
deeply in love with the nymph Euridice. The two discuss
their problems for a while; then each sings a song. When
they finish, a third shepherd, Thyrsis, enters and reports
that he has found the calf and also seen the nymph.

Mopsus and Aristaeus depart, the one going to his cattle
and the other in search of the nymph.

Politian uses these two shepherds to contrast two
ways Of life. Mopsus, the Older shepherd, is more concerned
with his practical duties to his animals than he is with
love. The younger shepherd, Aristaeus, has fallen hope-
lessly in love with Euridice, becoming a Petrarchan lover
who knows only the pains of love and none of its joys.

His attention is totally taken up with the torment caused

by the passion of love; the emotions of love have gotten

58

the better of common sense. M0psus can see exactly what
has happened and warns Aristaeus:
For, Aristaeus, if once he [Love] holds thee in

his cruel sway, straightway thou will forget thy bees,

thy gardens, and thy vinesi thy tilth, thy pastures,

and thy flocks and herds.3
Aristaeus scoffs at this admonition, saying that he does
not want to relinquish the sweet pains of love. He is
completely committed to the life of the emotions. In fact,
Aristaeus sings the usual lover's complaint so sweetly that
Mopsus, in spite of himself, is briefly won over to his
position. He thinks that if the nymph hears his poetry she

will "come to thee like a little dog."32

Before leaving to
look for his cattle, Mopsus asks Thyrsis, the third shep-
herd and servant of Aristaeus, what he thinks of his
master's madness. Thyrsis' answer recognizes the limits
and the lowly status of the world of common sense:
0 Mopsus, 'tis for a servant to Obey, and he is

mad who would fain rule his master. His wisdom far

surpasses ours, that I know. For me suffices it to

tend the cows and bulls.3
The world of emotions is higher and beyond the comprehen-

sion of the realm of common sense. After Euridice dies

and Aristaeus becomes the complete courtly lover, devoted

 

31Lord, pp. 77-8.

32Ibid., p. 80.

331bid., p. 84.

59

to a love who has died, several more powers of the world Of
the emotions are revealed.

Orpheus appears in the play, singing the praises of
the Cardinal of Mantua. After the compliment, Orpheus
learns of Euridice's death and his mood changes to grief,
which he expresses in a short lament. Feeling that con-
ventional mourning is not enough, he decides to descend
into Hades and bring her back to earth. His singing, he
thinks, is the prOper instrument to retrieve her with
because prior to this: ". . . we have moved stones by our
song. We have made the deer and the tiger herd together,
the forests follow us, and the rivers flow backwards in
their channels."34

The power of Orpheus' song stops the punishments in
Hades, and even Pluto marvels at the sweetness of the
music. Orpheus kneels before Pluto and begs him for the
sake of love to return Euridice to him. At this point
Proserpine says to Pluto:

I did not believe, my sweet lord, that pity
would e'er come to this realm. Now I see it
triumphant in our midst. I feel my heart filled
with it. I behold not only those in torment but
even Death weeping for his unmerited woes. Now
mayst thou for him let bend thy law inflexible,

for the sake of his song, his love, and his just
prayers.35

 

3‘4Ibid.,p. 9o.

35Ibid.,p. 94.

6O

Orpheus' music has had its intended effect. He is exuber-
ant in his triumph: "Euridice is won--my life restored."
He sings several songs as he leads her out of Hades. Of
course, he looks back and then watches hoplessly as she
returns to Hades. Orpheus returns to earth alone and a
bitter man. In his despondency, he swears that he will no
longer seek or honor woman's love and urges married men to
flee from the company of women. In retaliation several
Bacchantes kill him. The play ends with the drunken
followers of Bacchus commanding everyone to follow their
example and worship Bacchus. Orpheus, the poet who can
order and control his emotions through art, is killed by
the unorganized and uncontrollable fury of the Bacchantes.
He derived his power over nature from love. When trans-
formed into art, his emotions can cause pity in the hearts
of the coldest people and can alter the inflexible laws of
nature.

Politian believes that emotion not reason rules the
life of the artist, which is just another way of saying
that the pastoral world is a sentimental world. Politian
dramatized the difference between the world of common
sense and the world of sentiment; prefering the latter
even though it, more often than not, leads to unfulfilled
love and death. The rest of the Italian dramatists make
the same choice; only they do not believe that it is as

tragic a place as Politian has made it out to be.

61

In employing the myth of Orpheus, Politian was the
first to blend the Ovidian mythological world with the
pastoral. The blending was not as difficult as it sounds
because the emotional development Of the Orpheus story and
of the pastoral elegy are the same. Both progress from
sorrow to defiant bitterness. Only, in this play the
short-lived joy disrupts the steady progression of sorrow
and makes the final anguish that much more bitter. The
theme of rebirth, however, does not dominate the structure
of this play as it does in Boccaccio's elegy. The pro-
gression of the emotions supplies the sense of structure
in the performance; the action has intentionally been
slighted. As Symonds and Greg have pointed out, Politian
is more interested in the lyrical qualities of his play
than in the dramatic.‘ This, of course, is only fitting]
in a world devoted to emotion. The sadness begins on a
slightly melancholy note as the lover sings his complaint.
It increases considerably, becoming a distressed cry Of
woe when Orpheus learns of Euridice's death and intensifies
into a plea when Orpheus plays before Pluto. Then it bursts
out into a rage after Euridice returns to Hades. The play
ends with the frantic yells Of the drunken Bacchantes—-
almost exactly contrary to the restrained emotions of the
beginning.

The mythological stories from Ovid provide the kind

of action that is harmonious with the pastoral background.

62

The pastoral eclogue didn't have any action or even any
hints that could be ingeniously developed into plots.
Because Of the obvious violation of decorum, the play—
wrights couldn't include the ambitions of kings or the
foibles of city dwellers in Arcadia. It is to Politian's
credit that he saw that Ovid's deities and nymphs would
provide action that was essentially Of the same spirit as
that of the pastoral. Several of the stories that compose

The Metamorphoses share at least two qualities with this

 

pastoral world. First, they are complete in themselves;

the audience does not need any special knowledge or exper-
ience to understand what they are seeing. Secondly, they
remain pleasing fictions, delicate and beautiful artistic
creations for all to behold and admire. Many of the stories
pretend to relate the origin of trees and flowers, but
everyone who knows the stories accepts them not as science
but as art. As Mia Gerhardt has noticed, Politian has
imagined these stories not to be about gods and goddesses

36 There is no real

but about real human protagonists.
difference between the personalities of Aristaeus and
Orpheus and Pluto and Proserpine. All are equally moved
by music and therefore capable of the finer emotions.

While the characters are given a slight bit of life, there

 

36Gerhardt, p. 78. "Le monde mythologique est
pour lui une realite presente et contemporaine, sur le
meme plan que 1es protagonistes humains."

63

is still not enough to allow the audience to identify with
them or to even begin to think that they have anything in
common with these characters. As in the pastoral the sense
of life, of vitality, and of reality is kept strictly under
control, so that the audience is continually aware that
these characters are part of an artistic creation. Poli-
tian's drama does not hold a mirror up to human nature.

It tries to reflect beauty, the goal Of artistic perfec-
tion.

Beauty, attained by the conscious refinement Of the
story, pervades the work. All the actions that could be
violent and theatrical are ignored or turned into narration.
Euridice's death is very briefly described; even the chase
that led to her death is closer to the symbol of a chase
than to any representation. Orpheus' death is also briefly
handled. His head is brought on stage as proof of his
dismemberment. The drunken Bacchantes' actions are highly
stylized and intended only to suggest frenzy, not represent
it.

The few descriptions suffer the same process of
refinement. They are just the Opposite of Sannazaro's.
Where his were detailed and pictorial, these are abstract
and suggestive. They concentrate upon the beauty of
Euridice and the sadness of Aristaeus and Orpheus, her
two lovers, and not upon the landscape. Politian did not

want the audience to get too much of a whiff of the actual

64

world; he preferred that they experience the ideal world of
created beauty.

Politian and his followers' conception of beauty,
drama, and art have been fairly consistently misinterpreted
by modern critics. For example, Mia Gerhardt correctly
sees the relationship between 9££§p_and the Hellenistic
Idylls, but she refuses to see that these same qualities
can be part of the aesthetics of a successful work of art:

Toute cette mythologie, qui fasait un 51 convaincant
appel a l' imagination des Italiens, est une mythologie
de decadence, plutot alexandrine que grecque, dans 1e
gout des Idylles pseudo-anacreontiques et de 1' Anthol-
ogie--gracieuse, Claire, sans profondeur et un peu
efféminee.

To begin to understand the works that are discussed in this
chapter, we must realize that these qualities were looked
upon as virtues and that they were consciously incorporated
into the work of art by the artist.

These qualities--grace, clarity, simplicity, and
delicacy--b1ended well with the pastoral world created by
Virgil and developed by Sannazaro. The blending of the

pastoral and the Ovidian settings created a world com-

pletely devoted to the emotions. Against the artificiality

 

37Gerhardt, p. 78. She is not the only one who
disparages this style. Here is Douglas Bush's opinion of
the pastoral Ovidian verse: "In their pictorial richness,
artificial rhetoric, erotic themes, and general slightness
of content, they were typical young men's poetry . . . .
Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry
(rev. ed. New York, 1963), p. 75f.

65

of a pastoral and mythological scene the emotions of the
Petrarchan lover could be displayed, reflected, and some-
times even analyzed. This sentimental world was also
ideally suited to the development Of the motif of death

and revival. Although this motif is latent in the Orpheus
story, Politian did not emphasize this aspect; he preferred
to concentrate upon the emotions of the characters. It

was left to other dramatists to exploit the possibilities
of this motif.

NicolO de Correggio (c. 1450-1508) first adapted the
motif of death and revival to the mythological drama in his
play called Cefalo. This play, based upon the story of
Cephalus.and Procris found in the seventh book of 222.

Metamorphoses, unfolds against the same blend of pastoralism
38

 

and mythology that Politan invented. In the fourth act,

Cefalo wounds an animal in the bushes who turns out to be

his wife, Procri.39

Prior to this the two had been sun-
dered by the insidious gossip of two‘self-serving creatures.
But now that Procri is dying, the two resolve their dif-
ferences, and as she dies, Cefalo pledges his love to her.
In the last act, Diana, to whom Procri had pledged her-

self in a moment of anger, comes on the scene, raises

Procri off her bier,and restores her to her husband and

 

3
8Greg, p. 168.

3915ia,,pp. 166-8. My discussion rests upon his

resumee 5f‘fhe plot.

66

lover. This last act, which does not derive from Ovid,
appears to be the secularization of the theme of rebirth
in Boccaccio's eclogue, Olympia because it ends with the,
joyous revival of the hero's dead loved one. Correggio
was the first to dramatize the complete motif Of death
and revival, allowing his audience to experience the
sorrow of loss and the joy Of revival that are common in
the Renaissance pastoral eclogue.

This play shares more than its emotional rhythm with
the pastoral eclogue; it includes many conventions from the
tradition. Three acts end with the shepherds and nymphs
assembling to sing eclogues and songs. In the second act
an old shepherd forces Procri to listen to the pleas of
her husband. When he finishes, the act ends with an
eclogue. A chorus of fauns and satyrs end act three, and
the fourth act concludes with the Muses and the nymphs
singing a lament for Procri. These songs in honor of
Procri's death include several of the conventions of the
pastoral elegy. The mourner asks the muses to help him
mourn his beloved; the mourners assemble around the bier;
the deities pass by; the singers tell how all nature mourns
for Procri; and Cefalo himself despairs at her death.

This play demonstrates the intimate relationship between
the pastoral elegy and the pastoral tragicomedy better

than the later and more refined examples of the genre.

67

Guarini fails to mention Cefalo in his discussion of
the origin of the pastoral drama. According to him Agostino

Beccari's Il Sacrifizio (1554) was the first pastoral
40

 

drama. The period between the Cefalo and the El

Sacrifizio produced many experiments, but none of them
41

 

were as complete and as polished as Beccari's play,
which presented a complicated plot that was full of action
centering around three pairs of lovers. So much dramatic
action constituted a decided improvement over the earlier
plays, such as Cefalo, which substituted songs and eclogues
for dramatic action. The difficulties of the plot are
resolved by miraculous means which, while not instances

of the fully developed motif, still maintain the same
spirit and cause the same results. Callinome, condemned

to be a sacrifice to Pan because she attended his festival

 

40"The first of the moderns who had the courage to
do it [write a pastoral drama] and succeeded was Agostin
de' Beccari, a respected citizen of Ferrara, to whom
alone the world should assign the happy invention of such
a poem." As I have shown here and as Greg demonstrates
in his Appendix I, the origin of the pastoral drama is
not as simple as this. Guarini ignores completely Ovid's
role in the formation of the pastoral drama (Gilbert,
p. 531.)

41None of these plays used the motif of death and
rebirth in any significant way. Torrsillo's Due Pellegrini
(1528) comes the closest to using it. A miraculous voice
saves two lovers who were contemplating suicide. Casalio's
Amoranta, Epicuro's Mirzia, Cozza's Erbusto and Cinthio's
Egle experiment with different combinat1ons of elements,
but they are not interested in the motif. See Greg, p. 173.

 

 

68

which was forbidden to followers Of Diana, escapes death
by smearing a magic Ointment, which makes her invisible,
over her body. While invisible, she kills the boar which
the priests of Pan hoped would kill her. Erasto, who
loves her, gave her the Ointment, and in return she falls

in love with him.42

Again near death causes a conversion
from indifference to love. Another couple is saved by a
miraculous metamorphosis. Carpalio loves Melidia, and

she secretly returns his love. Melidia's brother, Pimonio,
refuses to sanction the marriage, and to prevent her from
disobeying his will, he keeps her under guard. While
Pimonio attends the games held at Pan's festival (cf.
Sannazaro's Arcadia, ch. 11.), the two lovers consummate
their love and are able to escape Pimonio's wrath because

he falls into an enchanted lake and reappears as a boar.

Agostino Argenti's Lo Sfortunato (1567) tries to

 

effect the conversion without recourse to the miraculous.
Sfortunato, a shepherd who has intentionally let his love
escape from his grasp, decides to die since he now will be
unlikely to experience the pleasures of love. His love,
Dafne, who hears him make this vow of death, finally falls

in love with him.43

This is only one of three pairs of
lovers, and this conversion doesn't receive the emphasis

in the structure of the play that it receives in later

 

42Greg, pp. 174-5.

43Ibid of pp. 175-60

69

works. These early playwrights experimented with various
combinations of the pastoral eclogue, the Ovidian mytholog-
ical tale, and the classical Latin comedy, but none of
them approached the perfection of Tasso and Guarini.
Torquato Tasso wove these various traditions into
a pastoral drama, Aminta, which became one of the most
celebrated works of art of the Italian Renaissance. The
astute critic J. A. Symonds has called this play, along
with 11 Pastor Fido, "the climax of dramatic art in
Italy."44 More recent critics, such as Greg, Gerhardt,
and Brand spare few adjectives when discussing its per—
fection.45 Perhaps, John Shearman's comparison describes
its qualities most precisely of all:

It is like a bronze by Giovanni Bologana: tiny,
polished, exquisitely interlaced yet balanced and
gracefully at ease. As one turns the bronze in the
hand so one may read and re-read Aminta, continually46
satisfied by the discovery of new—f3ffiil fe11c1t1es.

Tasso partially adopts Sannazaro's and Politian's
view of Arcadia. He too believes that the pastoral world
belongs to the emotions, but whereas they centered their
worlds around the sorrow of the Petrarchan lover, Tasso

centers his upon the fulfillment of love. Aminta, of

course, is the typical Petrarchan lover, hopelessly in

 

44Renaissance‘in'Italy, p. 114.

45Greg, p. 192. "The effect produced is one and
whole, that of a perfect work of art, . . . "

4'6Mannerism, p. 92.

 

70

love, sorrowful, shy, modest, despairing, theatrical, and
suicidal. Tasso allows him to win the love of the shep-
herdess that he worships and thereby denies the tragedy in
the traditional pose Of the worshiping lover. All Sincero
and Orpheus had was the memory of their beloved to immor-
talize in verse; Aminta discovers that his love was not
dead, as he thought, and so he attains the enjoyment of
his desire. In addition to motivating the action, love
comes in for a good deal of discussion by the characters
and the chorus of the play. These discussions determine
the nature and importance of love and stress its intimate
connection with the pastoral world. In the prologue Cupid,
who has decided to go among the shepherds, begins the
discussion of love by boasting about its ennobling powers.
In effect, love overcomes the social distinctions imposed
on people by raising shepherds to the level of heroes. The
belief that love purifies and refines the base nature in
man so that even the lowly perform deeds of valour and the
untalented sing songs pleasing to hear belongs to the
courtly love tradition that began in the twelfth century.
From the beginning, then, this world assumes that the
emotions can alter for the better and that they are the
only practical means available.

The lover, if he wants to win the heart of the girl
he loves, has to appeal directly to her emotions. Tradi-

tional chivalrous deeds, which are part of a rational code

71

of honors, duties, and protections, will not suffice.
Aminta saves his beloved Silvia from the Satyr; but instead
of falling in love with him, she runs Off into the forest
without a word of thanks. It takes a much more drastic
action to convince her of his love. When the despair,
caused by the realization that he will never possess his
love again, forces him to attempt suicide, she realizes
just how sincerely he does love her. Love dominates his
entire existence; he cannot live without it. This fact,
like a bolt of lightening, flashes straight into her breast
and ignites the dry husk that had been her heart. Only
sincere love could have had such a miraculous effect upon
the maiden.

Love can be either pleasurable or sorrowful, depending
on whether or not it is fulfilled. In this pastoral world,
which differs from Sannazaro's and Politian's on this point,
all desires are fulfilled; none are doomed to perpetual
frustration. The chorus in a famous speech at the end of
act one makes just this point about the pastoral world.
This world was the ideal and deserved to be called the
Golden Age, but not because it was innocent, simple, or
fruitful. It merited the title because the people living
there knew no restraint upon desire. They obeyed a law

. . . aura e felice / che Natura scopli: S'ei piace,

 

72

ei lice" (11. 590-1).47 Honor, the symbol of the public
life that restrains passions in the name of custom, reason,
and taste, has destroyed this once beautiful world. The
chorus prefers the world of the libertine to the world of
the courtier and wishes only to live according to its
desires, because life is so short and death so permanent.48
The advice that Daphne and Tirsi dispense is based upon
this same law. Daphne tried to get Silvia to abandon Diana
by recounting how she, as a young girl, found much more
pleasure in life after she had given in to her lover than
she did before. Tirsi tries to get Aminta to find a woman
who will be more easily persuaded than Silvia so that he
doesn't have to suffer so much frustration. Aminta,
despite falling over a cliff, and Silvia, despite being

chased by a wolf, enjoy each other's love and thus fulfill

their own deepest desires.

 

47Torquato Tasso: Poese, ed. Francesco Flora
(Milano, 1956). All quotes are from this work.

48The more prevalent humanist viewpoint is expressed
well by Spenser in his Faerie_gueene: “But temperaunce,"
said he, "with golden squire/betwixt them both can measure
out a meane,/ nether to melt in pleasures whott desyre,/
Nor frye in hartlesse grief and dolefull tene./ Thrise
happy man, who fares them both atweene!" (Book II, Canto
ll, lviii). Hiram Hayden in The Counter—Renaissance (New
York, 1950) sums up his discussion (pp. 308-20) of the
subject with: "Hence volition while making the soul's
decisions, is typically checked and limited by understanding:
nothing is more alien to the Christian—humanistic tradition
than the concept of a life directed by the autonomous and
unlimited will. Indeed, if the will revolts from the
guidence of reason, it is simply to fall victim to
"inferior' irrational powers, and hence to lose all true
freedom (p. 319)." Needless to say Tasso advocates pre-
cisely the Opposite viewpoint.

 

 

 

73

The motif of death and revival is the only means that
will convert their potentially tragic situation into joyous
fulfillment. It denies the possibility of death and also
the frustration of longing and sorrow. Death-and-revival
is necessary to this pastoral world because it reveals that
love does triumph in Arcadia--even over death. For those
who feel that this motif is proper to this world and
believe this conclusion to be natural, love has also
triumphed over common sense. Tasso adds this motif to
the pastoral world to show the power of love and to deny
the tragic implications Of courtly love. Regardless Of
how the contradiction in the motif appears to common sense,
it will still feel natural to those who believe that the
world should be arranged to fulfill all desires.

To complete his conception of the pastoral world,
Tasso has to make two more alterations in the traditional
Arcadia. In the Renaissance, Virgil's Arcadia came to
symbolize the ideal of ppmmm, the life of contentment,
free from all perturbations Of the spirit.49 Tasso

believes that this style of life, which he calls 0210 or

 

49What Hallett Smith writes of Elizabethan England
applies equally well to Italy: "Whatever may be said of
other times and places, Elizabethan England saw a meaning
in pastoral. This meaning was, or constituted, a positive
ideal. It was an ideal of the good life, of the state of
content and mental self-sufficiency which had been known
in classical antiquity as otium." Elizabethan Poetry_
(reprinted Ann Arbor PaperbacE, 1968), p. 2.

 

74

leisure (II, 1. 269), is the proper soil in which to nourish
love. Towards the end of their discussion, Daphne says to
Tirsi: ‘ ‘
contento vivi
piu che mia fossi, O tirse: in 0210 vivi
e ne l'ozio l'amor sempre gemoglia
(II, 268-70).

The chorus, at the end of this same act, amplifies this
hint. It wonders where and from whom one learns the art
of loving well. The answer is a little surprising. Only
love itself can teach the mysteries of love. Love is too
intense and flies too high to be discussed by those who
have not experienced its ecstasies. There really is no

such thing as the art of loving. The books, such as The

Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus,that state the

 

rules and regulations of courtship and love are completely
superfluous and even wrong-headed. But this passion which
enobles and transports the soul to other realms can hardly
be called contentment. In fact it is just the Opposite:
a madness. For Tasso the madness called love is a natural
growth in the ideal country of leisure and pleasure.

It follows then that the poet's relationship to the
pastoral world differs from that described by Boccaccio
and Sannazaro. The former believed that the quietness of
the forest was a healing balm that soothed and mended the
tormented spirits of the poet, so that, soon after arriving
there, he would again be inspired to write poetry. The

latter believed that the poet belonged to the city and that

75

he could only briefly visit Arcadia. The peaceful setting
of the woods only served to set Off his inward torments;
in Arcadia the poet learns just how deeply the image of
his love has dominated him. The poet leaves Arcadia a
wiser man but still suffering from the same malady. Tasso
sees the pastoral world as the source and nourisher of

the poet's love. The poet is no stranger passing through;
he grew up and fell in love in Arcadia. The poet is,
thus, a natural part of the forests and the fields, living
his life in accordance with a beneficent nature which
permits the fulfillment of desires that in other more
realistic settings would be frustrated.

Tasso transformed the pastoral world into a garden
of delight from which reason and common sense were excluded.
He also denied that sorrow and suffering were permanent
aspects of the Petrarchan lover's condition. The motif of
death and revival demonstrated that the Petrarchan lover's
love was not hopeless and, in so doing, reaffirmed the
basic assumption of this world: Where the emotions reign,
everything that is pleasing is permitted.

Tasso's success consisted in creating an image of
this idylic world which could be presented upon the stage.
The delicate aesthetic qualities, so much more appropriate
to lyric poetry than to drama, which Tasso invented to
harmonize with this world, were borrowed from the classical

drama, the pastoral elegy, and Ovidian mythology. The

76

simplicity, beauty, symmetry, and elegance of these genres
combine with the motif of death and revival to produce an
artificial work which was admired for its artificiality and
not for its approximation to reality. In this respect his
play is a development Of Politian's gmfgg.

Like Politian, Tasso reproduces the simplicity of
classical drama by imitating many of its conventions.
Beccari had used three pairs of lovers, but Tasso prefers
only one pair and gives each a confidant to discuss his
problems with. Also the conventions of the nuntio and the
chorus increase the frozen SOphistication of the play.

They turn all potentially violent and intense action into
narration, thus removing the play even further from the
immediate experience of the audience. The representation
of any violent or emotional action would destroy the
langorous and sensous mood so necessary to the presentation
of the world of desires. The three unities, borrowed from
classical examples, increase the decorum of the play even
more by inhibiting the movement of time, space, and action
upon the stage. The simplicity of the plot, the unity of
action, place, and time, and the continuity of emotion
create the formal beauty and perfection of this work.

Tasso was one of the few to appreciate just how much the
rules of classical drama, which were formulated by applying
reason to the classical drama, could help to suggest the

langorous, subdued, and sensuous realm of the emotions.

77

The pastoral elegy contributes a great deal to this
atmosphere. Although no action takes place before the
audience, there is still enough emotional rhythm to engage
its attention and to give it the sensation Of action. The
rhythm of the Renaissance pastoral elegy provides this
movement that structures the play. The emotions belong to
Aminta and move from the melancholic and even tender
opening lament, through his sadness, fear and dejection
when Silvia runs away, through his complete despondency
caused by before hurling himself from a cliff, to the
absolute joy when he Opens his eyes and sees his love
bending over him. At the same time he strikes the emotional
balance of sadness and joy, which Thenot, the shepherd in
the "November" eclogue, called "doleful pleasaunce" when
he felt the same movement in the lament sung by Colin Clout;
This balance becomes part of the work's symmetry which, in
turn, is part of the formal perfection which leaves so
strong an impression. In this manner the motif of death
and revival makes another important contribution to the
aesthetics of the play.

The "little pictures" or idylls of rustic life which
Theocritus included in his pastoral poetry also contribute
to this aesthetic impression. Each act has at least one of
these short pieces of narration and description that one

character recites to another. Aminta's early youth with

78

Silvia, the circumstances of his falling in love with her,
Silvia's rescue from the Satyr, and Aminta's suicide
attempt are good examples of these small set pieces. Each
of these scenes is complete inlitself, and yet none of
them clashes with any of the others. They form a series
Of miniatures that complement one another at the same time
that they maintain their individuality. All of these
miniatures share a sense of immobility, of time having
stopped while the idealized descriptions were copied, the
same sense of tranquil pastoral simplicity, and the same
sense of artistic craftsmanship. Tasso leaves no doubt in
the audience's mind that an artist made these scenes to be
appreciated them.

The characters also owe their origin to the pastoral
elegy. The few characters that appeared in the scene
surrounding the elegy itself were types which didn't exist
beyond the bounds of the poem. These types were not
intended to develop into recognizable human beings; they
were meant only to illustrate a mood or an emotion. The
dramatis personae function in the same manner in this play.
Aminta is the love lorn shepherd-poet and Silvia is his
cruel mistress. They don't become realistic personages
even though one of them, Silvia, changes her attitudes
completely in the last act of the play. Actually these
stock characters function exactly as the human figures

in a pageant called tableau vivant. In a pageant Of this

 

79

kind the situation defines the identity Of a figure for

the audience; no actions are necessary to reveal the
characters' identity. Since the audience reads the
characters in such a pageant, it does not become actively
involved with the emotions of those in the scene. The

same thing happens at a performance of Aminta; the audience
uses its eyes and its reason and not its emotions. Accord-
ingly the audience always views the play as a work of art
and the characters as something other than themselves. Of
course, the death and revival of one of the characters
increases the gap already existing between the production
and the audience. What the audience admires in the
characters are their beauty, elegance, and sophistication,
in other words, their manufactured qualities.

Tasso borrowed the sensuous beauty found in Ovid's
mythological world and wrapped the motif of death and
revival in it, so that the audience's response was con-
trolled by this ornamentation. At first glance Ovid would
seem to be an Odd poet from whom to borrow since his theory
of love directly contradicts the Petrarchan theory described
by Cupid. David L. Stevenson succinctly contrasts the two
theories in the following manner:

In Ovid's two witty discussions of the subject
(Love) he denies all transcendental notions Of sex.
Desire is all, and its purpose is served by formulating
techniques of seduction and capture (as in the

Ars Amatorla and techniques of escape (as in the
Remedia Amoris.) Amor is not an emotional experience

 

80

deeply rooted in the personality, as it was to the
Renaissance Petrarchan, but an affair of the nerves.

50
Tasso only borrowed the background of Ovid's poems for the
Aminta. This polished texture composed of nymphs, sylvan
deities, boar hunts, attempted rapes, and metamorphoses
kept the audience very much aware that they were watching
a work of art. The descriptions of the naked Silvia
appeal to the connoisseur who delights in the beauties Of
the senses and especially in the pleasures of the flesh.
Tasso, like the connoisseur, knows how to keep his pleasure
under control. The attempted rape of Silvia while she is
bathing in a forest fountain could have been Obscene.
Tasso, however, provided just enough detail to suffuse the
scene with erotic pleasure and still not Offend anyone in
the audience. He accomplishes this by not having anything
happen to Silvia and at the same time lavishly describing
her body in terms of sensuous pleasures.

The characters help to keep the audience at a
distance from the work because they are slightly amusing
in themselves. No one accepts the actions of a nymph or
satyr as real. They just don't belong to any world that
the audience could consider real. These creatures weren't
meant to develop personality traits; they were only

intended to contribute to the artifice and they ornament the

scene by adding variety to the stage setting. The more the

 

50The Love-Game Comedy_(New York, 1966), p. 19.

81

playwright could find for them to do, the more inventive
he appeared to his audience.

It is very difficult to characterize exactly the
subtle atmosphere that the Ovidian mythology possesses.
It approximates to a sophisticated and amused irony. The
eyes of experience watch the intense actions of youth
plunge into experiences that they have never had before.
The author knows what is in store, so he remains detached
from the action and at times--especially in the most
intense moments--finds their seriousness very amusing.51
Silvia's and Aminta's exaggerated emotions probably received
a cynical grin from the more experienced members of the
audience. The irony, the characters, and the controlled
sensuality of the Ovidian atmosphere help to prevent the
audience from being imaginatively drawn into the action
of the play. While watching the Aminta the audience never
loses its poise, its sophistication, and its awareness
that it is an audience watching a play. At the end of the
performance, the audience knew that it had not participated
in an experience centering around a conflict of character,
but rather that it had observed a beautiful work of art,
balanced, graceful, elegant, and conscious of itself as

a work of art and not life.

 

51Gerhardt sees this same quality; only she calls it
skepticism: "Sceptique a l' égard de bonheur arcadien comme
de toute chose, desenchanté d'avance, il a cree une
pastorale ou domine 1e désenchantement" (p. 123). I think
this last description is a little too strong. The ending
certainly confirms the pastoral world.

82

Tasso presented what was, in effect, a lyric poem to
the court of the Estensi, and Guarini, his conscious rival,

turned the pastoral back in the direction of the drama with

52

the publication of I1 Pastor Fido in 1590. Greg believes

 

that the excellence of this work resides entirely in the
two ingeniously complex plots which give his play such a
strong feeling of dramatic action:
In the construction Of a complicated plot, apart from
the dramatic presentation thereof, he achieved a
success not to be paralleled by any previous work in
Italy, . . . .5
In the previous chapter we noticed how the motif of death
and revival became an intimate part of these complications.
We saw also how the ingenuity lavished upon the suspense
of the near death came to be an end in itself, which con-
sequently changed completely the moral and aesthetic
purposes of tragicomedy. Viewed from the vantage point Of
the pastoral world, the motif of death and revival serves
another, perhaps even more interesting, purpose. It con-
nects the pastoral and the heroic worlds and also is the
means of passage from one of these worlds to another.
Guarini's Arcadia is a very different place from
Tasso's. The latter's was the world of the emotions; no

emotion is restrained, and no desire, unfulfilled. The

restraints of reason, custom, and law are completely

 

52Greg, p. 210.

53Greg, p. 201.

83

absent; everything lives according to nature. Guarini
praises the life of unrestrained naturalness and honesty,
but for him this ideal no longer exists. Arcadia, like
the golden haired maiden of romance, is threatened by
powerful forces. A wild boar ravages the Arcadian country—
side, and Diana's curse requires a human sacrifice and
prevents the two lovers from enjoying each other. After
these evils are destroyed, Arcadia will be able to revert
to its old unrestrained ways. Two characters, Corisca
and the satyr, help to keep the plot boiling by using the
despicable ways of the court, i.e., lying, artifice,
gossip, hypocrisy, and revenge. These two must also be
stopped before the Arcadians can once again consider
themselves free.

Threatened Arcadia requires the heroic services of
a noble champion. It gets two, and they come from a most
surprising place: Arcadia itself. The hero, who defines
himself in noble deeds, not in intense emotions, finds a
home in Guarini's Arcadia. The poets leave the scene and
the heroes who are also lovers take their place. Silvio,
a young man of royal blood, is one of these heroes.S4 He

kills the wild boar, thus.earning-the applause of the

 

54Guarini said that he patterned Silvio after
Euripides' Hippolytus (Herrick, p. 130). The Satyr came
indirectly from Euripides' C clo s (Herrick, p. 131). The
recognition scene is obvious y patterned after Oedipus Rex.
Oedipus was raised as a shepherd, so this association is
not so absurd.

84

Arcadians. Infatuated with honor, he boasts that he owes
his success to his chastity. This certainly was true of
Gawain, but Silvio is in Arcadia; he must join the pastoral
world. The near death of Dorinda causes him to forsake
the world of honor and become a member of the world of
love. The breaking Of his bow symbolizes his repudiation
of the heroic and his complete acceptance of the Arcadian
world of the emotions. Love conquers honor.

The other plot moves in the opposite direction.
Mirtillo is a pale reflection of Sannazaro's Sincero. He
is a recent arrival in Arcadia and is Obsessed with his
unrequited love but is more fortunate than Sincero because
he has his love before him, while Sincero only has an image
of his in his mind. After learning that Amarillis must
marry someone else and consequently longing for his own
death, Mirtillo Offers to die in the place of his love,
Amarillis; this selfless action establishes beyond a doubt
that he belongs in Arcadia. Now all that has to be shown
is that he is a member of the heroic world. This the
strangers do for him by reconstructing his birth and early
life. Mirtillo really belongs to the priestly upper class
of Arcadia. This piece of information wins him his love,
and his marriage removes the curse from the land--the
perfect blend of the heroic and the pastoral. His life
and Arcadia are saved in the same moment that he wins his

love. The motif Of near death and revival was an important

85

part of his passage from Petrarchan lover to Arcadian hero
and prince. Guarini adds another ingenious touch Of irony.
Becoming the hero allows Mirtillo to become the successful
lover. Even though he is heroic he still ends up with the
same reward as Aminta.

The Ovidian mythological-pastoral background that
Guarini inherited has one advantage that would make it the
ideal setting to use for a play that combined both tragedy
and comedy. Traditionally the pastoral was not associated
with either comedy or tragedy. Comedy was an affair of
the city and required realistic urban settings. When it
eventually moved to the country, it took its need for
realistic detail with it. Tragedy was an affair of kings
and therefore required stately and noble backgrounds,
such as castles, courts, and battlefields. SO the pastoral
world was a neutral ground where the heroic and the rustic
could mingle without making each other appear too ridic-
ulous.

Arcadia, however, exacted a heavy price from tragedy
and comedy before it allowed them to join hands on its
hillsides. This pastoral world has its own decorum, which,
as we have seen, gradually developed from Arcadia, through

Orfeo, through Il Sacrificio, to Aminta. This decorum

 

imposes harsh limits upon the kinds and amount of action
that is permissible. Since the inactivity of the pastoral

world is one of its essential qualities, Greek drama is

86

much better suited to it than any that tried to imitate

the struggles and battles Of the tragic hero. Greek drama
was essentially a drama of recognition, enlightenment, and
revelation. This inward action is made to order for the
pastoral world. Guarini, in his lengthy annotations to

the play, points out the many parallels that he constructed

between the Greek dramas and I1 Pastor Fido. The recogni-

 

tion scene in Guarini's play, wherein Mirtillo discovers
his true identity, prevents the tragedy rather than causes
it. It has no significance for the audience and remains
for them just a device that resolves the plot. All it has
to recommend it, is its ingenuity. The earlier experimentors
in the pastoral drama discovered the kinds of actions
appropriate to the pastoral, and none of them include
anything the least bit heroic. The shepherds can indulge
in games, dances, songs and religious festivals, centering
around Pan, the chief deity in Arcadia. Guarini includes
an example of each of these in his play which greatly
contribute to the variety and grace in this world. To
provide some action that will resemble the heroic, he adds,
by means of narration, a boar hunt (cf. Cefalo). This
refined, very stylized, activity is all that Guarini can
think of which won't violate the decorum of Arcadia. This
example of the heroic, and consequently of the tragic
(since only the aristocracy can suffer tragic falls) never

becomes a convincing part of the play. It doesn't fit,

87

so no one can take it seriously. The failure of both plots
stems from the incompatibility of the pastoral and the
tragic. ‘

The unconvincing representation of the heroic and
the tragic in the pastoral world invites a amused skepti-
cism from the audience. .This skepticism is reinforced by
the same sophisticated irony found in Aminta. Guarini
can't capture any of Tasso's sensuousness, but he does

manage to recreate the Ovidian atmosphere of graceful

inconsequentiality solcharacteristic of the Metamorphoses.

 

The intense involvement of the characters (especially
Dorinda and Mirtillo)in their own love problems helps to
sustain this skepticism throughout the play. The audience,
which has experienced the same emotions without approaching
death, can only smile at the simplistic utterances of these
love-lorn creatures. (As with Aminta, the members of the
audience keep their distance from the world of the play.
Only from a distance can they experience the play as a

work of art and not as a reflection of life. Only when
they are detached and rational can they admire the grace

of the characters, the beauty of their speeches, the variety
of incident, the difficulty and the ingenuity of the plots,
and the harmony of the entire play. The Ovidian atmosphere
insures that pastoral tragicomedies will be experienced as

art and not life.

88

When the aesthetics becomes the end of the play's
activity, it, of course, loses all moral significance.
Heroic actions, when they are.tragic, have such moral
significance. But when they appear in a play without moral
significance, they only vitiate the real chivalric ideals.
Thus when the heroic and the pastoral blend together, the
heroic threatens to become a ridiculous caricature of
itself. In any pastoral tragicomedy, the danger is always
present; it is solely up to the playwright whether he
wants to emphasize the risibility of the heroic or the
beauty, grace and delight of the pastoral.

Giraldi, Tasso, and Guarini each put the motif of
death and revival to a different use. Cinthio, in accord-
ance with his theory of drama, used it didactically to
illustrate his particular religious belief of the beneficent
nature of Providence. Cinthio also kept it confined to the
romance tradition where it thrived until the end of the
sixteenth century. Tasso adapted the motif as it was
developed‘in the pastoral eclogue to his lyric drama. There
it structured the emotions of the play, as it had in the
eclogue. Also it struck the necessary balance between
sadness and joy, and finally denied any of the tragic
implications in the plight of the Petrarchan lover.

Guarini used the motif to transform the heroic world of
Chivalrous deeds into the pastoral world of love. It had

no didactic function--which at least made the play

89

consistent with his theory--and it did call attention to
his own ingenuity and to the aesthetic qualities of the

work.

CHAPTER III

THE MOTIF OF DEATH AND REVIVAL IN

RENAISSANCE THEORIES OF LOVE

In the pastoral plays examined in the last chapter,
love dominated the lines of the characters. Orpheus' love
for Euridice sent him into Hades; Aminta, completely
absorbed in his beloved, tried to kill himself when he
thought that she had died; and Mirtillo, because he was
faithful to his love, volunteered to become a sacrifice.
These characters are not exceptional; most Italian poets
and dramatists of the Renaissance looked upon the pastoral
as a natural setting for affairs of the heart. For them,
shepherds and shepherdesses thought of nothing other than
their loves. In earlier centuries Dante and Petrarch had
used the pastoral mainly to conceal personal messages and
to disguise their criticisms of the church. But through
the influence of writers, such as Sannazaro and Politian,
the Italian pastoral ceased to dabble in politics and
gradually devoted itself to the subject of love. By the
time Tasso and Guarini had adapted the pastoral to the
stage, no one thought it strange that shepherds should be

more concerned with their emotions than with their herds.

90

91

The conception Of love dramatized in Arcadia did not
come from any classical source as Hallett Smith, following
W. W. Greg, Suggests in his discussion of the English
pastoral.1 The pastoral tragicomedy borrowed its char-
acteristic rhythm and several of its conventions from the
classical pastoral elgy, but Theocritus and Virgil did not
provide examples of love that these Italian dramatists
could adapt to the stage. The conception of love that
these dramatists use finds its source in the romances and
the love lyrics that the troubadours and minnesingers sang
in the various courts Of southern France, Germany, and
northern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The
songs of these itinerant bards were preserved in Italy
where, in the thirteenth century, Guinicelli, Dante, and
Cavalcanti transformed the troubadour's theory of sensuous
love into a religious and quasi-mystical worship of the

lover's mistress. Petrarch and the Stilnovisti refined

 

and repeated this religious theory of love throughout the
next century until Ficino, Pico, Politian, and Lorenzo de'
Medici transformed it again--this time into a cosmology

and a metaphysics. In their hands, the theory of courtly

love became a beautiful veil that partially obscured their

 

1Smith, pp. 15-16. Smith believes that Longus'
Daphnis and Chloe is the source. The history of love in
Arcadia is more complicated than this. As we shall see
below, Plato's Phaedrus is a more likely source for the
example of love in a pastoral setting.

 

92

exposition of the mysteries of nature, man, and God. These
cosmological speculations, called Neoplatonism, when they
assumed beautiful forms in painting, drama, poetry, and
prose, enchanted many Europeans. Commentaries upon poems
and treatises upon the nature of love circulated through
the European courts in the sixteenth century, and, while
they simplified and diluted the original theories, they
still contributed to their pOpularity and prestige. The
last and in many ways the most interesting of these
treatises is Giordano Bruno's 2§.gli_Eroici Furori. In this
series of dialogues he transforms the theory of courtly
love into a description of the Renaissance Magus' heroic
struggle to acquire knowledge, wisdom, and power.

At the same time that the love treatises were dis-
seminating these theories, Politian, Tasso, and Guarini
incorporated these theories of love, which dovetailed so
beautifully with the rhythms of the pastoral elegy, into
the first pastoral tragicomedies of the Italian stage.

Now the motif acquired an anagogical purpose; it pointed
beyond itself to the central Neoplatonic mystery of death
and revival. In presenting this mystery, these playwrights
turned the pastoral drama into a rite of art, which was

completely self-conscious and ceremonial.

93

In this chapter we are not concerned so much with the
general history of the theory of courtly love.2 Our atten-
tion will be focused only upon the role that the motif of
death and revival plays in this theory. From its first
appearance in the romance literature of the twelfth
century, the motif was an integral part of courtly love
and therefore suffered the same basic changes in the course
of the Renaissance. This chapter seeks to trace these
various changes in the meaning of the motif and to describe
the various images in which it is presented to the reader.
This motif belongs to a long tradition which, through its
repeated use over the course of centuries, gradually
established a variety of responses in those watching it
upon the stage. These meanings, some esoteric and some
metaphysical, were the reasons why the playwrights used
the motif in their plays. They also hoped that the
audience, which was already familiar with the Neoplatonic
mysteries, would appreciate these references to the
popular theory.

In the Middle Ages Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan
(c.1210) is the first major work of art of any length to

dramatize the motif of death and revival. This poem, a

 

2For a detailed history of the development of courtly
love see Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love:‘ An Intro-
duction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance (New York,
1958). For itsihistory in England see Lu EfiEly Pearson,
Elizabethan Love Conventions (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1933).

 

 

94

mixture of the ancient Celtic romance traditions and the
conventions of courtly love, describes the nature of love

and its role in the world.3

For Gottfried, the tale of
the young warrior hero, Tristan, his adulterous love of

his uncle's wife, Isolde, and their eventual discovery and
banishment, symbolized a desperate struggle between the
emotions of the individual and the laws and customs of

the court. Although Gottfried did not live to finish
Tristan, it is a fairly safe assumption, based on hints
seattered throughout the text, that he would have followed
his acknowledged source, Thomas, and ended his tale with
the death of the lovers. The structure of the entire
work, then, could hardly conform to the motif of death

and revival. Gottfried, in fact, usually limits the motif
to his images and rhetoric. Only one chapter, the first,
completes the pattern of death and rebirth.

This chapter, which tells of the birth of Tristan,
introduces many of the themes that appear later in Tristan's
own history. Rivalin, a knight of courage and courtesy,
fell in love one day with Blancheflor, the sister of King

Mark, at a festival where she watched him joust. Neither

knew what love was, but both were swept along in its wake

 

3According to A. T. Hatto, a translator of Gottfried's
poem, nothing positive can be said about the early Celtic
versions Of the tale because the first versions that we have
date from C. 1150 A.D. See Tristan by Gottfried von
Strassburg, trans. A. T. Hatto (BaItimore, 1960), p. 8 of
Intro.

95

until neither had control of his life. Once love had taken
possession of Rivalin's heart and will, he became a new man:

. . . Love, the one and true incendiary, came and

kindled her flames of desire, the flames that set

his heart on fire and revealed to him in a flash

what keen sadness and lovers' pining are! For now

he laid hold of a new life, a new life was given

him; so that he changed his whole cast of mind and

became quite a different man, since all that he did

was chequered with strangeness and blindness.4
The fires of love illuminated the mysteries of his own being
for his consciousness. He now realized that he had an inner
emotional life that was as important as his outward life of
honor and courtesy. Blancheflor felt the same torment of
desire for Rivalin, and their love exploded into a consuming
passion which was consumated outside of the laws of church
and state. Soon after the consumation of their love,
Rivalin was called away to fight his old enemy, Morgan.
Before the battle, he validated their marriage by announcing
it in church. It was fortunate that he did because he was
killed defending the honor of his king. When Blancheflor
heard of his death, she lay on the ground in agony for
four days. Then:

She twisted and turned and writhed, this way, that

way, to and fro, and continued so until, with much

labour, she bore a little son. But see, it lived,
and she lay dead.5

 

4Tristan, p. 53.

5Tristan, p. 63.

96

Gottfried juxtaposes the joy of new life with the
sadness of death to emphasize that the two qualities are
interconnected and that they are necessary aspects of the
world. The appearance of one of these emotions entails
the appearance of the other. The death of Blancheflor
brings forth Tristan, who becomes the joy of Mark's court
when he grows up, but, as his name suggests, he also
brings more than his share of sadness to himself and to
the court. Gottfried used this motif in his structure to
adumbrate the fate of the hero and, at the same time, to
state the metaphysical truth which underlies the events
in the poem.

Marie de France (fl. 1150-1200) is the first writer
to use this motif in the structure of a complete poem,
but she does not develop the metaphysics latent in it. In
the l§m_called the ngm_émgmm, the pattern of death and
revival completes itself and then returns to the theme of
death again.6 Before a young squire can marry the woman
of his dreams, he must carry her to the top of a mountain.
As he trudges up the slope, she sees how hard he is
struggling and offers him a magic potion to ease his pain,
but he refuses it. Just as he reaches the top of the

mountain, he dies. In deep mourning his love pours the

 

6John Steven, "The granz biens of Marie de France,"
in Patterns of Love and Courtes , ed. John Lawlor (London,
1966), p. 2. My descriptiOn o the lai is based upon
Mr. Steven's summary because I was ufiable to obtain a
modern translation.

 

97

magic potion over the ground. Every place that it touches
immediately brings forth new life in the form of a great
number of plants. The girl then falls on the body of her
dead lover and dies. When the two dead lovers are dis-
covered, they are buried with a great deal of ceremony.

In Eliduc, Marie uses the motif to harmonize adul-
terous passions with the world of law.7 When Guilliadun
learns that her prospective bridegroom is already married,
she falls into a deep swoon and appears to be dead. Then,
writes Steven:

Eliduc lays her out in front of the altar in a
hermitfischapel deep in the forest. Eliduc's wife
noticing his extreme melancholy, finds out his
secret; but when she visits the chapel with a
squire she is completely overcome with Guilliadun's
beauty. By observing the behaviour of two weasels,
she hits on a miraculous flower-cure for Guilliadun.
The latter, joyfully restored to life and to love,
is united to Eliduc, whose wife equally joyfully
surrenders her claims and retires to a nunnery.
Marie de France obviously doesn't feel the deep tensions
between the individual's passions and the public world of
law and custom.

Steven, in his comments upon Marie's artistic

ability says that:

 

7Steven, p. 21. Again I rely upon his summary of

the lai.

81bid.

98

Her great talent is to concentrate, to crystallize

emotion in a single image or in a sequence of dramatic

images.
This statement is equally true of Gottfried. His dramatic
images, even more than hers, concentrate his philosophy of
love into unforgettable symbols. The most powerful of these
dramatic images rely for their effectiveness upon the motif
of death and revival. The motif first appears in the scene
that describes the conception of Tristan. While Rivalin
was defending King Mark's estates, he was severely wounded
in the side and brought home, a dying man. Many mourned for
him, but Blancheflor's was by far the most intense; she
surreptitiously entered the chamber where he lay dying.
She swooned when she saw him, and lay next to him as though
she were dead:

And when she had rallied a little from this extremity

she took her darling in her arms and laying her mouth

to his kissed him a hundred thousand times in a short

space till her lips had fired his sense and roused

his mettle for love, since love resided in them.10
Gottfried tells us a few sentences later that God helped
him to live again. Really, however, as he clearly states,
the miraculous kiss of his beloved was what revived him and
transformed him into the living man who in the next moment
made love to Blancheflor.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) in a famous

series of sermons on the Song of Songs blended the mystical

 

 

9Ibid.

10Tristan, p. 58.

99

and the erotic, so that he could imagine the Mother Church
as the bride of Christ excited on her marriage bed to a
passionate frenzy by the zeal Of God.11 Joseph Campbell
believes that Gottfried:

. . . threaded echoes of the celibate saint's seraphic
rapture Bhrough many verses of his own inspired work

Although Campbell doesn't include the resuscitating kiss
among his examples, Gottfried probably had the saint's
symbolic use of the kiss in mind when he wrote the scene.
Bernard believes that one of the conditions for divine
union is that the Lord must pass as an intermediary between

13 Christ is such an intermediary,

our spirit and God's.
and as such be becomes the kiss of the Song of Songs. He
Opens our soul to the favors of the mystical life. As
Gilson explains:

Christ therefore, in Whom human nature is assumed by

the divine nature, is Himself the Divine kiss. Man

can hope for no more than to receive the kiss of this

Kiss; . . . Christ is the model and the source of all

ecstasy, and any other is a mere participation.

Gottfried has changed the sex of the intermediary and

has interpreted the source of love differently, but he still

conceives of this kiss as a sacred and miraculous experience

 

11Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative
Mythology (New York, 1968), p. 245.

12

 

 

Ibid. Hatto agrees with him; see p. 17f.

13Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint
Bernard, trans. A. H. C. Downes (London, 1940), P. 110.

14Gilson, pp. 110-11.

100

which Opens the heart to the joys of divine love. Blancheflor
has been called divine throughout the chapter. Now, after
assuming her humanity by lying next to him in a death-
imitating swoon, she awakens and Opens Rivalin's dying soul
to the desire for the joy and pleasure of union. As the
intermediary, she prepares him for his new life of true
love. Their becoming one has a significance that transcends
the mere conception of a child. It represents the ultimate
oneness that separates true love from the mundane varieties.
Gottfried describes their union this way:

Her heart, her mind, her desire were centered entirely

on Rivalin, and his in return on her and on the passion

she inspired in him. Between them they had in their

minds but one delight and one desire. Thus he was

she, and she was he. He was hers and she was his.

There Blancheflor, there Rivalin! There Rivalin,
there Blancheflor! There both, and there true love!

15
These two opposites, male and female, these two distinct
individuals, these two unique psyches have blended into one
another and, defying all laws Of nature and logic, have
become one. True love is the name of such a sacred and
complete union of opposites, and death and revival is an
essential part of the means to this end.

Gottfried repeats and elaborates this doctrine of
love in a series of closely related images in the story of
their son. When the wound Tristan receives from Morold

refuses to heal, he resolves to go to Morold's sister, the

Queen Isolde, to get it cured. After hearing his inspired

 

15Tristan, p. 58.

101

performance on the harp, she promises to cure him if in
return, he will teach her daughter, Isolde, to play the
harp. Since Tristan killed her brother, she should have
hated him, but Gottfried says that this woman, so wise in
the ways of medicine, did not realize that he was her
brother's killer:
Had she known on whom she was lavishing her care and
whom she was helping from death's door, if there is
anything worse than death, I assure you she would have
given it him far more gladly than life. As it was,
she knew nothing but good, and good will was all that
she bore him.16
After twenty days, Tristan has recovered well enough to
begin to teach Isolde how to play the harp. Out of this
association, unbeknownst to them, grows that love which
was to be both their joy and their sorrow. As in the first
image, the motif of death and revival indicates that the
young hero has been prepared to receive the higher mystery
of true love. His wound, the symbol of foul impurity,
was healed with the arts of medicine, and his rebirth
indicates that his spirit has been purified enough to
participate in true love. In this incident, the inter-
mediatrix is the source of all good and the sister of evil.
Her knowledge of medicine, not her love, purifies his soul
and makes him worthy of the gift of her daughter.

Gottfried repeats this same situation when Tristan

returns to bring Isolde back to King Mark of Cornwall.

 

161bid., p. 146.

102

Queen Isolde's husband had decreed that if anyone killed
the dragon disturbing the neighborhood, he would allow him
to marry his daughter. Tristan slew the beast and cut out
its tongue as evidence. The tongue exuded a foul poison
which caused Tristan to fall senseless into a shallow pool
when he placed it next to his skin. The two Isoldes and
their maid, while looking for the slain dragon, found him
close to death in the pool. After they pulled him out,
the Queen discovered that it was the tongue that caused
his death-like swoon. She revived him with the skilled
application of her medicines. This time when he awakes he
knows where he is and upon whom he is looking:
Ah, merciful lord, thou hast not forgotten me! Three
lights encompass me, the rarest in all the world, joy
and succour to many hearts, delight of many eyes--
Isolde, the bright Sun; her mother Isolde, the glad
Dawn; and noble Brangane, the fair Full Moon!17
He has been purified enough to recognize the divinity
working through the three women. After he revives and tells
them his name is Tantris, they transport him to the castle
for further treatment.

While Isolde is caring for him and beginning to
admire his body, she discovers that the splinter found in
Morold's head belongs to Tristan's sword. She flies into
a rage and decides to kill him while he is in his bath.

She calls him a dead man, but before she can slay him, her

mother enters and reminds the girl that the Object of her

 

17Ibid., p. 166.

103

wrath is under her protection. NO matter how he deceived
her to win that protection, he still is entitled to it. At
this point, Tristan says that if they will treat him
amicably, he will tell them some good news. The two women
now don't know what to do. Brangane enters and after
hearing the details advises them to make peace with him.
The women allow him to rise out of the bath, and he tells
them of King Mark's desire to wed Isolde. Three times
Tristan was saved from death by the Queen. Each time his
revival resulted in a love match. Only this time Tristan
doesn't know who is going to fall in love; he thinks that
it will be Mark.
While Isolde and Tristan are sailing from Ireland

to Cornwall, they pass the time by talking to each other.
She professes to hate him, and he tries to mollify her.
She persists in countering any moves that might lead to
friendship. Then, one of the ladies-in-waiting accidentally
gives them a drink of the love potion prepared by Queen
Isolde for Mark and her daughter's wedding night:

No longer were they at variance: Isolde's hatred was

gone. Love, the reconciler, had purged their hearts

of enmity, and so joined them in affection that each

was to the other as limpid as a mirror. They shared

a single heart. Her anguish was his pain: his pain

her anguish. The two were one both in joy and in 18

sorrow, yet they hid their feelings from each other.

The love potion has caused a great deal of comment among

the critics of this poem. Some, such as, A. T. Hatto think

 

18Ibid., p. 195.

'104

that it caused their love. Professor Gottfried Weber of
Cologne sees the potion as a metaphor for the moment in a
love affair when two people lose control of their sense of

19

free will. Weber continues:

This psychological process--and here is the important

point--is elevated by the poet into an objective

experience of an existential absolute and described

as an independent force, more than human, opening out

to the transcendent.
This is a very pedantic description of the function that
St. Bernard gave to the Divine Kiss which was Christ. The
potion opens the soul, already predisposed to love, to the
possibility of transcendence which, for Gottfried, is the
higher synthesis of the two lovers into one soul. The
potion, working as an intermediator, changed Isolde's hate
into love and forced their unconscious love into conscious-
ness. These young people have been transformed again,
this time into a symbol of the divine synthesis. But the
synthesis is not complete because they have not yet told
each other of their love. The world of law, represented
by Mark, still inhibits them. Once they have transcended
the force of law, they will be ready to partake in the
higher divine synthesis. After a brief inner struggle,

Tristan overcomes honor and duty to Mark, and they realize

their deepest desires. They continue to meet after Isolde

 

19Quoted in Campbell, p. 241. For Hatto's remarks
see Tristan, p. 29.

ZOIbid.

105

marries Mark, whose gradually increasing suspicions force
them to leave the court. They only attain the divine union
far away from the court in the privacy of $3 fossiure §.lg
gent amant.

The cave of the lovers condenses most of Gottfried's
theory of love into a few concrete symbols. In the middle
of a wasteland is a small forest with a stream, many flowers,
and many singing birds. In the midst of this pastoral
splendor rises a mountain in which is hollowed the cave of
lovers, containing a bed of crystal dedicated to the Goddess
of love. Here Tristan and Isolde live. Gottfried assures
us that they have everything that they will ever want.
Their mutual love is their food, their court and their
servitors. They have fulfilled all of their desires.

The structure of the cave symbolizes the qualities
requisite for true love. Gottfried's description of the
significance of the height of the cave is the same concept
dramatized in the various occurrences of the motif of
death and revival:

Height is Aspiration that mounts aloft to the clouds:
nothing is too great for it so long as it means to
climb, up and up, to where the molten Crown of the
Virtues gathers the vault to the keystone. The Virtues
are invariably encrusted with precious stones, inlaid
in filigree of gold and so adorned with praise, that
we who are of lower aspiration--whose spirits play and
flutter over the pavement and neither settle nor fly--
we gaze up intently at the masterpiece above us,

which stands amid the Virtues and descends to us from

the glory of those who soar in the clouds and send
their refulgence down to us!--we gaze at their Virtues

106

and marvel! From this grow the feathers by which our

spirit takes wing and, flying, earns praise for its

virtues.2
This passage applies to more than the images of death and
revival in Gottfried's poem. It looks forward to the poets
and artists Of the Renaissance, providing a rational and
explicit theory for the inclusion in their works of so many
women and goddesses who descend from on high, amid all their
perfections, to revive their dying knight and awaken in him
the urge to achieve these virtues for himself.

Up to this point in the story the motif has been used
to dramatize the awakening spirit which then discovers love.
In the cave of love, Gottfried reverses the significance
of the motif. In this beautiful earthly paradise, sensuous
love exists for its own sake. The bed made of crystal
indicates its purity, which brings neither children, honor,
land, money nor status. It has its own rewards and exists
solely for these:

Whatever frolics or pastimes had been pursued in this
grotto before, they did not equal this; they were
neither so pure nor so unsullied in spirit as when
Tristan and Isolde disported themselves. These two
beguiled love's hour in a way no lovers surpassed--
they did just as their hearts prompted them.2

The world of complete fulfillment of desire was not
to be theirs for long. Mark, out hunting one day, dis-

covered the cave. Tristan had heard the hounds and,

fearing capture, had worked out a plan meant to deceive

 

21Tristan, p. 264.

221bid., p. 267.

107

Mark. They lay on the crystalline bed far apart from one
another with a sword between them. Mark looked in on the
sleeping lovers through one of three small windows, through
which the sun shone, while they were in this estranged
position.23 Mark this time is the intermediator; he blocks
the windows with leaves and grass and goes away. Upon
awakening, they notice that the sunlight of Honour no
longer shines upon them, marking the beginning of their
end. By deceiving Mark, they were not true to their
desires and sullied their love. Death is the only reward
for such behavior.
In the dramatized images the motif brought together

in the same person two opposites: death and life. A
rhetorical device that does the same thing is called
oxymoron; it is Gottfried's chief stylistic embellishment.
Joseph Campbell reminds us that this word came from a
Greek word meaning "pointedly foolish" and that it:

denotes a mode of speech commonly found in Oriental

religious texts, where it is used as a device to point

past those pairs of opposites by which all logical
thought is limited . . . .24

 

23Gottfried explains the significance of the windows:
"Through these three (windows), the sweet light, that
blessed radiance, Honour, dearest of all luminaries, smiled
in and lit up the cave of earthly bliss (p. 265)."

24Campbell, p. 188. One particularity good example
he gives comes from a Zen Buddhist work, The Gateless Gate
"and there read of 'the endless moment' and Tthe fuli void':
Before the first step is taken the goal is reached.
Before the tongue is moved the speech is finished."

 

108

Campbell calls such speech "anagogical" because "it points

25 Gottfried uses his

beyond itself, beyond speech."
oxymorons in just such a manner. He wants to point.past
the individual manifestations of love which are imperfect
to the ideal of true love which is the goal of all desires
for union in the world. In the prologue he describes the
world of the heart, which he wants to live in, as just
such a world where Opposites are conjoined:
I have another world in mind which together in one
heart bears its bitter-sweet, its dear sorrow, its
heart's joy, its love's pain, its dear life, its 26
sorrowful death, its dear death, its sorrowful life.
The world that he has in mind is exemplified by Tristan and
Isolde; accordingly he looks upon their story as the inter-
mediator between us and the mystery Of love-death towards
which the anagogical speech points:
Their life, their death are our bread. Thus lives
their life, thus lives their death. Thus they live
still and yet are dead, and their death is the bread
of the living.27
The readers are to be shocked by the seeming paradox of the
oxymoron and the death and revival motif into awakening to
the mystery of love revealed in the images and the rhetoric.

Gottfried believes that true love is really a coincidence of

opposites and, as such, is beyond the bounds of logic,

 

25Campbell, p. 189.

26Tristan, p. 42.

27Ibid., p. 44.

109

reason, and common sense. Nicholas Cusanus (1401-1464)

tells us in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae that

 

 

God is the simultaneous mutual implication Of all
things, even the contradictory ones . . . .23

In this sense then love is divine. True love is such an
appearance of the divine harmony Of opposites in the world.
Rivalin and Blancheflor first attain this union, and
Tristan and Isolde follow suit. These epiphanies are rare
because not many people are pure enough to partake of the
divine. Only those of noble heart are capable of ever
experiencing the complete and ecstatic union with the
beloved. The union of opposites, the creation of the
mystery, the epiphany is reached through the senses, the
will, and the bodily desires. The final paradox unites
the divine and the mundane in the physical union of two
people completely controlled by love.

Once the two lovers are aware of their unity, they
cannot be sundered again. When Tristan prepares to leave
Mark's court Isolde reminds him Of this:

Our lives and very souls are so interwoven, so utterly
emmeshed, the one with the other, that you are taking
my life away with you and leaving yours with me. No
two lives were ever so intermingled. We hold death

and life for each other, since neither can really find
life or death unless the other gives it.29

 

28As quoted in Campbell, p. 189.

29Tristan, p. 285.

110

These two lovers have become one, and the oxymoron is the
only rhetorical device that can begin to describe such a
paradox. This, then, is the mystery to which the coincidence
Of Opposites points.

The Opposites, joy-sorrow, pleasure-pain, love-hate,
male-female, will-reason, desire-honor, and life-death occur
so frequently in the poem that the reader soon realizes
they are part of the very marrow of the story. The motif
of death and revival is just the dramatization of one of
these pairs of opposites. Because this motif contradicts
common sense so neatly and so completely, it can point to
a world beyond the reach of reason better than any other
device. Its anagogical possibilities are always waiting
to be exploited by a writer.

The other pairs of opposites present in this work
assume some very interesting shapes. Isolde and Tristan
must appear to each other as both good and bad, as a source
of both joy and sorrow, and as an object of both love and
hate before they can be united by the mystery Of the
potion. To Isolde he is Tantris-Tristan, her saviour
and slayer of the dragon and the killer of her uncle. TO
Tristan, she is both the beautiful young girl that he once
taught to play the harp and the revenging fury who wants to
kill him while he bathes. These same Opposites extend to
the very speech the characters use to describe their own

desires. Both Rivalin and Blancheflor believe their newly

111

discovered emotions to be an agony, a suffering, a tormenting
pain, and a living death; at the same time they find love
joyous, happy, sweet, and festive. Since these lovers are
capable Of containing these Opposites in their heart at the
same time, they are capable of experiencing true love. The
use of the oxymoron verifies, as it were, the fact that
these noble hearts are more sensitive and have a touch of
the divine in them. The possessor of the noble heart
welcomes the coincidence of opposites even though he knows
that any easing of his pain is only temporary and that the
new life his love inspires entailes its Opposite, death,

as well.

The troubadours3O

kept the relationship between the
lady and the suffering knight alive in many of their .
lyrics, but they felt that the sexual union of the lovers
was completely superfluous. In fact, the lovers' separa-
tion and not their union became the essence of their
relationship and the source Of inspiration for the poems
of the lover. In the role of the poet-knight moved by

his love to write of his agonies in beautiful verses, the
troubadour sang of a love called amor. Joseph Campbell
points out that amor is the third kind of love to appear

31

in the Occident. It differs from agape and eros because

 

30The first troubadour was the Count of Poitiers,
William IX (1071-1127). The last were silenced in the last
Albigensian War (1240). See Friedrich Heer, The Medieval
World, trans. Janet Sondheimer (New York, 1963), pp. 177-8.

31

 

Campbell, p. 177.

112

the poets neither sublimate it into the charity Of the
community of men nor celebrate it as an indiscriminate orgy
or love feast. For these poets love was a selective and
discriminating principle that responds to the eyes and the
heart. The poet-knight falls in love because of the per-
fections and virtues that he perceives in his liege-lady.
When the poet-knight falls in love with a woman
possessing such perfections, he enters into her service,
a relationship that forces him to remain at a great physical
distance from her. The true lover humbly seeks permission
from her to enjoy a state of perpetual desire, and, after
suffering for some length of time, he hopes to receive the
reward of blessedness from her. But, if the lady is pre-
disposed to mercy and is moved by the lyrics he has written
to acknowledge his complaints and agonies, then she
destroys the purity and beauty of their relationship;
consequently the lover is forever supplicating and she
forever withholding her mercy. The frustration of his
desire enables him to write the lyrics that describe the
agonies of his heart and upon which he relies to elicit
some sign of mercy and concern.32
These cruel liege-ladies lacked all divine powers.
They could not revive a moribund knight or heal his wounds;

they could only inspire poetry and a single minded devotion

 

32The above description comes from: Valency, pp.

26, 92, & 167.

113

from their true lovers. Also these poets did not develop
the metaphysical implications Of their situation. They
were content to imagine their ladies as members of the
courts before which they performed. Gradually the poet's
own internal agonies replaced the importance of their
mistress' life; hence in the later troubadour poetry the
woman becomes just a name.

The poets, called the stilnovisti, inherited the

 

traditions of the troubadours; only they changed the themes
from the celebration of the sensuous and the actual to the
worship of the abstract and the ideal. The crusaders from
the north of France in the name of orthodoxy extirpated

the troubadours along with the heresy of the Cathars and
the culture of the Provencal courts in the Albigensian
wars (1209-1229-1240).33 Only Italy preserved the texts

of the Provencal poets, and only the Sicilian school kept

34 But as the

alive the sensuous tradition of love.
repressive forces of the age grew stronger, most poets
were compelled to compromise with the ecclesiastical
authorities if they wanted to continue to write. They
compromised by altering the referents of their images and

descriptions. The Italian poets, writing after Guido

Guinizelli, converted the sensuous conception of love into

 

33Heer, p. 178.

34Robert S. Briffault, The Troubadours (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1965), pp. 160, 164.

114

an abstraction that was closer to philosophy than to the
35

chivalric ideals of the courts of love.
Guido Guinizelli (c. 1235-1276) was the first to
change the liege-lady into a goddess. His canzona, 5; SEE
Gentil, summarized the doctrine of true love as he knew it.
In it the lady, by means of a witty conceit, becomes an
angelic lady with the powers Of the Virgin Mary. Although
this poem was not meant to be taken as serious philosophy,
it was studied and commented on as if it were a dialogue

36

by Plato. Guinizelli explains how the noble lady turns

the gentle heart towards love. The gentle heart is made
by nature not art, and in it love burns for its own sake.
The lady remains the intermediatrix, but instead of a kiss
awakening the knight and kindling a blaze in his heart, a
look in his direction suffices:

Up in the Intelligence of Heaven shines

God the Creator, more than to our glances
The Sun: He knows all its deep-hidden signs;
And as that sky, obeying Him, advances,

From God Himself it showers

Upon the first, complete and proper bliss.

A lovely lady with her sunlit glance

Must so reveal the powers

Of inborn gentleness 37

To one who never scorns Obedience.

 

35N. A. Robb in her Neoplatonism of the Italian
Renaissance (London, 1935) summarizes the change wélI:
1fThe—liege-lady of the troubadours, becomes a being of more
than earthly perfection who raises the lover towards the
bliss of Paradise" (p. 177).

 

 

36Valency, p. 232. He adds: "For Dante it was the
corner-stone of the new style."

37Medieval Age, ed. Angel Flores (New York, 1963),
p. 230. This poem is trans. by Joseph Tusiani.

 

115

She derives her powers from God and directs them into the
gentle heart. In a religious context, this is usually
called sympathetic magic. Guinizelli, however, replaces
the magic with a piece of scholastic doctrine which makes
the mystery appear intelligible. Velancy presents this
complicated theory as clearly as possible, so I will quote
two passages from it:

God moved the world through love by means of inter-
mediate substances created for the purpose, and these
intelligences worked simply by knowing the Creator's
will. Gazing upon the light of God, they transmitted
it in action, themselves radiant with the light they
received. In the same way, the spirits of the human
organism moved the flesh in accordance with the soul's
desire. When this soul in its turn contemplated a
higher spirit, and, through love, obeyed it, it
reflected the working of the cosmic mechanism all
along the chain of being. The lady who thus dominated
the lover's soul might properly be compared with an
angelic intelligence . . . . She touched them [her
lovers] only with her spirit, but it was enough; they
were moved. Then, ablaze, with desire, pleading for
pity, sighing and weeping, and full Of the joy of love,
they ggvolved about the angelic figure which controlled
them.

As Guinizelli happily notes in the last stanza Of his poem,
God could hardly consider it a sin to love such an angelic
substance. Obviously this poem pleases both the poet and
the church. Guinizelli was the first to state the relation-
ship between the lover and his lady in abstractions borrowed

from scholastic philosophy. Other stilnovisti struggled

 

with the problem of breathing life into these abstractions.

They wanted to make the relationship convincing. Borrowing

 

38Valency, p. 244.

116

the troubadour's role Of the anguished lover and his
oxymoron-filled complaints, they adapted them to the much
more subdued life of the philosopher-poet who devotes his
life to study and wisdom.

Guido Cavalcanti (1250-1300) enthusiastically adopts
this role in his sonnets and ballata. He concentrates his
poetic skills upon the moment when the lover makes the
double discovery of the anguish of being separated from
his love and the sheer joy of being in love itself (Sonnet
XXXI). His torment becomes so severe that in Sonnet XXXIII
he would welcome death if it appeared and Often asks love
why he tortures his favorites. Cavalcanti enjoys expressing
the paradox that the noble heart, which few possess, is the
only heart capable of such excruciating pain. An anonymous
commentator upon Cavalcanti's poems calls this play of
Opposites within the soul an Obscurity:

. . . which is the melancholy agitation [conturbatione]

that arises in the soul after love has been generated,
and always accompanies love.

 

The oxymoron is necessary to the expression of true love
simply because the noble heart contains the coincidence of
opposites.

Cavalcanti becomes more infatuated with the variations
that can be worked on the theme than with his mistress who

has inspired the need for them. Consequently, she fades

 

39John C. Nelson, Remaissance Theory of Love (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 41.

 

117

from his sonnets and ballata as quickly as a summer flower
in the autumn. In the famous canzone, mem§_§i_Priegha she
becomes merely a convention that allows him to open an
abstract explanation of the processes of the mind in the
conventional concrete manner. The courtly lover has dis-
appeared, and a philosopher has taken his place.

Dante (1265-1321) continued the philosophical and

 

technical concerns of the Dolce Stil Nuovo with a sincere
passion that has never been equaled. De Rougemont believes

that the only time Dante'reaches the heights of passion is

40

when he is singing of philosophy. In the Vita Nuova and

 

again in the Divina Commedia Dante's liege-lady, Beatrice,

 

leads him out of his spiritual turmoil caused by ignorance,
error, and sin into the new life consisting of the vision of
and the devotion to God, the source of harmony, peace, and
love in the universe. As Isolde prepared Tristan for the
union of love by healing his stinking wound, so Beatrice
prepares Dante for the union and knowledge of God by saving
him from death. There is only one difference: Beatrice
herself had to die. Dante's new life springs from

Beatrice's death; thus Dante with the use Of the oxymoron

 

40"For such was the paradoxical secret of courtly
love; stilted and inanimate when addressed to woman, it
became all ardent sincerity as soon as it was directed to
the Wisdom of love. Dante is never more passionate than
when philosophy is the theme of his song, unless it is
when philosophy has turned into holy science.“ See Denis de
Rougemont,‘Love in the western WOrld (New York, rev. ed.
1956). p. 166.

118

thrusts us into the heart of the mystery of life in death
and death in life which is central to the use Of the motif
Of death and revival.

Dante transfers the role of Tristan from its setting
in the medieval courts and chambers of the aristocracy to
the urban life of the late thirteenth century commoner.
Dante, indeed, has the noble heart, but he still remains
the poet-scholar, walking the streets of Florence. He does
not perform in public. His sonnets, the proof of a noble
heart, were supposedly called forth to express the emotions
of the moment. They are encrusted, however, with narrative
and commentary, the signs of the scholar. Both Of these
are necessary, because without them, we would think that
he was just the ordinary troubadour singing of his love.

Dante, the poet-scholar, is struck one day by the
beauty of Beatrice. Being the true courtly lover, he keeps
it a secret. Occasionally he catches glimpses of her in
public. Then, one day at the house of a friend, he sees
her again. This time her nearness throws him into com-
plete confusion and all of his senses are overpowered by
love. He faints as love rushes into his soul. When he
recovers, he tells a friend that he is now taking a path
along which he will not be able to return. This momentary
death and revival happened quite frequently to the noble
heart, and, as Valency points out, was even theoretically

justifiable:

119

When the vital spirit, anima, was driven from the

heart by the fiery spirits which composed the lady's

image, the heart was bereft Of life, and it died.

Such was the normal consequence Of the separation

of body and spirit. But the interruption was

momentary. The lover felt faint, his heart missed

a beat, then the spirits surged back and resumed

their functions more or less as usual.41

The joy of love fills his soul until one day, he

becomes so sick that he can't move. He broods upon his
love and experiences a vision of her death. Still within
the dream, he goes into deep mourning and appears to his
friends as one who is dead. Then, after awakening, in a
few days he again sees Beatrice on the street. Her
beauty and his love immediately begin to heal his soul

and lead him from this world to God, dwelling beyond the

spheres.42 When Beatrice actually dies, he confesses that his

 

41Velancy, p. 232. Valency quotes Lapo Gianni's
description of the same phenomenon: "Within your heart
there arose a little spirit which issued from your eyes
and came to wound me as I gazed at your lovely face, and
it pushed its way through my eyes so rapidly and so savagely
that it made my heart and my soul run away--the one had
been asleep and the other was terrified--and when they felt
it coming so proudly and the blow so strong they feared that
death in that moment would exercise its power. But when the
soul was reassured, it called to the heart, 'Are you dead
then, that I don't feel you any longer in your place?‘ The
heart, which had little life in it, wandering alone and
comfortless, almost speechless for trembling, answered 'Oh,
soul, help me up and lead me again to the castle of life.'
And thus together they went to the place whence they had
been driven (p. 232)." This little conceit contains the
pattern of the Vita Nuova, Pericles, and Aminta.

42Dante explicitly compares her coming to that of
Christ by showing how her companion's name, Joane, who walks
first, comes from John, the one who prepared the way for
Christ. Christ is the saviour and the mediator between God
and man.

 

 

120

pen cannot do justice to his sorrow, and he wanders through
the city sad and alone. A year later he happens to be
drawing some angels on a sheet of paper, when they appear
beside him with reassurances.43 Soon after their appear-
ance, he is attracted to the beauty of a woman whom he
sees on a balcony. Her beauty and the thought of worldly
pleasure tempt him away from Beatrice. One night, when
the struggle between worldly pleasure and devotion to love
is particularly intense, Beatrice appears to him in a
vision. From that moment on, he thinks of her constantly.
She has shown him the way, and Dante, reborn into the life
of the pilgrim, begins his journey that leads to the beauty
and splendour of the vision of God:

Beyond the sphere which spreads to widest space

Now soars the sigh that my heart sends above:

A new perception born of grieving Love

Guideth it upward the untrodden ways.

When it hath reach'd unto the end, and stays,

It sees a lady round whom splendours move

In homage; till, by the great light thereof

Abash'd, the pilgrim spirit stands at gaze.

It sees her such, that when it tells me this

Which it hath seen, I understand it not,

It hath a speech so subtile and so fine.

And yet I know its voice within my thought

Often remembereth me of Beatrice: 44
So that I understand it, ladies mine.

 

43He was practicing a little magic. It is accepted
practice to make an "image" of the spirit that the Magus
wants to appear. Dante, however, is playing with the
conceit and preparing us for the appearance of the angel,
Beatrice.

44La Vita Nuova, trans. D. G. Rossetti, reprinted in
The Portable Dante, ed. Paolo Milano (New York, 1947),
pp. 6I7-18.

121

Dante's assertion that his liege-lady is a miracle,
a manifestitation of the divine in the temporal world, was
a poetic commonplace among his fellow poets. All of their
ladies dazzled the world, took the lover's heart away, and
blessed them with a glance. Their death was a public
calamity which caused universal mourning and oceans of

tears in the faithful lover.45

Only Dante, however, pro-

vided her with the theory of scholastic love, so that her

death became an allegory and his rebirth, a conversion.
Behind the motif of death and revival in the 2123_

45 All

Eggzg lies a great deal of scholastic philosophy.
men have a sensitive and a rational soul. Dante first
apprehended Beatrice with his sensitive soul. Since this
soul serves the animal appetites, it cannot apprehend the
purpose of its own actions but always acts blindly, and

one who follows this soul can only end up in doubt, despair
and confusion. Dante suffers through this frightening
condition after Beatrice dies. Man's rational soul, which
only apprehends ideas (also called essences or essential
forms) can understand the purposes for the actions that it

sees. After Beatrice's death, Dante could only apprehend

her with his rational soul. Her death was allegorically

 

45Va1ency. p. 260.

46This is not the place to discuss this interesting
psychology. See Valency, pp. 224-45 for an excellent dis-
cussion of the relationship of scholastic philosophy to the
stilnovisti theory of love.

 

122

necessary to indicate which faculty or soul she controlled.
The rational soul was the higher faculty, so to love
intellectually was the highest activity of man. With this
faculty he could see the essential beauty of his lady:
The highest quality of the beautiful woman would thus
be her transparency, the quality which permitted the
lover to glimpse the soul, the ideal, through the
fleshly envelope; and the function of the beauty of
woman would be to set man on the upward path, making
manifest to him in the first place through his senses
that beauty which his intellect could afterward follow
upward to its source in the absolute.47
Her death indicates the movement from the world of the
sensitive soul to that of the rational soul. His choice,
which is his new life, amounts to a conversion from
devotion to worldly beauty to devotion to heavenly beauty.
This conversion is symbolized by his "death" and sub-

48 Like

sequent rebirth under the influence of Beatrice.
Proteus, the troubadour and liege-lady could change their
shape to fit the circumstances, but their essential

relationship, imaged so beautifully by Gottfried in Tristan,

remains untouched by the various alterations.

 

47Valency, pp. 224-5.

48The pattern of conversion described by Herbert
Weisinger in Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1953),
p. 22, includes all of Dante's actions in Ea Vita Nuova.
First there is an "almost overpowering sense of chaos"?
there is the sudden joy of seeing everything fit together;
"and above all, the feeling of knowledge and power which
comes from having ascended from ignorance to light"
sweeps over the soul. Finally the converted cherishes
the new vision of order and design in the world. Religious
conversion is only one of many kinds of possible conversions.

 

123

In the one hundred years between the stilnovisti and
the Neoplatonists, who were to produce the final change in
the medieval love-traditions, the poetry of the courtly
lover was not neglected. Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374)
completely absorbed the tradition, giving a vitality to
the ancient conventions which fascinated many of the
Renaissance poets and insured the survival of the tradi-
tions well into the seventeenth century. He was familiar
with the earlier romances and assumed the voice of Tristan
occasionally in the Rime_(v. Sonnetto CXXII).49 Where
Dante turned these conventions into philosophy, Petrarch
turned them into rhetoric and style, putting them at the
service of his own personal passions. For instance, as
Miss Pearson notices, Laura retains her humanity throughout
the Rim3350 She never becomes an idealized abstraction nor
an object of sensual gratification. He often describes her
beauty, reflects upon its brevity, and promises to make her

51

immortal with his verse. As the conventions demand, she

becomes the center of the poet's world. The sonnetti

 

follow the same general narrative line invented by Dante,

 

49de Rougemont, p. 192. He quotes the trionfo d'amore:
"Here be the erring knights in ancient scrolls,
Lancelot, Tristan, and the vulgar souls
That wait on these (n.2)."

50

 

Pearson, p. 31.

51For beauty see Sonnetti XXXVII, CXXI; and CLV; for
brevity see nos. I and XI; for immortality see CLXX and
CLXXI.

124

which means that they follow the motif of death and revival.
Laura, of course, plays the same role as Beatrice in the
poet's death and revival. The only difference is that
Laura is married to another--a return to the original
romance motif (v. Sonnetto LCXXXVI).

Petrarch explored many of the stylistic possibilities
of the paradox of the coincidence of opposites which
resided only in the heart of the true lover. Two sonnets
explain the lover's desire for death (XV and CCVIII). The
oxymoron intrigues him; in fact, many of the sonnets just
play with the various kinds of antitheses appropriate to
the courtly lover. The lover fears and hopes, freezes
and burns, and desires to perish and asks for health

(sonnetto LXXXIX).52

He doesn't know whether to live or

die (X) or whether to love or hate her (CXVII). The

bitter-sweet nature of love comes in for a good deal of

comment as well (sonnetti XLIV, CXL, and CXLI). These

rhetorical devices, which Gottfried used anagogically to

indicate the mystery of love, exist for their own sake in

Petrarch's poems. Their beauty ornaments his sonnets,

and, if they call attention to anything, it is to the poet's

own rhetorical skill and to his powers of invention.
Petrarch should not be held responsible for the

excesses of his imitators, but the daring success of his

use of the poses of the courtly lover coupled with his

 

52For further examples see CII, CIV, CIX, and CXI.

125

magnificent style, which appeared to be the perfect blend
of art and nature, stimulated many poets to adopt the voice
of the troubadours and sing of the bitter joys and the sweet
agonies of love. Excessive use coarsened the significance
and destroyed the rhetorical effect of these conventions
so that today few can see the force and the beauty that the
Renaissance poets divined in the oxymoron's pithy compactness
and startling paradoxes. Many of those who imitated
Petrarch borrowed only the fragments that appealed to them.
They missed the total vision of the complete image, which
Petrarch had absorbed from the romances and from Dante.
Consequently they shattered the motif into many pieces,
emasculating the power and dissolving the mystery of the
image of the dying poet-knight being revived by the kiss
of the woman whom he loves and whose beauty rivals that of
a goddess.

The Neoplatonists and their friends reconstructed the
image from the fragments found in the late romances, in the

poems of the stilnovisti, in the canzone and sonnetti of

 

Petrarch, and in the pastoral eclogues of Bocaccio and
Petrarch. In the process of reconstruction, they expanded
its significance, so that it harmonized with their cosmic
theory of love. For them love was a cosmic force, a

movement and a rhythm of the universe, emanating from the

126

One, dividing into the individual things in the world, and

53 Most of the credit

finally returning back to the One.
for the invention of this theory belongs to that Renaissance
scholar, translator, commentator, priest, and magician,
Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). He was the trusted advisor

to Lorenzo de'Medici and one of the most illustrious

members of the group surrounding Lorenzo. He also founded
the Florentine Academy, from whence issued the theory of
Platonic love that had such a large impact upon the arts

54

of Europe. The Academy was an unofficial social club,

research society, and promoter of the arts, which only

half seriously looked upon itself as a revival of the

55

earlier Platonic Academy. When it held its famous

banquet in Florence on the seventh of November, 1474 to

celebrate Plato's birth, Ficino had already translated all

56

of the Platonic dialogues into Latin. Ficino's commentary

 

53Sears Jayne, "Ficino and the Platonism of the English
Renaissance," Comparative Literature, IV (1952): p. 226.

54Other members of this society were: Christoforo
Landino (commentator on Virgil, Horace and Dante); Lorenzo
the Magnificent; Pico della Mirandola; Francesco Cuttani di
Dioiceto; and Angelo Poliziano (Politian). There were many
others of less importance. See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in
Iconolog% (New York, reprinted 1962), p. 130. Also see
N. A. Ro , p. 57f.

55

 

 

Robb, p. 57.

56John vyvyan, Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty (London,
1961), P. 33.

127

upon Plato's Symposium,57 which purports to report the

 

actual discussions of the November seventh banquet, and his

more comprehensive, Theologia Platonica, really amount to

 

an original synthesis, which Plato would have difficulty
recognizing.58

Ficino's theory, like the Platonic and the scholastic,
posits two separate and Opposite worlds, the spiritual and
the material which are based upon the classical pair of

59 Each of these worlds is

opposites, form and matter.
bifurcated, making four distinct areas in the cosmos.
Ficino arranges these in a hierarchy; immediately below
God, who is distinct from yet intimately connected with
the four levels of existence, is the Cosmic Mind, which
possesses God's incorruptibility but lacks His unity. The
Cosmic Soul, which is incorruptible but not stable, com-
pletes the spiritual world. This world of pure cause is

identical with the familiar scholastic-Ptolomaic universe.

The Realm of Nature, composed of form and matter and

 

57Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de Amore. Begun
in 1469 and printed in41484. He also translated it into
Italian.

58Ficino used the phrase, "platonic love" (amore
platonico) in a letter to Alamanno Danate. See Nelson, pp.
68-9. As the phrase increased in popularity, it had less
and less to do with Plato.

591 don't intend to describe Ficino's complete meta-
physics, only those parts connected with his theory of
love. For a more detailed description see: P. O. Kristeller,
The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). A succinct
description can be found in Panofsky, pp. 130-46.

 

 

128

corruptible for that reason, occupies the third level

removed from God and lacks a great deal of perfection be—
cause of the distance between it and God. The last world,
lifeless, formless, imperfect, and almost without movement

Ficino calls the Realm of Matter. A circuitus spiritualis

 

or "uninterrupted current of supernatural energy" flows
from God through the four worlds and back towards him.
The worlds are intimately linked together by this force,
and it is by this flow that the higher worlds continually
"influence" the lower.

On this theory of the universe Ficino grafts the
doctrine of courtly love as it comes to him from Dante.
Each of.these worlds influences the other in the same way
that Blancheflor revived Rivalin or Beatrice, Dante: with
the power of its beauty. With the exception of God and the
Realm of Matter each world becomes the mediator between the
one above and the one below. Here is Ficino's own descrip-
tion of the process:

This divine quality of beauty stirs desire for itself
in all things: and that is love. The world that was
originally drawn out of God is thus drawn back to God;
there is a continual attraction between them--from
God to the world and from the world to God—-moving as
it were in a circle. This circle may be said to dis—
play three qualities: beginning in God, it is beauty
[pulchritudo]; passing into the world, it is love
[amor]; and returning to unite the creation with the
Creator, it is pure delight . . . . God is the beauty

that all things desire: By this their longing was
kindled, and in the possession of it they will be

129
content. Here the ardour of all lovers comes to rest,
not because it is spent, but because it is fulfilled.60
And again, only this time in terms closer to the courtly
love tradition:
Finally, in all worlds, there is love within Chaos.
Love precedes every world; it awakens what is sleeping,
lightens what is obscure, gives life to the dead, form
to the formless, and bestows perfection on imperfect
things.61
This is certainly what the liege—lady had been doing for
two centuries.

The Neoplatonists and Ficino adapt the rhythm of

Dante's experience in the Vita Nuova to the circular flow

 

of love. The beauty of the Gods overflows (emanatio) into

 

the lower beings. This ignites a vivifying rapture or

conversion (Ficino called it a conversio rapto 9£_vivificatio)

 

 

which draws the lower beings back to heaven where they

rejoin the gods (remeatio).62 Each created thing shares in

).

some way in the great cosmic movement of death and revival

 

that returns all creation to its source.
Ficino also borrows the lady on the balcony and
Beatrice from Dante and refines them into symbols of the

two kinds of love in the world. Beatrice becomes the

 

60As quoted in Vyvyan, p. 39. His translation, my
parentheses. This is very close to the scholastic universe.

61As quoted in Vyvyan, p. 38.

62Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in The Renaissance
(Baltimore, rev. 1967), p. 37.

 

130

celestial Venus (Venus Coelestis); she has no mother, so

she belongs to the immaterial sphere.63

As Panofsky
describes her:
She dwells in the highest, supercelestial zone of
the universe, i.e., in the zone of the Cosmic Mind,
and the beauty symbolized by her is the primary and
universal splendour of divinity. She can thus be
compared to 'Caritas,‘ the mediatrix between the
human mind and God.64
She also represents the contemplative life, which advances
from the contemplation of objects of sense to the knowledge
of things divine. The lady on the balcony translates into

the Terrestrial Venus (Venus Vulgaris), who is the daughter

 

of Zeus and Juno. She inhabits the Realm of the Cosmic

Soul and is a vis generandi, giving "life and shape to the
65

 

things in nature," She particularizes beauty, thereby
making it intelligible to our intellect. She inspires
human love, called by Ficino the active life, which "delights

66 Both of

in seeing and conversing with the person loved."
these Venuses are good, but Ficino, being a priest, prefers
the contemplative to the active life. Each Venus has a son
(Eros and Amor), who inspires the kind of love appropriate

to his mother. The one impels the mind to contemplate the

 

63Panofsky points out that mater (mother) was asso-
ciated with materia (matter), p. 142.

64Panofsky, p. 142.

65Ibid.

 

66Nelson, p. 78.

131

beauty of God, while the other raises the desire in man to
procreate a likeness of divine beauty in this world.67
He also mentions a third kind, bestial love, which is really
an aberration of the other types. The bestial lover,
forgetting his humanity completely, lusts after the pleas-
ures of the flesh with uncontrolled passion.

The individual's relation to the two Venuses is the
same as that of Dante to his two ladies. In order to
participate in the flow of divine love which culminates
in beatitude the individual must move from the influence
of the sensual procreative Venus to the intellectual Venus
of the Cosmic Mind. Ficino and the other Neoplatonists
describe this turning from one Venus to another as a death
and a rebirth. Ficino calls the renunciation of the active
life of the physical world a voluntary death. The soul is
dead to the world apprehended by the senses. But at the
same time that the soul dies in one world, it is reborn
again in the other. The lover lives again in God, and
finds the object of his desire. He becomes a unity--at

one with the world, himself, and God.

 

67As quoted in Vyvyan, p. 48: "Our mind corresponds
to the first Venus; and because of the divine provenance
of beauty, the mind is moved to a reverential love when the
beauty of a human body is presented to the eyes; while the
power of generation in us, which is the second Venus is
stimulated to create a similar form. Love acts in both--in
the one, as a desire to contemplate, and in the other to
propagate the beautiful. In reality, each love is that of
the divine image, and each is pure."

132

For the philosophers of the Academy, Orpheus was the
type of this conversion.68 His journey to Hades symbolized
the death of the sensitive soul and the rebirth of the
rational in the Realm of the Cosmic Mind. Orpheus also
possessed the four divine madnesses distinguished by
Socrates: of the Muses or Poetry; of ritual mystery or

Bacchus; of prophecy or Apollo; of love or Venus (Phaedrus,

 

244-245b). God above draws man into the spiritual world

by the divine madness, and the divine madness leads to

man's illumination. In this world man's soul labors under
discords; each of the four species of divine madness helps
to heal the soul and raise it that much closer to its longed
for reunion with God. The music of poetry tempers the soul;
the mystery of the Bacchic sacrifice unifies the parts of
the soul; the Apolline vision discovers the transcendent
unity behind the phenomena of life; and the passion for

69 Orpheus is the complete

beauty unites the soul with God.
man, and like Tristan, he only became complete after he
came close to death and was reborn.

Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was the only other

philosopher of the Florentine Academy to construct a theory

 

68He was also viewed as the originator of the mysteries
of Platonism. Proclus fathered the error, and Ficino and
Pico cherished it. The genealogy: Orpheus-Aglosphamus-
Pythagoras-Plato is completely fanciful as history (Wind,
p. 36).

69Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind (Oxford: At
the Claredon Press, 1969), p. 28. ‘

 

133

of love. His theory derives from his teacher's (Ficino)
doctrines, but he does make some additions relevant to our
inquiry. Most of his speculations occur in his popular

Commentary on Benivieni's "Canzona dello Amore Celeste gt

 

 

Divino."70 Pico, who was not as rigid a Platonist as Ficino,
connected the Venuses with the three psychological faculties:
sense, reason, and intuition. To do this, he had to invent
a third Venus. He identified the daughter of Uranus with
Intuition, the daughter of Zeus with the senses, and his

71

own invention, Celestial Venus II with reason. Sharing

the same delight as his master in the Neoplatonic rhythm of
universal emanation and return, he went so far as to see
it reflected in the structure of Benivieni's Canzona:

. . . which first describes celestial beauty and love
in stanzas III and IV, then relates in the fifth
stanza how from them arise their earthly counterparts,
and in the concluding stanzas shows 'how from sensuous
beauty one rises by ordered steps to intelligible
beauty.‘ Pico writes that this process, known to but
few, is what Plato in the Philebus calls 'deducing
unity ipto multitude, and reduCing multitude to its
unity.'

Pico lays greater emphasis upon the individual's ascent to
intelligible beauty, bringing the process closer to tradi-

tional mysticism than to Ficino. The soul forgets the

 

70Girolamo Benivieni (1453-1542) wrote a verse
summary of Ficino's theory. It contains nothing that Ficino
would disavow; the same cannot be said of Pico's Commentary,

71See Panofsky, pp. 144-5, n. 51 for a chart making
these comparisons.

72Nelson, pp. 60-1.

134

experience of intellectual beauty when it enters the body,
and Pico believes that the soul must climb a six-rung ladder
in order to return to its source, which is God or absolute

beauty.73

The six degrees are nothing more than scholastic
psychology arranged in a series of steps, suggesting the
Platonic ladder of love. Heavenly love is too pure to enter
into man's soul, so it works from a distance, pulling man up
to perfection.

On the way up tx: heavenly beauty, man's soul must die
and be reborn twice. Stanza eleven (11, 9-14) of Benivieni's
Canzona explains how man's intellectual life springs up after
the death of his physical appetites. Pico comments that
morendo e1.92£_(the dying heart) means that man's human soul
dies when he gives himself over to intellectual love. He
dies as a man and lives as an angel, desiring the dimly
perceived divine beauty in his own soul. As Nelson has

correctly noticed, this transformation is an extension of

the metaphors used by the stilnovisti when they described

 

their liege-ladies.74 Once the soul has managed to suspend
all intellectual desires and activities, it undergoes

another death; Nelson summarizes the event this way:

 

73The six steps are: 1. The soul is attracted to the
beauty of a particular person. 2. The soul refines this
image. 3. Further abstraction lets the soul behold the
universal nature of corporal beauty. 4. It finds that Ideal
beauty is in the intellect. 5. By turning within, the soul
ascends to the Celestial Venus (I). 6. The journey termi-
nates with the beholding of pure beauty and the soul remains
fixed in contemplation (see Vyvyan, pp. 220-1).

74Nelson, p. 59.

135

To achieve complete union with the heavenly Venus a
second death is necessary, in which the soul, kissing
and embracing Venus in an indissoluble bond, becomes
one with the soul of Venus.75
Here again is the divine kiss of St. Bernard and Gottfried,
used as a symbol of the unity of being, which is the syn-
thesis of the ego and divine beauty. In this union, the
soul loses the ego and is transformed into divine beauty
itself. It has reached the goal of its long quest. Pico
liked to refer to this state as the "blindness of joy."76
As the liege-lady disdained to return the troubadour's love,
so this highest form of love, unlike friendship, is not
returned. The lover must be willing to go blindly to his

77

own self-destruction. Pico thought that Plato had dis-

covered a particularily apt symbol of this in the story of
Alcestis:
. . . Alcestis achieved the perfection of love because
she longed to go to the beloved through death; and

dying through love, she was by the grace of the gods
rGVived o o o o 7 8 '

 

75Ibid., p. 59.

76Wind, p. 63.

77This is where Ficino and Pico part company. Ficino
never welcomed the loss of the ego. He felt that divine
love was a kind of friendship where each remains himself
and yet partakes of the other (see Wind, p. 66f).

78As quoted in Wind, p. 157. Plato's story is in the
Symposium 179D. Lorenzo de'Medici has the same belief in
his sonnet sequence. Explaining why he began with one on
death, he writes: "And if love has in it a certain per-
fection . . . it is impossible to arrive at that perfection
without first dying with regard to the more imperfect
things (Wind, p. 157)."

 

136

Pico's definition of beauty is also closer to the
troubadour tradition than is Ficino's. Ficino believed
beauty to be the desire for perfection and for completeness.

Pico felt the essence of Pulchritudo was:

 

. . . la contrarieta' unita, e la discordia concorde,
il chi si puo\per vera definizione assignare di essa
bellezza, cioe che non sia altro che una amica
inimizizia e una concorde discordia.7

The coincidence of opposites or the concordia discors,

 

which once indicated that the troubadour's heart was noble
and worthy of the love that beauty inspired in it, now is
the essence of that beauty itself. Between Ficino and Pico
the complete theory of courtly love was expanded into a
metaphysical system, which became the most pOpular theory
of love in the Renaissance.

These Neoplatonic theories, emanating from the
Florentine Academy, spread throughout Europe, until by the
middle of the sixteenth century almost every courtier and
sophisticate had at least a hazy notion of the subject.
They circulated, not in the form of philosophical treatises,

but in a form peculiar to the times called the Trattato
80

 

d'Amore. This genre accurately reflected the aristocratic

ideals of the time.- It was usually put in dialogue form,

 

*7 fi TV .

79Wind, p. 78. ". . . the unity of contrariety, and
the harmony of discord, that is the true definition of her
beauty, namely nothing other than a hateful friend and a
discordant harmony" (my translation).

80For a summary of the contents of most of the imporv
tant treatises see Nelson, Renaissance Theories of Love.
Robb also discusses them in her work.

137

either between two abstractions, as in Leone Ebreo's

Dialoghi d'Amore or between several people, sitting in the

 

privacy of their gardens or their apartments. Most pro-
fessed to handle the topic in a learned fashion, inquiring
into its nature, its origin, and its effects. The dis-
cussion of love carried on in these books, however, never
was original or profound. The authors of the treatises

did not wish to spoil the reader's impression of sophis—
ticated elegance by taxing his brain with abstruse specula-
tions on amgge, so they merely summarized the mainpoints of
"platonic love" and tried to present them in the most
pleasing style that they could muster. The motif of death
and revival found its way into these works because it was
part of the tradition and because its oxymorons provided a
dramatic rhetorical flourish which broke up the long and
often emotionless conversations. As the Neoplatonic
doctrines spread from one treatise to another the motif

and the oxymoron lost all anagogical significance and
became instead merely ornaments to the thought.

Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani (1505), for example,

 

records a conversation in a peaceful garden between a small
intimate group of men and women. One of the characters,
Perottino, knows that love is a torment and a suffering for
the lover. With his eyes full of tears, he recites a poem
which focuses on his wish to die and his soul's continual

revival:

138
So living digs my grave; 81
So dying raises me again to life.
And in a passage that would horrify Gottfried, Petrarch and
Ficino, Perottino describes his heart in greater detail for
the ladies:
For love having thrust my tortured heart betimes into
the hottest fire, in which it was inevitable that I
should die since my own powers were unable to resist
such heat, the cruelty of that very lady with love of
whom I burned made me fall to weeping so plentifully
that my blazing heart was steeped in tears and by their
help recovered from its flames; and yet these tears
would of themselves have so relaxed the tendons of my
life and made so deep a pool within my heart that I
would have surely died, had it not been that everything
my weeping softened the arid flames made hard again
and so restored me.82
Bembo, in the person of Lavinello, refutes this kind of love

and offers the chaste love of the intellectual and spiritual
world in its place.

The fourth book of the Il_Cortegiano (1528) by
Baldassare Castiglione provides another good example of the
popularization and the dilution of the motif. Castiglione
has Bembo describe the love proper to the courtier by
reciting a modified version of Pico's ascent of the soul.

He describes the process of the soul's return to beauty
without any of the references to death and rebirth found
in Pico. The process has become a rational and effortless

adventure. The kiss that awakened Rivalin and for Ficino

 

81Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani, trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954), p. 33.

82

 

Bembo, p. 34.

139

signified the union of the soul with beauty has now been
reduced to just the union of two souls:

Hence, a man delights in joining his mouth to that of
his beloved in a kiss, not in order to bring himself
to any unseemly desire, but because he feels that that
bond is the opening of mutual access to their souls,
which, being each drawn by desire for the other, pour
themselves each into the other's body by turn, and
mingle 33 together that each of them has two souls;

In all these discussions in the Trattato d'Amore the kernel

 

of the theory was present, waiting to be revived by more
sympathetic writers.

The last of the trattati to be written, De gli Eroici

 

Furori (1585) by Giordano Bruno returns significance and
force to the moribund motif. Bruno imitates Ficino and
writes of divine things in the speech and similitudes

84 He describes the Neoplatonic

common to ordinary lovers.
ascent of the soul from the world of sense to the world of
intelligible beauty, where, motivated by love, it beholds
the absolute beauty and goodness of the universe. Bruno
adds an interesting dramatic touch by telling part of the
story through the eyes of the heroic lover who leaves a

record of his torments and his ecstasies in a series of

sonnets. The philosophy appears in the discussions of the

 

83Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the‘Courtier,
trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York,’l959), pp. 349-50.

84Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies, trans. P. E.
Memmo, Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1964), p. 63.

 

 

140

two characters who explain and amplify the symbols in the
poems. Here is an example:

For love snatches me from life, she from
Death, she gives me wings, he burns my heart;
He kills my soul; she revives it; she is my
Sustainer and he is my bereaved burden.85

The comment is rather superficial:

Therefore it is love that remains to deprive me of
life, to burn me, to give me death and put all its
weight upon my bones. As for her noble visage, it
remains there to snatch me from death, to give me

wings, to revive and sustain me.

He does, however, understand the purpose of Blancheflor,
Isolde, Beatrice, and Laura better than others who were
influenced by the same tradition. He also repeats the
Neoplatonic belief about the soul:
The body is as though dead and privative for the soul,
which is its life and perfection; and the soul is as
though dead and privative for the illuminating intel-
ligence whereby the human intellect receives its
proper character and actual form.37
Bruno transforms the courtly lover into the heroic philos-

88

opher who seeks to become God. Bruno and the other

Neoplatonists insist that the world of the flesh, of the

 

85Bruno, p. 94.

86Bruno, p. 95.

87Bruno, p. 238.

88Francis Yates in Giordano‘Brunggand‘The Hermetic
Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964),
p. 281, believes that there is a core of Hermetic philosophy
underneath the Neoplatonism. Thus she believes that the
real goal is the Hermetic gnosis; the love poetry is the
mystical poetry of the Magus man who once was created divine
and seeks to become divine again.

 

141

senses, and of matter has to be transcended in order to
experience divine love. Death and rebirth symbolize the
soul's movement from the natural to the intelligible world.,
Once in the spiritual world the soul's love became an
inward contemplative exercise performed best by the priest
or scholar alone in his cell. Gottfried, on the other
hand, believes that the divine realizes itself in the world
of the senses when a man and woman give themselves up com-
pletely to their desires. Their union is the union of
opposites, which for a brief moment becomes a likeness of
the divine unity in the temporal world.

Neoplatonism exerted such a wide influence upon the
aristocracy and those who wrote for them for such a long
time because its vocabulary and images could be adapted to
express almost any theory of love. Even the prudish
Christian writers emulating St. Jerome's misogyny could
have used the imagery to express their beliefs. The deep
ascetic strain in Neoplatonism lent itself very easily
to denunciations of the flesh and marriage. Indeed,
virtually everywhere a literate person looked he would
encounter some fragment of the tradition.

Among the aristocracy, it was most prestigious to
be acquainted with the theory. Those at court not acquainted
with the symbols and doctrines found in the various works
would have a difficult time surviving the conversations and

the social banter, and they would have been most hard

142

pressed for forumlae with which to deliver a compliment.
Love was always the center of court life, and this theory
sanctioned the passion by making it the essence of God as
well as of the noble lover. Beauty, one of the major
interests of the ladies at court, no longer was a sign of
vanity; now it was a faint resemblance of the divine
splendor and was to be admired and worshiped instead of
castigated as another snare of the devil. It must have
been very flattering and a bit comforting to those at court
to know that their world reflected the operations of the
universe in every detail.

The artists, scholars, and the litterati, who them-

 

selves were often members of the courts, cultivated the
theory for very different reasons. They looked upon it as
ancient sacred lore, passed on down the centuries among
those few initiates who could understand the truths hidden
by this mystery. The word mystery had three basic meanings
which were frequently confused by the Renaissance anti-
quaries when they rummaged through the rediscovered works

89 The‘secret rituals of

of the Hellenistic culture.
purification and initiation practiced among the Greeks

from before the fifth century to the Hellenistic period
were called mysteries. Plato and his followers borrowed

their vocabulary and images to describe their particular

philosophic habits of dialectic and contemplation. Plato

 

89Wind, pp. l-l3.

143

and Plotinus thus created the figurative or the literary
use of this vocabulary. The members of the Platonic and
the Neoplatonic schools continued to use these terms all
through the Hellenistic age. As the hocus-pocus of magic
again became ancillary to philosophical meditation, the
word shifted to include the magical incantations of the
quacks. All three uses of the word were mixed together in
the works of Plutarch, Porphyry, and Proclus. But as Wind
notes:

While they differed widely from each other in the

degree to which they promoted, tolerated, or resisted

a magical or ritual re-enactment of mysteries, they

were unanimous in regarding the figurative under-
standing as basic. Whenever 'the mysteries of the
ancients' were invoked by De Bussi, Beroaldo, Perotti,

or Landino, not to mention Ficino or Pico della
Mirandola, their concern was less with the original 90
mystery cults than with their philosophical adaptation.

So these humanists studied the sacred images, the

spells, and the prayers, seeking the basic, unifying truth

91

behind the various symbols. Pico, for example, believed

that the ancient sages went so far as to deliberately hide
their knowledge with symbols at the behest of God:

But to disclose to the people the more secret
mysteries, things hidden under the back of the law
and the rough covering of words, the secrets of the
highest divinity, what was that other than to give
what is holy to dogs and to cast pearls among swine?

 

901.19.15.13. p. 7.

91As Wind points out (p. 9) they had the encourage-
ment of both Plato and Plotinus. Both insisted that even
though language is inadequate, it still is the basic tool
to use to indicate the divine.

144

Consequently it was not human prudence but divine
command to keep these things secret from the people,
and to communicate them to the perfect, among whom
alone, Paul says, spoke wisdom. 2

Pico lists a series of ancient sages from the Egyptians and
Pythagoras to the early Christian philOSOphers who staunchly
upheld the custom. Again in his commentary on Benivieni's
Canzona Pico affirms the principle of hiding the truth:
It was the opinion of the ancient theologians that
divine subjects and the secret Mysteries must not be
rashly divulged . . . . That is why the Egyptians
had sculptures of sphinxes in all their temples, to
indicate that divine knowledge, if committed to writing
at all, must be covered with enigmatic veils and poetic
dissimulation . . . . How that was done . . . by
Latin and Greek poets we shall explain in the book of
our Poetic Theology.
Pico believed that the poets used their myths and tales in
the same way that the theologians and philosophers used
their incantations, spells, and symbols. The poets, such
as Orpheus, disguised the wisdom of their beliefs behind
the myths and fables that they presented as foolishness.94
There was little that Pico read that did not have a meaning

intentionally hidden by its author.

 

.92Pico Della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans.

Charles G. Wallis in Library of Liberal Arts (New York,
1965)] P0 30.

93As quoted in Wind, p. 17.

94"But, as was the practice of ancient theologians,
Orpheus covered the mysteries of his doctrines with the
wrappings of fables, and disguised them with a poetic
garment, so that whoever reads his hymns may believe there
is nothing underneath but tales and the purest nonsense
'(On‘the Dignity of Man, p. 33)."

 

145

If all the most revered sages of the ancient world
wrote this way, then a lowly student of their writings
could hardly refrain from imitating them. Pico practiced
the art of symbolic speech in his writings, and Wind notes
that:

. . . these were regarded by his contemporaries as

models of how to adumbrate an ineffable revelation

through speech.95
Another humanist, Celio Calcagnini, struggled with the
problems of communicating secret truths while still keeping
them secret. He came to the reasonable conclusion that the
man who wants to both 'publish' his mysteries and keep them
secret must alternate between speech and silence. His own
work shows how this can be done with the use of verbal
ciphers and hieroglyphs. The riddle of these symbols both

96

publishes and hides the secret at the same time. Finally

Dionysius the Areopagite seems to sum up what the later
Renaissance humanists believed when he says:

All those who are wise in divine matters and are
interpreters of the mystical revelations prefer
incongruous symbols for holy things, so that divine
things may not be easily accessible.

It is Mr. Wind's thesis that many of the Renaissance

artists hid the Neoplatonic and Orphic mysteries behind the

95Wind, p. 11.

96'Ib'J'-d-,p. 12. Dante and Petrarch used the pastoral
eclogue to disguise their message in just this fashion.

97As quoted in Wind, pp. 12-13.

146

most simple of facades. The simplicity of the work opens
into the complexity of the philosophical mystery, delighting
those who know the mystery and misleading those unfamiliar
with the truth. The artists connected with the members of
the Florentine Academy ignored the images of the courtly
love tradition and instead borrowed their symbols from the
gods and goddesses of classical mythology. The deities
symbolized the same doctrine as the images of courtly love,
but in extremely different ways. Examples of how they
adumbrated each of the three phases of the motif reveal
that they felt the actual death and rebirth was part of
the mystery and was not to be shown. They veiled it from
the viewer with the beauty and the elegance of the figures
and with the simplicity of the fable.

The Renaissance Florentines decided that the image of
the Three Graces as described by Seneca and Servius and as
rediscovered by the Renaissance adorning late Roman artifacts
was the perfect symbol of the larger rhythm of the Neopla-
tonic universe.98 Divine love, according to Ficino, went
through three phases. It began with God as heavenly
beauty, entered into the world as love, the desire that
moved the noble heart to rapture, and finally it appeared
as the joy of the return to the source of creation. On a

medal stamped for Pico, appear the Three Graces; above their

 

*98Wind reconstructs the history of this figure and its

adoption by the Neoplonists in great detail. See pp. 26-52.

147

heads, reading from left to right, are the three words:
Pulchritudo-—Amor--Voluptas.99 Wind interprets their
postures in the following manner:

The converting power of Amor is illustrated by the

Grace in the centre who, represented from the back,

looks towards Voluptas on her right and stretches

out her arm in her direction. Her left hand rests,

as if for support, on the shoulder of Pulchritudo

from whom she turns.1
The point is that beauty must be combined with desire before
both can return to joy. Desire alone will not accomplish
anything. The abstraction, Amor, has the same function here
as the liege-lady in the courtly love tradition. Beauty and
desire are usually considered opposites, but in the rapture
of Amor they fuse together. Amor has her back to the viewer
to indicate that only by turning to the beyond do these

101 These

contraries fuse together into transcendent joy.
three lovely figures, absorbed in their own dance, veil the
essential elements of Pico's philosophy.

In Botticelli's Primavera, Ovid's fable of Zephyr and

 

Chloris disguises the same theme.102 Zephyr, as the breath
of passion, transforms Chloris into the goddess Flora.
Under the influence of Venus, in whose garden these trans-

formations occur, love combines the opposites, chastity and

 

991bid.,Fig. 10.
1°°1bid.,pp. 43~4.
1011bid.,p. 47.
102

Ibid., pp. 113’270

148

pleasure, into divine beauty, who, enraptured, gazes towards
Mercury, the leader of the graces and symbol of the mystery
of divine knowledge. As a mediator between man and God, he
removes the clouds that obscure divine illumination. The
Voluptas of divine illumination then returns into the world,
appearing as the vivifying passion, Zephyr.

Titian painted a variation on the same theme.103 His
Sacred and Profane Love depicts two maidens, one on the
left, clothed, and one on the right, naked, sitting on either
end of a stone fountain. Exactly in the center between the
two figures, the god Amor bends over the edge of the foun-

tain (which resembles a casket) with his hand in the water.

On the side of the fountain in bas-relief are a woman being

 

dragged by the hair, a horse, and a man being scourged at a
stake. These suggest the exorcising of the lower passions,

which Ficino called bestial love (amore bestiale) and con-
04

 

sidered a form of insanity.1 Both of the women sitting
on the top of the fountain are above this agony. They
correspond to Ficino's human love and his celestial love.
Human love is clothed and sedate, while celestial love has

only a long red flowing robe around her arm and a white

 

1°3Ibid.,pp. 141-51.

104Wind remarks: "Both Ficino and Pico professed to
know that in the pagan initiatory rites of love the first
stage was a purge of the sensuous passion, a painful ritual
of purification by which the lover was prepared for his com-
munion with the god (p. 146 and n. 17 for the apposite
passages in Ficino and Pico)."

149

cloth wrapped and knotted about her thighs. She is much
less restrained than her companion, and she undoubtedly
represents the purity and frenzy of the divine passion.
Amor mediates between the two kinds of love, initiating
beauty into divine love by purifying her in the waters of
the fountain of love.

In all three examples, the transformations, usually
rendered in terms of death and rebirth, hide behind the
simplicity of the images. The dynamic rhythm of emanation-
rapture—joy is not suggested by any movement of the figures
or structure of the paintings. Nor are the profound
emotions of the transformations and the very different
lives that they entail suggested through the emotions and
attitudes of the figures. All three works have instead an
impression of balanced harmony. The symmetry of the design,
the peaceful attitudes of the figures, and the quiet sim-
plicity of the pastoral backgrounds emphasize restraint,
proportion and a balance of forces. This balance points to
one of the major doctrines of Neoplatonism that the artists
particularily enjoyed illustrating: the coincidence of
Opposites.

As we have seen, the coincidence of opposites,
reflected in speech with the oxymoron, indicated the capac-
ity and nobility of the suffering lover's heart. Pico
expanded this habit with the help of a few hints in Plotinus

into a theory of Beauty, the definition of which we have

150

already quoted. Beauty cannot be simple; it has to have
contrariety to be beautiful. Pico in his commentary gives
an illustration of what he means:

. . . [it is] said by the poets that Venus loves Mars,

because Beauty, which we call Venus, cannot subsist

without contrariety, and that Venus tames and mitigates

Mars, because the tempering power restrains and over-

comes the strife and hate which persist between the

contrary elements.10
Where the contraries meet, there will be balance, restraint,
and temperance. This belief produced a series of pictures
showing Venus tempering Mars' powers. She finally put on
his armor so that her own image combines the fierceness of
war with the gentleness of love. Her image, in effect, is
a visual oxymoron. Eventually she becomes the conqueror
in her war of love and displays her martial trophies as if
she were Mars himself, and, indeed she is. As Edgar Wind
concludes:

. . . Venus is not only joined to Mars, but . . .

his nature is an essential part of her own, and

vice versa . . . . In the perfect lover they

coincide—because he-or she-is the perfect warrior.

But whenever their 'infolded' perfection is

'unfolded,‘ the argument requires two opposing

images which, by contrasting the martial with the
amiable spirit, reveal their transcendent unity.106

 

Another closely related pair that operates in the same

way is love and death. This is the same rhetorical conceit

105As quoted in Wind, p. 89.

106Ibid.,p. 94. Wind mentions that even Savonarola
used these contrasts in his images. God was both love and
Vengeance.

151

that Petrarch revived and his followers made into a common-
place. Love, as a voluntary death, had a metaphysical
significance for the Neoplatonists. As mentioned above,

it signified the agony of the soul as it tore itself away
from the body and turned towards heaven. Lorenzo Lotto
translated this into "Amor crowning a death's head that

107 Love as death also permeated the

108

rests on a cushion."
emblem literature of the time. In one of Alciati's
emblems with the motto, De_mgrte at aggre, Love and Death
exchange their arrows, causing the young to die and the

old to fall in love.109

In this manner, this particular
mystery shrunk to a game that tested the poet's wits.

The image of Tragecomedia that crowns the frontispiece

 

of the first edition of Ben Jonson's works is only one of
many in a long tradition that combined contradictory

110 The skirt she wears belongs

qualities in the same figure.
to the image of comedy, which is reproduced on the page, and

her upper garments, designed in the Roman style, derive from

 

l°7Ibid..p. 152.

108The Emblemata of the Italian jurist Andrea Alciati
was the most famous. It had a series of emblems arranged
in three categories: the vices, the virtues, and miscel-
laneous subjects. Most are followed by a Latin motto and
a gloss in verse. See Memmo, p. 52 n. 14.

109

 

Wind, pp. 163-4.

110Reproduced from the title page of 1616 Jonson Folio
in the Elizabethan Club, Yale University, in Eugene M. Waith,
The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 41.

152

the figure of tragedy, which also is reproduced on the same
page. In addition, she combines the serious countence of
tragedy with the relaxed and casual stance of comedy.
These contraries joined in the same image indicate the
greater perfection of the new hybrid, and when Guarini
asserted that his mixture of tragedy and comedy was better
than either tragedy or comedy alone because it combined the
best of both forms,111 anyone versed in the Neoplatonic
doctrines of transcendence through the coincidence of
opposites would have known immediately the reason why.

It was Pico's belief that "A myth gets its animation

112 and the painters who were acquainted

from a mystery,"
with his theories adopted the same attitude towards the
myths they were painting. Politian (a member of the
Florentine Academy) and Tasso also let the mysteries

animate their dramas. Looking at these plays as fables

that simultaneously hide and reveal a mystery discloses

that most of the images in these plays have another level

of meaning. In the first two chapters we studied these
plays through the eyes of the uninitiated; now we will
observe them through the eyes of an initiate. Most of the
qualities of the play discussed above will remain what

they were before; they will only have acquired an additional
philosophical meaning.-

L

lllGilbert, p. 512.

lleind, p. 21.

153

Mr. Cody in his excellent discussion of these two
plays describes the pastoral landscape as a metaphor for

113

the inward life. He cites Plato's Phaedrus as the most

impressive example of the pastoral countryside being used

114 He needn't have gone that

for the discussions of love.
far back because the classical pastoral elegy always
reflected the emotions of the shepherd-poet, and Politian
continued the tradition that uses the pastoral as a
metaphor of the inward life of the mind. The movement of
the play depicts the characters harmonizing their con-
flicting passions, becoming one again with the pastoral
landscape, and thus accomplishing the transcendence that
indicates their oneness with God. Arcadia symbolizes the
ideal unity of thought, feelings, and action away from
which the characters have fallen and towards which they
will return. It has all the qualities that Boccaccio's,
Marot's and Spenser's "Elysium" had, except that now this
reflects the ideal unity and harmony in the soul. The
pastoral landscape becomes the mediator between man and
God because it reflects the divine harmony and the harmony
in the human soul at the same time. When the soul becomes
one with the landscape, then it also becomes one with God.
As any Christian Neoplatonist knows, the three are really

One .

113Coay, pp. 23-23, and pp. 3—19.

114Ibid., p. 24.

154

Love is the force that unites the contraries,
motivates the soul towards unity, and inspires the poet to
song. It is only natural then that love should be the
subject of the plot and of most of the discussion among
the characters. In the previous chapter we described how
Aristaeus, the lover in the first part of 95222, was dis-
tinguished from the more pedestrian shepherds. In the
Neoplatonic theory, his love becomes the desire of the
soul for divine beauty, which is symbolized by Euridice,
the nymph difficult to capture. His madness is that
species inspired by Venus which belongs to the world of
celestial love. The other shepherds belong to that world
of human love presided over by the terrestrial Venus.
Euridice dies, signifying that Aristaeus does not love
the earthly corruptible part of her, but the pale image
of the divine that shines through her body. His pursuit
and her death complete the first movement of the play,
the movement that imitates the emanatio of the Neopla-
tonists.115

Orpheus begins the movement that corresponds to
raptio, the drawing of the creatures back to God. He had
a special significance for the Neoplatonists. In addition

to possessing those qualities listed by Miss Mayerson and

h‘

115This differs from Cody's division of the play into
the same three movements. He includes Aristaeus' pursuit
0f Euridice in the raptio (p. 34).

155

being the originator of Platonism, he signified the central

mystery 0f Orphic theology: the coincidence of opposites.116

As Cody summarizes:

The heart of his mystery is thus how the many pagan
gods are one. This discovery is reputed to have
occurred after he visited Egypt and learned the
doctrine of Moses . . . . As a victim of dismem-
berment he personally embodies what syncretic 117
rationalism always assumes, the One in the Many.

His figure includes, among others, Bacchus and Apollo,
i.e., emotion and art, whose powers to penetrate the under-
world and suspend its operation were discussed in the last
chapter. The play moves toward the unity of the many and
the one which his death symbolizes.

The journey into the underworld was read by Pico as
a parable on the necessity of dying in order to love.118
Following Plato, Pico believes that this myth demonstrates
the folly of trying to discover true love without dying.
All Orpheus finds is a shadow.

Politian intends to initiate the audience into a
mystery of Orpheus. The final movement of the play, that

which parallels the remeatio or the returning into the

unity of divine beauty, ends with the Bacchantes turning

116For a discussion of Orphic Theology see Wind,
p. l98f; also Cody, p. 32 ff. "Whatever may be said
against the divine hybrids, the curious crossbreeds that
people the Orphic pantheon, they express the Orphic spirit
at its fullest, . . . .“

ll7Cody, p. 32.

118mm, p. 157);

156

towards the audience and inviting them to partake of the
rite. This turning transforms the play into a rite and
alters the relationship of the audience to the play. To
follow the play, the audience have to be aware of their
own position, i.e., as initiates and also to read the
symbols so that they can understand what is happening.
They cannot lose themselves in the story; they have to
remain self-conscious participants in the rite. The play-
wright's use of pastoral and Ovidian mythological back-
ground helps to achieve this consciousness. The aim of the
whole pagan rite is to purify the souls of the audience so
that they can begin to comprehend the truth behind the
world of phenomena.

This play unites the pastoral and the Ovidian myth-
ological worlds to present an Orphic mystery to the audience.
In the symbolic pastoral world, the emotions, when combined
with art, suspend the laws of nature. When Bacchus and
Apollo combine, they transcend the common-sensical world of
Mopsus and Thyrsis and enter the region of divine love.
But in order to unite with divine beauty in an ecstatic
union one must first die.

Tasso also reveals this Neoplatonic mystery of death

119

. in order to live in Aminta. The courtly lover, desiring

k

119Cody believes that Tasso practiced an Orphic
theory of art and mentions Tasso's quote of Hesiod which
defines the shepherds as keepers of the mysteries in support
of this position (p. 62). He concludes: ”Here once again

157

his own death, was a staple of the courtly love tradition
popularized in the sonnets and the treatises on love.

Tasso combined this motif with the image of the liege-lady
revivifying her knight to veil this basic mystery. To the
initiates, Aminta's death indicates that his soul has turned
inward away from the world of the senses towards the region
of celestial love. This is the death that Orpheus tried to
avoid. Silvia, who has been purified before this by going
through her own near death and revival, mediates between
God, the source of divine beauty, and man. Her kisses and
her purifying tears awaken him to the world of celestial
love. His desire, purged of all impurities, fulfills
itself by uniting with divine beauty. The audience in its
mind's eye (the scene was narrated to them) sees in their
embrace the reconciliation of opposites, i.e., of life-
death, male-female, love—hate, and human-divine, which
signalizes transcendence, by the divine, of the world of
reason and common sense. The unity of their souls blends
into the harmony of the pastoral landscape, signifying the
fulfillment and the balance of their desires and their

(emotions. This‘hieros gamos also represented the joy of

 

fthe.southo.divine.beauty, which Ficino called Voluptas.120

 

is the view of pastoralism as 'divine philosophy' informed
by antique wisdom-an immanental view common to humanists of
the Florentine persuasion (p. 63)."

120Wind, p. 156. Defines hieros gamos as "An ecstatic
union with the god which was experienced by the neophyte as
an initiation into death."

 

158

The Neoplatonists read other incidents in the story
symbolically. The kiss that caused Aminta to fall in love
with Silvia represents the moment of raptus when divine
beauty enters the soul through the senses and awakens the
desire to possess it. The scene at the fountain has the
same meaning that the myth of Orpheus had for Plato; it
shows that the lover must die before he can possess divine
beauty. Silvia, the symbol of divine beauty, whose nudity

121

reflects her contempt of worldly things, has been tied

up by the Satyr. He represents Amore bestiale, that lower
kind of love which is a perversion of human love.122
Aminta, the lover seeking divine beauty, after purging
himself of the bestial imperfections, still can only
briefly touch divine beauty. He is not pure enough to
possess her yet; consequently, she runs off into the woods.
Only after he dies, which reveals to her that he is a true
lover of divine beauty, does she open her heart to him.
Again a Neoplatonic mystery hides behind the simple
incidents of a pastoral tragicomedy.

The pastoral landscape reflects the higher world of

celestial love where the purified desires are fulfilled and

 

121See Panofsky, p. 151 on the significance of nudity
in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.

122"And he who is insusceptible even to visible
ibeauty, or stoops to debauchery, or, even worse, abandons
for sensual pleasures a contemplative state already
attained, falls prey to a 'bestial love' . . . which,
according to Ficino, is a disease rather than a vice:
- . . (Panofsky, pp. 143-4)."

 

159

harmonized. In a very real sense the pastoral world becomes
the symbol of the harmony toward which the mystery directs
us. Cody does not believe that it means anything so
specific:

it [the pastoral landscape] means the mind of love,

erotic, impassioned, and viewed from within. Life in

the woods means the acting out of certain inner states

which for the Renaissance find their classic symbol in

shepherdliness.
As we saw in the last chapter, however, the poets used the
pastoral to indicate this unity or, as in Sannazaro's case,
the lack of unity in the shepherd-poet's life. The kiss
forced Aminta to become aware of his separation from the
ideal and of the discord that entered his soul as a con-
sequence. The agony and the torment of the courtly lover's
soul contrasts sharply with the ideal unity, simplicity,
and concord of the pastoral. His revival means that he
has once again attained the unity and harmony of spirit
that all souls once possessed. It appears more clearly
here than in the g££e2_that the Neoplatonists use the
qualities of the pastoral tradition to symbolize the ideal
state of mind that only the lover completely devoted to
heavenly beauty ever attains.

The rhythm of the pastoral elegy has much in common

xnith the three phases of divine love. Pulchritudo, which

(Ficino compares to a beacon, corresponds to that period

123Cody, p. 49.

160

when the woman was alive, e.g., Beatrice and Dido, or as in
this play when Aminta and Silvia were growing up together.
Amgg parallels the increasing sadness and suffering of the
lover who sings of the death of his beloved and wishes for
his own death. Voluptas corresponds to the joy of rebirth
and the recognition that the woman lives in Elysium, e.g.,
Beatrice, Olympia, and Dido. Tasso easily combined the
two, so that even the pastoral rhythms suggested the
Neoplatonic rhythm of divine love to those who knew the
doctrine.

Balance, the quality of Mannerism that impressed
Shearman the most, has a symbolic value for the followers
of Plato and Plotinus. It is the result of the meeting
of the opposites when strife is transformed into harmony.
This new synthesis characterized by the balance of the
opposites transcends the world of reason and indicates
the divine. Tasso balances many opposites in this play,
such as, life and death, love and hate, human and divine
love, and purity and foulness. The most interesting of
these opposites concern the work of art itself. Art and
:nature blend together in the pastoral background. The
:pastoral and the court blend together when the courtly
lover becomes a shepherd. The sensuous and the divine
Ibalance each other, and at the same time the simple fable
patterned after Ovid balances the complex Neoplatonic

meanings .

161

The Neoplatonic mystery binds the pastoral elegy,
the Ovidian mythological fable, and the courtly love tradi-
tion into a unified work of art whose perfection was often
imitated in the following century.

Tasso's work was only one small contribution to the
style that came to be called Mannerist and which eventually
metamorphosed into the Baroque style of the seventeenth
century. Unfortunately, those imitating Tasso more often
than not were unaware of the nature of the mystery concealed
by his fable. When the mystery disappeared, all the writers
had to work with was the style created by the fusion of the

three traditions. I1_Pastor Fido demonstrates what happens

 

to these stylistic qualities when the dramatist's imagina-
tion is not restrained by a poetic theology.

Guarini expanded one of the Neoplatonists' mysteries,
the coincidence of opposites, into a stylistic and struc-

tural principle of £1 Pastor Fido. As mentioned above, the

 

Neoplatonists enjoyed combining the gods and goddesses into
new combinations which expressed the belief that in the
divine all the opposites are one. The painters and sculptors
spread this passion for hybrids throughout the courts of
Italy and Europe. When Guarini blends the tragic and the
comic, he is simply adapting a popular fashion to the stage.
The motif of death and revival forms the knot that binds the
many opposites together. It unites the tragic with the

comic, the hero with the lover, the lover with the hero,

162

and the courtly Arcadia full of discord with the pastoral
ideal of harmonious simplicity. A clever example of this
principle in the rhetoric is his description of the kissing
war (II,i). The very name suggests the popular figure of
Venus donning Mars' armor, discussed above. He describes
their game to see who kisses the best in the terms of a
battle. Of course, Amarillis wins and Mirtillo enters

into the phase of love's suffering so familiar to the
courtly lover. But the use of this principle in the style
of the work calls attention to itself and consequently

to the artistic skill of the dramatist. It no longer

hides a mystery; rather it has become just another stylistic
ornament which only contributes to the general artificiality
of the play.

The pastoral landscape also lost its symbolic meaning.
Arcadia merely signifies the conjoined worlds of the court
and of nature. The "kingdom" of Arcadia reverts to its
earlier function as a scene or backdrop. Guarini mainly
uses it as a foil against which the heroic actions of Silvio
and the agonies of Mirtillo are contrasted. Mirtillo's
marriage to Amarillis, for which his near death has purified
him, only removes the curse from Arcadia. A.maiden will no
longer have to be sacrificed to Diana. The marriage does
not bring Mirtillo or Amarillis or the audience any closer
to the harmony or the beauty of the pastoral world.

Mirtillo's nobility, the quality that allows him to marry

163

Amarillis, insures that he will not become identical with
Arcadia. Guarini's Arcadia operates as a compliment
rather than as a symbol. The aristocratic audience sees
their own fondest beliefs reflected in the mixture of the
courtly and the pastoral. Arcadia is a combination of the
ideals of nature or birth and the ideals of art or educa-
tion. These two combine to create exquisite works of art,
of which the audience is one of the finest examples. This
has very little to do with Neoplatonism.

Since there isn't any mystery to reveal, it follows
that the audience's relation to the play will differ from
that to the other two plays. In 95:22 and again in Aminta
the authors wanted to effect a change in the souls of the
audience. Their hope was to illuminate a Neoplatonic
mystery for the audience. They did this by bringing the
audience to a state of self-consciousness. The goal was
essentially didactic even though the means were designed
to delight. Guarini only wished to purge the melancholy
in the audience with pleasure. He did this by combining
compliments, ingenious plots, and skillfully constructed
speeches into a complicated surface which glittered and
Sparkled before the audience's gaze. The beauty, the style,
the grace, and the ingenuity pleased the audience, and what
Was even nicer, they did not have to see beyond the action
to discover the truths that the author had to communicate;

they could attend to the surface of the play, knowing full

164

well that there was nothing behind the action. Guarini
had created an artifice that existed solely for its own
sake.

The Neoplatonists revived the moribund courtly lover
by breathing the animating spirit of their mysteries into
his body. Their esoteric art caught on among the aristo-
crats of Italy, and soon it was dispersed across Europe
in treatises, poems, paintings, statues, medals and emblems.
The mysteries soon disappeared, and a delight in the style

for its own sake replaced the urge for illumination. Tasso's

 

Aminta and Guarini's Il_Pastor Fido reflect the change of
emphasis from mystery to style. Both works combined the
motif of death and revival with those qualities that the
aristocracy found the most civilized, refined, and decorous,
but the former used it to present a mystery, while the
latter used it to bind together his disparate worlds. The
motif contributed also to Guarini's style, artifice and
ingenuity. In England, Shakespeare and Fletcher roughly

reflect this same difference.

CHAPTER IV

THE FUNCTION OF THE MOTIF IN THE PASTORAL
PLAYS OF LYLY, SHAKESPEARE,
DANIEL, AND FLETCHER

In England the motif of death and revival travels a
parallel route to the same destination that it reached in
Italy with the publication of‘Il_Pastor'§i§g, The rest of
this paragraph provides a map of this route, which the body
of this chapter slowly retraces. John Lyly introduced the
pastoral, Ovidian, and Neoplatonic conventions to the
English court. In so doing, he adapted them to his own
theory of love, which differs greatly from that of Ficino
or even Tasso. His theory, grounded on common sense and
fashioned out of Christian humanist materials, exists
totally within the limits of reason, law and morality. It
parallels the traditional Christian theories by oscillating
between an ascetic renunciation of women and an ideal
domestic bliss resulting from the marriage of two equally
moral people living according to reason. The motif loses
its metaphysical and anagogic significance and acquires in
their place a humanistic moral meaning quite foreign to
the Neoplatonic love conventions that circulated before

Lyly wrote his plays. Shakespeare inherits this moral

165

166

significance along with the pastoral and the Neoplatonic love
conventions from Lyly. In his early pastoral comedies,
however, he gradually works out from under Lyly's humanistic
view of love. Shakespeare does this by exploring Bembo's

theory of love,recorded in Castiglione's‘11.69rtegiangjwhich,

 

as we have seen, touched lightly upon the motif of death

and revival. He gradually restores the symbolic and
esoteric meaning to the motif and to the pastoral conven-
tions. Samuel Daniel, writing towards the end of Shake-
speare's career, harks back to the older moralistic
tradition of Edwards and Greene. He criticizes aristocratic
society and the court with the pastoral and tragicomic
conventions derived from Guarini. The total absence of

the coincidence of opposites and of any irony or sense of
paradox indicates that even more of the mystery behind the

motif has disappeared. Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess

 

brings an end to the tradition of the didactic pastoral.
This play makes the by now trite assertion that only a
love free from lust can bring marital bliss. The actions
and the poetic style, however, dampen any moral impact
that this tale might have by distracting the audience's
attention away from the lesson to be learned. The surface
splendors exhibit the ingenuity of the author and the
beauty of his poetry. As in‘Il Pastor 5392! the motif of

death and revival only contributes to this ingenuity and

167

to the ornamentation of the play; its anagogic function has
been completely forgotten.

Anyone browsing through John Lyly's (1554?-1606) plays
after reading a few of the sixteenth century Italian pas-
toral tragicomedies immediately notices many similarities.

In Sappho and Phao, Gallathea, Love's Metamorphosis, and

 

 

 

The Wbman in the Moon1 he blends the Ovidian pagan deities

 

with the shepherds and nymphs of the pastoral tradition in
the same way as Politian in g££22_or Correggio in Cefalo.
The deities sometimes complicate the lives of the shep-
herds; more frequently, however, they resolve their dif-
ficulties and restore harmony to Arcadia. The same rural
setting composed of trees, caves, and streams that the
Italians borrowed from Ovid, Virgil, and Longus frames the
characters in these stories. The unrealistic settings
function in the same manner as in the Italian court dramas.
As G. K. Hunter has noticed, Lyly's sets were designed to
impress the audience rather than deceive them.2 These
impressive and unrealistic sets contrasted sharply with the
court, forcing the audience to be aware of the play as a

work of art that portrayed a world much more simplified

 

1The dates of composition are unknown. The dates of
publication of the five plays mentioned here are: ‘Sa ho
and Phao-1584; Endimionw159l; Gallathea-1592; The woman in
the Moon—1597; Love‘s MetamorphosiSw16Ol.a See Violet
Jeffery,John'Lyly and'the Italian Renaissance (Paris, 1928),
p. 73.

26. K. Hunter,‘John‘Lyly:_;The‘Humanist as Courtier
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 107.

 

 

 

168

and idealized than their own--but one that was just as
beautiful. Lyly's plays also neglect dramatic action,
concentrating, instead, upon the emotional or lyrical
movement of the poetry. This was one of the character—
istics of the pastoral elegy that the dramatists adapted
to their court presentations. Lyly carries it to such an
extreme that there is almost no action at all in his plays.
This has led Peter Saccio in a recent study of Lyly's
dramaturgy to say of Endimion:

There are so many arrangements of characters for Lyly

to establish that there is little time for anything

in the way of a plot to happen. The central situa-

tion, indeed, is almost completely static.3
The same can be said of the rest of Lyly's plays and most
pastorals. In the pastoral elegy and even more so in
Lyly's plays the emphasis shifts from the plot to the
refined dialogue and to the beautiful poetry of the
character's soliloquies.

As insignificant as his stories are, he still borrows

several incidents from the plots of the Italian pastoral

dramas. The sacrifice in Gallathea is reminiscent of that

 

in £1 Pastor Fido and a little less so of that in Beccari's

 

£1 Sacrifizio.4 All three create suspense from a cruel

 

 

3The‘Court‘Comediesof John Lyly (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969), p. 170. He says the same about
Campaspe and Gallathea.

 

4Jeffery, p. 79. Bond thinks that the play was
written much too early (1584) to borrow from Guarini; the
point has not been proven, however.

169

law which demands the sacrifice of the purest maiden in
Arcadia, and in each of these three plays the maiden is
saved from death. The motif of Cupid disguising himself
as a shepherd in order to run away from his mother, which
Tasso borrowed from Moschus, appears slightly altered in
one of the minor plots of Gallathea. In this play, Cupid
is disguised as a woman, and after causing trouble among
Diana's nymph's, is caught and returned to Venus. Miss
Jeffery lists several Italian parallels to this variation
and development of the motif.5 The'Agia_(1551) of Luca
Contile is reported to have scenes that resembled this,

and in Liberatione d'Amore (1576) Cupid is captured by two

 

villains and finally released by a helpful shepherd. The

third situation in Gallathea was also used by the Italian

 

dramatists. In G. B. della Porta's Cintia, two girls and
two boys fall in love with each other because one of them
is disguised as a member of the opposite sex. Finally the
sex of the disguised person is revealed, and the compli-

cations disappear. In Gallathea, Venus intervenes and

 

changes one of the girls, who has fallen in love with

another girl, into a man.6 Love's Metamorphosis relies

 

heavily upon a play called Mirzia by Antonio Epicuro de'

Marsi (1463—1555).7 In both plays three shepherds fall in

 

51bid., p. 81.

61bid., pp. 83-4.

71....

170

love with three nymphs who scorn them. In Mirzia the
shepherds sacrifice to Apollo, and he tells them how to

solve their problems; in Love's Metamorphosis the shepherds

 

go to Cupid's temple to find the answer to their problems.
In both plays two deities hold a debate, and just to com-
plete matters, in both plays characters turn into natural
objects.8
Lyly did not just borrow situations for his plots
from the Italians; he also adopted, as his own, their
subject matter and their method of presenting it. Miss
Jeffery shows, rather convincingly, that Lyly was intimately
acquainted with the "treatises of love," which disseminated
the diluted Neoplatonic ideas and conventions of love

throughout Europe.9 He drew from the famous ones, such

as Castiglione's ll Cortegiano, Bembo's Asolani, and

 

Guazzo's Civile Conversazione, and from those long forgotten,

 

such as Benedetto Varchi's Lezione sopra alcune Questioni
10

 

d'amore and Ortensio Lando's Quesiti Amorosi. In these

 

treatises cultured men and women, after an excellent dinner,

 

8Jeffery, p. 85. Mr. Uschald in his unpublished
doctoral dissertation, "The Italian Tradition in John Lyly's
Court Dramas: With Emphasis on His Characterization and
Ideas of Love." (Dept. of English, Michigan State Univer-
sity, 1957), p. 84 lists three other qualities that Lyly
had in common with the Italians: l) the mingling of tragic
and comic. 2) the use of the dumbshow, and 3) the use of
ballet, singing, and dream.

91bid., pp. 1-49.

loIbid., p. 15.

171

would retire to the garden or to the sitting rooms to
discuss questions of love. Euphues and its sequel, Euphues

and his England, in part reproduce for English readers the

 

same style of after-dinner conversation. Lyly only covers
a fraction of the questions discussed in the Italian
treatises, but those that he does debate can all be traced
to one or more of these books. The evening passes, and
presumably the guests' dinners digest while Euphues and

his friends try to determine if wit or beauty causes a man
to fall in love, if a man or a woman is the more easily
attracted to the opposite sex, or if the male or the female
is the more constant. They even wonder if love can be

11 The

aroused with the virtues of herbs, stones, or words.
habit of conducting debates and discussions spills over
into his plays. A debate between chastity and love appears

in Sappho and Phao, between love and honor in CampaSpe,

 

 

between love and friendship in Endimion, and between piety
12

 

and self-preservation in Gallathea.

 

Although Lyly unhesitatingly borrowed the Italian
subjects and imitated their style, he remained an English—
man, and his English humanistic studies at Oxford exposed
him to theories that were quite hostile to those that we
have analyzed in the Italian Neoplatonic tradition. The

world of reason and common sense that Politian, Tasso, and

 

llIbid., p. 14.

12Hunter, p. 123.

172

Guarini transcended reasserts itself in Lyly's plays as
the proper governor of the emotions--even that of love.
Lyly's plays are the Italian world of the emotions as seen
from the viewpoint of right reason, established custom,
and well—governed passions. The humanist's perspective
shifts the meaning of the motif of death and revival from
the mystical and metaphysical to the political and moral
realms. A greater belief in the practicability of the
passions described in the love treatises also accompanies
this alteration in meaning.

The wish to see the courtly love conventions turned
into moral precepts applicable to actual affairs of the
heart was certainly encouraged by the continuing Protestant
discussions of marriage. The early Protestant reformers
had condemned the ascetic way of life and denied that

13 The sixteenth century humanists

14

marriage was a sacrament.
continued the attacks on both celibacy and virginity.
At the same time that celibate life was repudiated the

ideal of a happy marriage was being triumphantly promoted.15

 

l3Mark Rose, Heroic Love (Cambridge: Harvard Univer—
sity Press, 1968), p. 27.

14Calvin thought the church suffered from "a super-
stitious admiration of celibacy." As quoted in Rose,
p. 27.

- 15A good example comes from Daniel Rogers' Matrimoniall

 

 

Honour: "Marriage is the Preservative of Chastity, the
Seminary of the Commonwealth, the seed~plot of the Church,
piller (under God) of the world, . . . ." (Rose, p. 28).

173

Rose concludes that marriage became a duty, a virtue and
somewhat ironically "a kind of religious order."16 Love
became the desired means to this end. Hooker, for example,
believed that love was "the perfectest ground of wedlock."17
The domestication of love provides the subject of the
English courtesy books which imitated the Italian treatises

on love. In Edmund Tilney's Flower of Friendshippe the

 

ladies and gentlemen discuss the duties of the married woman

and the married man.18 Whetstones"Heptameron'of'Civill

 

Discourses describes the joys of everyday married life and

 

includes a great deal of advice on maintaining a happy
union. Robert Greene's Morando: ‘The Tritameron of Love
19

 

closely resembles Bembo's Asolani, but takes the Protestant

position that love which is a means to marriage is virtuous,
while the love that exists for itself is evil.20
The morality of the passion called love also inter-

ested Sidney and Greville. Sidney was familiar with many

 

l6Ibid.,p. 28.

l71bid.,p. 31.

18Rose (p. 25) continues: "Men are counseled to
avoid gaming and rioting, to provide well for their house-
holds, to avoid jealousy, and to be careful about educating
their children. Women are advised to be obedient, to avoid
excess in apparel, to pass over their husbands' defects,
to keep their houses in order, and to take care with meat
dishes . . . "

lgIbid'lpo 260

ZOIbid.

 

174

of the Neoplatonic treatises, but he never subscribed to
their celebrations of love. He does not trust the heroic
frenzies or the mystical dissolution of self in divine
beauty. The Arcadia shows that Sidney had both feet planted
firmly on the ground. Arcadia has fallen from the ideal
because Venus Urania has departed, and as Rose notes:
The vital fact about Urania was that she was able to
throw "reason upon our desires," to give "eyes unto
cupid."21
Reason must control the passions, and Pyrocles spends
nearly his entire career learning how to do just this.
Musidorus' reprimand of Pyrocles when he puts on the clothes
of a woman in order to be with his love summarizes the
Sidneian and humanist position:
Remember (for I know you know it) that if we will be
men, the reasonable parte of our soule, is to have
absolute commaundement; against which if any sensuall
weakness arise, we are to yeelde all our sounde forces
to the overthrowing of so unnaturall a rebellion,
wherein how can we wante courage, since we are to
deale against so weake an adversary, that in it selfe
is nothing but weakenesse?22
Fulke Greville won't even admit that there is a real

enemy to be overcome; the courtly lover merely cherishes

vain insubstantial dreams. The dreams which the mind

 

21Ibid.,p. 45. This is a good example of a humanist
appropriating images from the Neoplatonists and giving his
own meaning to the symbols. For Ficino the heavenly Venus
was above reason, not identical with it; and the blindness
of Orphic love (and Cupid) was one of the highest Neopla-
tonic mysteries.

22The‘Prose'W’orksof Sir Philip‘Sidney) ed. A.
Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1962) I, p. 77.

 

175

engenders are completely specious, and if a man wants to
escape their influence, he has to turn to palpable,

immediate reality.23

Caelica, a sonnet sequence which

denies the Neoplatonic and idealistic conventions of

earlier sequences, expresses Greville's skepticism of other

worlds and his conviction of the permanence of the mundane:
Angells enjoy the heavens' inward Quires:

Starre-gazers only multiply desires.

(Sonnet XVII)24

Thus our delights, like faire shapes in a glasse,
Though pleasing to our senses, cannot last.
(Sonnet XLI)
Let no love-desiring heart,
In the Starres goe seek his fate,
Love is onely Natures art,
Wonder hinders love and hate.
None can well behold with eyes,
But what underneath him lies.
' (Sonnet LV)
The last two lines quoted above amount to the same kind of
blow that Samuel Johnson gave to Berkeley's philosophical
theories when he kicked the stone. These two men of common
sense hoped to tumble what they took to be a chimerical
construction with a swift appeal to the obvious. Neopla-
tonism, however, did not collapse quite so easily.
Lyly belongs to both the Sidney—Greville and the
Neoplatonic camps, and his plays and the consistency of

his thoughts suffer greatly from this divided allegiance.

 

23Stevenson, The LoveeGame‘Comedy, p. 134.

24All quotes are from stevenson, pp. 134—5.

 

176

His style is at odds with his subject matter in the pastoral
and mythological plays. Love dominates the discussions of

the plays, and Telusa, the love-lorn maiden in Gallathea

 

defines it:

0 devine love, which art therefore called devine,
because thou overvreachest the wisest, conquerest

the chastest, and doost all things both unlikely

and impossible, because thou art love. Thou makest
the bashful impudent, the wise fond, the chaste wanton,
and workest contraries to our reach, because thy selfe
is beyond reason.25

This is not the reason why Gottfried, the Stilnovisti, or

 

the Neoplatonists called love divine. The effects listed
here amount to little more than social and moral embar-
rassments and are really just a witty summary of the effects
of love discussed in the love treatises. While this is not
among the most intelligent comments on love that we have
encountered, it still is very important in Lyly's world,
and this description accounts for many of the curious
activities in his plays. Other characters recapitulate
these phrases either with their actions or in their
speeches. Endimion, in the play of the same name, falls

in love with the moon. His love, doomed to frustration,
makes him a courtly lover and a fool to boot. Endimion's
friend, Eumenides, leaves no doubt that he belongs with

thatigroup:

 

2STh'e' Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond.

3 vols. (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1902) II, p. 449.
All quotes from Lyly's plays are taken from these volumes.

177

Without doubt Endimion is bewitched, otherwise in
a man of such rare vertues there could not harbor
a minde of such extreme madness (I,i).

Tellus loved Endimion so much that she had him put to sleep
when she discovered that he did not love her. As she says:
Endimion, that Endimion in the prime of his youth,

so rav1sht my hart With love, that to obtaine my
desires, I coulde not finde meanes, nor to resi(s)te
them, reason (V,iii).
In Sapho and Phao Venus herself falls in love with Phao,
whose beauty was her own creation, and her son Cupid falls
in love with Sapho, who convinces him to force Phao to hate
Venus instead of making him love her as he has been

instructed to do. Cupid, disguising himself as a girl,

overcomes chastity in Gallathea by causing Diana's nymphs

 

to break their vows and fall in love. Two of them even

fall in love with Gallathea when she is disguised as a boy.
This foolishness comes to a head when Gallathea and Phillida
fall in love with each other while both are disguised as
boys. Only a metamorphosis can straighten out their

emotional lives. Pandora in The WOman in the Moon displays

 

all of the characteristics of love as all of the seven
planets in turn influence her character. The victims of
her kaleidoscopic emotions suffer the same rebuffs and the
same enticing promises as the courtly lover at the hands
of his liege-lady. The four simple shepherds only asked
the gods for someone to help them increase their kind;

instead they got the beautiful and divine Pandora. Even

178

so, when she first appeared among them, they were ready to
pay her the correct compliments:

Melee. 0 eyes more fayre then is the morning Starre!

Learchus. Nature her selfe is not so lovely fayre!

Ste51as. Let us With reverence kisse her 11111e hands,

And by deserts in service win her love.

(1,1)
These shepherds have been reading the treatises on love
while they tended their sheep; they are most accomplished
courtiers.
The subject of the plays may be the effects that

love, which is beyond reason and consequently irrational,
has upon the emotions of the creatures of this world, but
the style in which this subject is discussed belongs
completely to the world of reason, logic, and law. The
preceding quotation on love, as brief as it is, demonstrates
just how thoroughly the techniques of right reason penetrate
the Euphuistic style. This comment upon the effects of
love assumes the shape of a definition (page--l76 above) which
also explains divine love's nature. The "because" and the
"therefore" imply a process of reasoning that one does not
expect to find in souls distraught by love. The repetitions
of function and structure try to exhaust all the effects
of a course of action or the possibilities of an event,
which only a mind trained in logic would think important.
Of course, the purpose of all these techniques is clarity

of thought and expression--hardly the proper medium to

suggest the ineffable. In addition to the formal debates

179

in each play, the characters indulge in a great many verbal
exchanges which resemble the logic-chopping style of the

debate. In Sapho and Phao Molus and Cryticus, two servants,

 

conduct a lengthy discussion complete with formal proofs
and syllogisms. Eumenides, in reply to Endimion's con-
fession of love, tries to trap him with a distasteful

dilemma:

If you be enamored of any thing above the Moone, your
thoughts are ridiculous, for that things immortall
are not subject to affections; if allured or enchaunted
with these transitory things under the Moone, you shew
your selfe sencelesse, to attribute such lofty tytles,
to such lowe trifles.

(Li)

Endimion adroitly escapes this trap by saying that he loves
the moon itself. This is a fair example of the way that
logic and reason are used to belittle and ridicule the
courtly love tradition.

Many of Lyly's characters adhere to the beliefs of
the skeptical, rational, and clear-headed humanists.
Eumenides reaches the point where he has to choose between
his love for Semele and his friendship for Endimion. Geron,
an ancient sage, counsels him with the following advice:

Eumenides, release Endimion, for all things (friend-
ship excepted) are subject to fortune: love is but

an eye—worme, which onely tickleth the heade with
hopes and wishes: friendshippe the image of eternitie,
in which there is nothing moveable, nothing mischie-
vous . . . . Love is a Camelion, which draweth
nothing into the mouth but ayre, and nourisheth-
nothing in the bodie but lunges: believe mee
Eumenides, Desire dyes in the same moment that Beautie

sickens, and Beautie fadeth in the same instant that
it flourisheth.

 

 

(III,iv)

180

This description of love and beauty convinces Eumenides to
help his friend instead of his love. At the end of the
play, even though he prefers friendship to love, Cynthia
awards Semele to him.

The inconstancy of woman and the perishability of
beauty--both stock themes of the humanists--appear in
almost every play. Endimion falls in love with the moon
because even though it changes, the changes are regular
and so provide a certain constancy. Pandora, in Woman in
the Moon, is by far the best illustration of inconstancy.
Her alterations sow discord among the shepherds and drive
her shepherd husband to attempt to kill her. Pandora, the
mysogynists' ideal woman, can only cause trouble. Phao,

in Sapho and Phao, infatuated with his own beauty, seeks

 

advice from Sybilla, a priestess; he wants to avoid com-
mitting himself to one love. She tells him to forget that
nonsense because beauty fades too quickly. He should be
concerned more with virtue than with vanity. Finally,
after suffering the consequences of disregarding her
advice, he returns to her cave a much wiser man. Venus,
the goddess he loved, has herself been inconstant. He
concludes that:

Loves are but smokes, which vanish in the seeing,

and yet hurte whilest they are seene.
(V,ii)

181

His resolve to worship his first love, Sapho, as he poles
his ferry, parallels the courtly lover's devotion to his
dead loved one:

My life shal be spente in sighing and wishing, the

one for my bad fortune, the other for Saphoes good.

(V,ii)
Lyly, as opposed to his characters, never seems to make a
choice between the Neoplatonic and the humanist views of
love. He presents both theories with enough wit to avoid
being saddled with either position. Judging, however, by
his style, we can assert that he leans decidedly in the
direction of the humanists. When his reason and common
sense peer at the courtly lover through their objective
and impersonal lenses, the lover is reduced to a few foolish
actions and to a few absurd similes. The main purpose of
the motif of death and revival is to expose the folly of
the courtly lover; it also helps to state the humanists'
case against woman, but this is not nearly as important
as the exposure of folly.
Although Lyly was familiar with the Petrarchan

26 He prefers the image

oxymorons, he uses them very rarely.
of two opposites in one body, which in the Neoplatonists

symbolized the concordia discors, but which in Lyly usually

 

makes a moral point. Gallathea and Phillida, both girls

 

261n The Woman in the Moone:
Her greatest wound iswbut a pleasing harme:
Death at her hands is but a second life.
(III, p. 256)

 

182

and both virgins, are very much in love with one another.
As Saccio has noticed, this makes them devotees of both

Venus and Diana.27

They manage to reconcile the opposites,
love and chastity, and, as a reward, Venus transforms their
true but sterile love into a true and fruitful union. This

is Lyly's version of Castitas-Amor-Voluptas, which points

 

to a moral rather than to a metaphysical truth. Pandora
blends the powers of the seven planetary deities within
her body in order to show the inconstancy and folly of
woman. The most interesting of the dramatist's images is
the disguised person. In Lyly's plays men dress as women
and women dress as men. The former has a significance

different from the latter. In Gallathea Cupid dresses as

 

a woman and in The Woman in the Moone Stesias briefly dons

 

woman's clothes (IV,i). A man in woman's clothes signified
passionate love, the kind of love that "turns a man into

a woman," as Burton would have it.28

The woman disguised
as a man, on the other hand, indicates perfection because
the two Opposites, male and female, unite in one figure.

Gallathea and Phillida share this perfection, which Lyly

conceives of as a moral perfection. The disguise is

 

27Saccio, p. 147.

28Sidney, in the Arcadia dressed Pyrocles in skirts
to show the effeminacy that results when his passions con-
trol his reason. See Mark Rose, "Sidney's WOmanish Man,"
Review of English Studies, XV(1964), p. 357. It is quite
possible that Lyly had the same thing in mind.

 

183

usually reserved for the heroine, who is thought of as
divine, or for her close companion. Of course these dis-
guises are also rather funny, so they help to contribute
to the demonstration of the folly of love.

The metamorphoses that happen in almost every play
contribute to this same demonstration. Nature transforms
Pandora into the woman in the moon as the symbol of the
inconstant nature of woman:

Now rule, Pandora, in fayre Cynthias steede,

And make the moone inconstant as thyselfe;

Raigne thou at womens nuptials, and their birth;

Let them be mutable in all their loves,

Fantasticall, childish, and foolish, in their desires,

Demaunding toyes:

And starke madde when they cannot have their will.
(V,iii)

The three nymphs in Loves Metamorphosis prefer to remain a

 

stone, a rose, and a bird. Cupid obliges them by letting
them keep the quality of the object in their heart. The
stone means that the nymph's heart will be cold as well as
hot; the rose, that there will be prickles as well as
sweetness in her heart; and the bird, that she may fly
abroad and cause jealousy as well as stay at home. Only
Gallathea's change, which is motivated by the demands of
the plot, does not contribute to the humanists' ridicule
of woman.

Endimion introduces the image of the knight being
awakened to a new life by the kiss of his beloved. Endimion's
new life at the onset is not very promising because he has

aged forty years. Cynthia, however, rewards his pure

184

thoughts and his professed devotion to her by restoring

his youth to him. He has won Cynthia's favor, and like the
true courtly lover that he is, he will spend the rest of
his days in her service. The motif shows how pure thoughts
and constancy of emotion eventually are rewarded by the
beloved one. This, of all his plays, most closely approxi-
mates the world of Tasso and Politian. Everyone realizes
his deepest desires with the help of Cynthia. Endimion
will be allowed to worship the moon and the other characters
will marry the person of their choice. But unlike the
Aminta and the Orfeg, this play does not ask the audience
to look beyond the actions for more profound meanings.

The audience at Lyly's plays remain observers of the
actions; he does not turn the play into a rite and so does
not involve them in the meanings of his art. The morals of
the audience concern him but not in the same way as earlier

users of the motif. Edwards in Damon and Pythias tried to

 

get the audience to change its moral habits by witnessing
the near death and rebirth. The audience was supposed to
reverse its notions of policy at the same time that
Dionysius changed his. Lyly's plays are closer to satire
because they ask the sophisticated audience to appreciate
a witty point about tne nature of their favorite subject:
Love. On the one hand, Cupid is innocent, small, quite
harmless, cute, and even a little foolish-eafter all, what
harm can his tiny arrows do? Yet to the person struck by

these arrows, his power is the greatest in the world.

185

Jove, Mars, Saturn and even Venus herself succumb. Mortals
lose their will, suffer the agonies of love, and relish
the favors of the beloved. Those into whom the shafts
penetrate the furthest find their soul racked with discord,
their complexion altered, and their mind obsessed with the
image of their beloved. For those in whom love is purest,
death is a desired experience. Lyly's audience never see
things completely from this latter viewpoint. From time
to time he lets them see it through the eyes of the former
viewpoint, that of the humanist who prefers his passions
controlled by reason, and who feels that to be enslaved by
any passion entails a loss of dignity. The humanist looks
upon love as one of the many kinds of folly that plague
the human condition. The behavior it causes is very
degrading to_a creature placed midway between God and the
animals. Lyly expects his audience to respect and to
understand the irrational powers of love and to realize
how foolish they make the man possessed by them. Under-
standing and laughing at the same time, the audience keeps
its distance from the events in the play. The motif of
death and revival and the metamorphoses drive home these
beliefs in the audience, and the oxymorons and the con-
traries contribute to the wit, the ingenuity, and the
artifice of the production.

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1592) William

 

Shakespeare begins to restore the original Neoplatonic

186

meanings to the motif of death and revival. He borrows
many of his materials from Lyly's plays and adds to these
the Neoplatonic meanings that he probably read in Sir
Thomas Hoby's translation of 11 Cortegiano (1561). In
Endimion and this play true love is reconciled with friend-
ship. The love story of Felix and Felismena in Diana.

Enamorada by Jorge de Montemayor could have suggested the

 

story of Proteus and Julia to Shakespeare because in both
the young men are sent to court where they fall in love
with another lady while their first love follows them
disguised as a page.29 But Valentine's and Proteus'
rivalry for the same woman is closer to Euphues than to the
Spanish work. At the rising of the curtain Valentine
chastises Proteus for being in love in terms familiar to
Lyly:

Love is your master, for he masters you;

And he that is so yoked by a fool,

Methinks, should not be chronicled for wise.

(1,1, 39-41)30

Proteus agrees, saying after Valentine leaves:

I [leave] myself, my friends, and all, for love.
(I,i, 65)

As in Lyly, the foolishness of a love ungoverned by reason

‘will be laughed at in many scenes of the play. The many

 

29BlazeO.Bonazza, Shakespeare's Ear1y7Comedies

30All quotes from Shakespeare come from The Complete
gglays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. W. A. Nelson
éand C. J. HillgiCambridge, Mass., 1942).

187

.metamorphoses of Proteus and Valentine, the many lies told
to one another, and the disguise of Juliet reveal just how
inconstant "true" love can be and consequently just how
foolish those professing this emotion are. Throughout his
plays Lyly poked fun at the conventions of courtly love,
and Shakespeare follows suit in the scenes that feature
the two servants, Launce and Speed. In scene III,for
example,Launce complains that his dog, Crab, has not shed
one tear over his departure. Just prior to this scene
Proteus left Julia with many verbal flourishes and a brave
promise to remain constant. The contrast provides the
humor and an ironic comment when it turns out that the dog
was more constant than Proteus. Shakespeare also indulges
in the word play, the logic-chopping debates, the oxymorons,
the parallel constructions and the hyperbole that are such
outstanding characteristics of the Euphuistic style.
Shakespeare borrows the pastoral conventions from
Lyly, but he puts them to an entirely different use.
Lyly's pastoral was only a foil to the court and a place
where the laws of common sense didn't apply. Shakespeare
gives the woods the same meaning that it had for Boccaccio,

31

Sannazaro, and Tasso. The woods heals the divisions that

 

31Mr. Cody in The Landscape of the Mind says that the
aesthetic aspects of the pastoral in Two Gentlemen derive
from the Aminta. The pastoral world mirrors the shepherd's
inner life, the play has the same three part unfolding as
the Aminta, and the play is a highly self-conscious produc-
tion which ultimately becomes the subject of itself. Mr.

 

188

have torn the individual's soul, creates a harmony out of

the diverse elements contending within the shepherd's

breast, and permits the shepherd to experience the know-

ledge of his true self so that he will be able to return

to the world of the court a new man full of harmony and

wisdom. This use of the pastoral which signifies the inward

turning of the mind upon itself separates this play from

the court comedies of Lyly. Lyly is all morality and

social life. This world, however, is beyond the reach of

custom, law, and authority, as was the cave of the lovers

in Tristan.32
Valentine is the first to enter the woods and so the

first to be reborn. He begins the play as a skeptical

humanist with little time for the foolishness of love;

Eumenides in Endimion is a close parallel. Then he meets

Silvia. Her beauty metamorphoses him into the courtly

lover sighing and praying for the possession of his beloved.

Not content to worship at a distance, he tries to elope

with her; unfortunately the Duke discovers his plot and

 

Cody develops these points so well (pp. 81-104) that I

have omitted them from my discussion. His treatment of the
meaning of the pastoral is too general, so I have concen-
trated on that subject.

32Valentine says that "Here (in the woods) can I sit
alone, unseen of any . . . " (V, iv, 4), and Silvia, as she
hurries into the woods feels there are spies lurking in the
city (V,i). Sir Eglamore tells her not to be afraid because
the woods are near. The implication is that the woods are
free from the prying eyes of those in authority.

189

has him banished from the court.33 His complete surrender
to sensual love, which his desire to possess her body
suggests, has led only to lies, conflict, and dishonor.
Now in the woods, where he is completely isolated from the
court, he can begin to be enlightened. The outlaws, some
of whom "are gentlemen/such as the fury of ungovern'd
youth/Thrust from the company of lawful men'KIV,ii, 4406),"
make him their king because of his beauty, his "goodly
shape" and his perfection. Reason has asserted its control
over the passions and will now be able to lead him to the
sight of divine beauty. When we next see Valentine, he is
sitting alone in the woods in the attitude of the shepherd-
poet of the Renaissance pastoral tradition, wishing for
Silvia:

Repair me with thy presence, Silvia!

Thou gentle nymph, cherish thy forlorn Swain!

(V, iv, ll-12)

She appears to him as soon as he has uttered these words.
The sight of divine beauty in all its radiance and goodness
enables him to see the truth. He immediately recognizes

the falseness of Proteus and forgives him for revealing his

 

3380 far Valentine's behavior corresponds to what
Bembo in The Courtier would call sensual love. To escape
the tortures of this sensual love he "must firmly resolve
to avoid all ugliness of vulgar love, and must enter into
the divine path of love with reason as his guide (p. 347).”

 

190

plan to the Duke and wooing Silvia.34 In order to show
that his love is free, he next offers Silvia to Proteus.
John Vyvyan, who first showed the relationship between
Neoplationism and Shakespeare's plays, makes the following
comment upon the scene:
It is not a woman he is offering to give, or to share
with his friend, but perfection. No man who has
beheld the eternal beauty could imagine that it was
his alone. The point of the line is to show that by
the constancy of his friend's love--and of Julia's--
Proteus is also able to open the eyes of his soul,35
and to receive the heavenly vision as a pure gift.
When the Duke and Thurio appear in the woods, Valentine
forces Thurio to expose his cowardice, and this show of
spirit wins the Duke's approval. Valentine has reconciled
all the diverse elements in the play, so that his soul and

the court have become one:

One feast, one house, one mutual happiness.
(V, iv, 174)

The presence of Silvia causes him to be reborn in the

woods and begin his new life with his soul unified. She

 

34The critics have wondered why Valentine should for-

give Proteus; perhaps Shakespeare had this passage from The
Courtier in the back of his mind:

I say, then, that since human nature in youth is so

greatly given over to the senses, the Courtier may be

permitted to love sensually while he is young. But if

later, in more mature years, he chances to conceive

such an amorous desire, he must be very wary and take

care not to deceive himself by letting himself be led

into those calamities which in the young deserve more

compassion than blame, and, on the contrary, in the

old deserve more blame than compassion (p. 346).

35Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty, p. 71.

 

191

has the traditional role of the worshipped liege-lady; also
she symbolizes the celestial Venus, who was Ficino's figure

for divine beauty.36

Of all the characters, she is the only
one who doesn't change. Here Shakespeare and Lyly go their
separate ways. Shakespeare believes that woman is capable
of constancy; Lyly, that woman can only produce strife and
sorrow because of her inherent inconstancy. But Silvia
does not belong to the realm of becoming; rather she belongs
to the realm of essences and pure spiritual being. When
Proteus falls in love with her she sees through his screen
of words immediately and offers him sound moral advice,
which he cannot heed. The song that Thurio and the musi-
cians sing to her stresses her three most impressive
qualities: "Holy, fair, and wise'KIV, ii, 41)." Because
all three qualities unite within her, she "excels each
mortal thing/Upon the dull earth dwelling'KIV, ii, 51-2)."
Silvia is a member of that species of heavenly figure
which also includes Olympia, Beatrice, Blancheflor, and
the two Isoldes.

Proteus is Silvia's contrary. He, as his name
suggests, changes the most. In fact, he is the closest
representation to Lyly's cynical beliefs about woman. As

the quote above reveals, he readily forsakes everything,

 

36As Vyvyan says: "Silvia-—like the Princess of
France-—is both a mortal woman and something more; and it
is likely that a Renaissance audience would have seen at
once that she is intended to reveal the celestial Love and
Beauty (p. 69)."

192

including his self, for love, but his love is completely
sensual. The pastoral landscape discloses his sensuality
when he tries to rape Silvia. After his repentance, he
wins back his friendship, his love, and, with the help of
Julia, his self; thus the woods heal even the most
inconstant and alienated soul in the play.

Julia helps him to discover his self. Her death and
revival save Valentine's love and open Proteus' eyes to
the truth:

What is in Silvia's face, but I may spy
More fresh in Julia's with a constant eye?
(V, iv, 114-15)
She foreshadows her role in Proteus' life when she reads the
love note that he sent to her:
And here is writ "love-wounded Proteus."
Poor wounded name! my bosom as a bed
Shall lodge thee till thy wound be throughly heal'd;
And thus I search it with a sovereign kiss.
(I, ii, 114-16)
Arriving in Milan disguised as a page, she witnesses all
of Proteus' duplicities. Even though he has betrayed her,
she remains faithful to him, gradually revealing herself
to be the paragon of constancy. Then after all her trials
and just when it seems that she is finally going to win
her beloved, Valentine offers Silvia to him. She faints.
Proteus discovers the true identity of his page before he
can accept the offer. Her constancy makes him aware of

his own inconstancy, and so another facet of Proteus' real

self is disclosed in the woods. When she rises, he accepts

193

her, repents his inconstancy, and discovers divine beauty
in Julia. He has retrieved all that he had forsaken for
love; once again his soul is whole and his life harmonious.
Her symbolic death and rebirth have caused a corresponding
rebirth in Proteus. The story of Proteus and Julia
constitutes Shakespeare's rebuttal of Lyly's humanistic
belief that all women are inconstant and that love is just
a foolish weakness.

In Love's Labour's Lost (c.1594), which explores the

 

theme of love in the same style as Two Gentlemen, the play-

 

wright fragments the motif of death and revival even more,
but he continues to use it to reveal the Neoplatonic
mysteries of love. No character dies or even faints in
this play. At the end of the presentation of the Nine
Worthies (V, ii), Monsieur Mercade enters with the news
that the King of France, who is the Princess' father, has
died, and she exclaims:

Dead, for my life!
' (V, ii, 728)

This exclamation signals the reverse of the mood and the
emotions of the play. Prior to this point the play had
been full of gay banter, word-play, professions and mockery
of love, which have culminated in a masque and the presen-
tation of the Nine Worthies. Now the play shifts to a more
somber key, as the lovers confess their errors and listen
uneasily to their punishments. The marriage, which in

Two Gentlemen signifitd union and renewal, remains only a

 

194

promise to be realized in the future. In effect, the
Princess banishes the King and his three nobles for a year;
they have yet to undergo the self-discovery and the rebirth
that Valentine accomplished when he was banished to the
woods by the Duke. The spiritual development of these four
nobles has only reached the stage where the soul severs
itself from the world of the body and turns inward upon
itself. Reason has yet to guide the soul to the discovery
of its true self, to the apprehension of divine beauty,

and to the eventual union of the self with divine beauty
which transcends both reason and the self and becomes a
replica of the harmony and perfection of God.

We might ask of this woman who tries and sentences
the offenders against love the same question that the
musicians asked of Silvia: Who is the Princess? She is
both a woman and a symbol of divine beauty; as a symbol of
divine beauty she combines within her own body the two
opposing deities Diana and Venus, chastity and sensuous
beauty, which for Titian and Botticelli pointed to perfec-
tion. She becomes the mediatrix who awakens the souls of
the knights to the vision of eternal beauty. She does not
die and is not reborn, but her father does, and I suppose
that her year of secluded mourning and eventual return could
be looked upon as the suggestion of just such an experience.
Like Sidney's Uranian Venus, who gives eyes to Cupid when
she reigns over Arcadia, the Princess enlightens the court

wits to the nature of true love.

195

The evidence of this View of the Princess as the com-
bination of chastity and beauty appears throughout the play.
When she agrees to camp in the king's park and goes hunting
deer there, few in the audience would miss the allusion to
Diana, the chaste huntress. After listening to the king's
and Longaville's sonnets, Berowne whispers to himself:

This is the liver-vein, which makes flesh a deity,

A green goose a goddess; pure, pure idolatry.

(IV, iii, 73-5)

He can say this because he has not seen her full powers;
he will change his tune when he encounters the Princess
and her companions. The Princess, informed by Boyet of the
nobles' disguises, assumes one of her own and mocks those
who would mock love, by demonstrating to them just how blind
their sensual love is. None of the suiters can see beyond
the trinket that he has given to his beloved; so their love
hardly penetrates to the soul of the lady they wish to woo.37
She sees through their disguises, through their gifts, and
through their gilded rhetoric into their souls and dis-
covers that these are by no means pure. Confession and

penance are necessary before they can begin to experience

divine beauty directly:

 

37Vyvyan makes the point a little differently: "The

second scene of the fifth act, from line 81 to 471, turns
on the theme of disguise. The undermeaning, I suggest, is
that love-sight must now pierce the disguise of the body-
which is only a garment of the soul in Marsilianism—-and
behold the real self(p. 66)."

196

No, No, my lord, your grace is perfum'd much,

Full of dear guiltiness; and therefore this:

If for my love, as there is no such cause,

You will do aught, this shall you do for me:

Your oath I will not trust; but go with speed

To some forlorn and naked hermitage,

Remote from all the pleasures of the world . . . .
(V, ii, 800-6)

She is the liege-lady through whom the courtly lover begins
to experience divine beauty and true love.

The pastoralism in this play hardly has any con-
nection with the motif of death and revival. It does not
function as a symbol of the inner life, nor does it possess

the healing powers it had in Two Gentlemen. However, walter

 

Pater noticed that the pastoral landscape unifies the play,
and Cody has elaborated this insight into a series of
scenes in which the pastoral serves as an allusion to other

38 The

well known pastoral themes in the Renaissance.
pastoral, the symbol of the contemplative life, blends
with the symbols of the active life to make several witty

concordiae discordes on the order of the Mars and Venus

 

pictures so popular in Italy. The king would like his
court to become an academy without women devoted to the
contemplative life, but the Princess who is more at home
in the fields than the King, deflates that fanciful wish.
The presentation of the Nine Worthies (the symbol of the
active life) in the park continues the blend of the pasto-

ral and the heroic until the end of the play. The Princess

 

38C0dy, pp. 109-10 and 117.

197

combines Venus and Diana within herself, while the nobles
pose as the melancholy shepherd-poets of the pastoral
eclogues. Berowne's punsihment, to exercise his wit in
the hospital trying to make the sick laugh, does suggest a
witty harmony of opposites, which outdoes anything Lyly
wrote. Shakespeare knew the conventions of the pastoral
drama well, and when he wanted to could use them with more
ingenuity and wit than his predecessors in England.
Because the image of the motif is fragmented and
squeezed into the last half of the fifth act, it does not
have any chance to develop its proper rhythm. In fact,
there is hardly any kind of movement in the play. Shake—
speare spent all of his time exposing and ridiculing the
pretenses of those, such as Lyly, who think that love is
entirely sensual and a matter of rhetoric and witty conceits.
The Princess's masque dramatizes the essential foolishness
of the courtiers' posturings and professions of true love.
Indeed, Shakespeare spends so much time ridiculing the
mistaken lovers that he does not have time to present the
true lovers and is reduced to hinting at what their experi-
ence might be in the last act. The mockery of those who
think that love is folly in the terms that they themselves
use to ridicule love also severely curtails the movement
of the play. His verbal wit and stylistic ingenuity usurp
the attention of the audience and almost reduce the play

to a work of art that exists for its own sake. In his later

198

plays he learns how to use the motif to control and focus
the audience's emotions, so that never again does the style
come close to becoming its own end.

A Midsummer Night's Dream contains his first completely

 

successful use of the motif of death and revival. This
play, in fact, combines all the traditions that we have
discussed so far, i.e., the pastoral eclogue, the pastoral
drama, Ovidian mythology, courtly love, the folly of humans
in love, and Orphic poetic theology, into a rite of art
which reveals a Neoplatonic mystery. As Cody notes, this
drama continues many of the themes introduced in the :32.

Gentlemen:

 

As in the Two Gentlemen, Euphuistic versions of the
courtier and his lady are merged with figures from
mythology in a celebration of the powers of love and
poetry; only in this instance some of the immortals
and demigods whom the young lovers prefigure stand
among the dramatis personae in their own right.

 

But all the disparate elements are circumscribed by a
three-part movement, meant to suggest Ficino's threefold
rhythm of love in the universe: emanatio (Act I),raptio
(Act II-III-IV),remeatio (Act V). The deaths and revivals
and the transformations are confined to the raptio--as, of
course, they are in Aminta. If, however, we begin with the
emanatio, we will be in a better position to understand

why there are so many reversals and what exactly they signify.

 

39Cody, p. 128. Cody's chapter (pp. 127—50) on this
play is the best in his book and my discussion borrows a
good deal from it.

199

The play opens on a note of love, concord, and unity
out of which unfolds all the hate, dissension, and duplicity
of the lovers. After Titania and Bottom, who are enjoying
the ecstasy of love, appear while the distraught lovers
sleep, all their discord and divisions dissolve and flow
back into the original love and harmony. In a real sense
this play centers upon the marriage feast that Love's

Labour's Lost lacked. The first marriage in the play,

 

Theseus and Hippolyta's, constructs a witty union of
opposites, which foreshadows the reconciliation of all the
other opposites in the play. He personifies the warrior
who devotes his life to activity:

Hyppolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword,

And won thy love doing thee injuries;
Oberon reminds Titania that Theseus has also been a false
courtly lover and satyr:

Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night

From Perigenia, whom he ravished?

And make him with fair Aegle break his faith,

With Ariadne, and Antiopa?

(II, i, 77-80)

Hippolyta, his buskined Amazon bride, whose fondness for
hunting and respect for the moon suggests Diana, represents
the pastoral world of woods, hills, and caves and also those
fierce maidens who seek to maintain their chastity by
living there. Their marriage, then, unites the world of

heroic action and vice and the world of pastoral inactivity

and virtue together into an indissolvable whole.

200

Theseus, however, knows even less than Lyly about love.
Lyly at least admitted that it is beyond human control.
Theseus tries to make it obey his fiat, but only succeeds
in causinngefiance, disobedience, and discord. Cody
points out that these commands could hardly constitute the
voice of integrity.40 In Neoplatonic terms, Theseus tries
to impose Castitas and Voluptas without Amer, In a play
of many strange and unexpected reverses, his action becomes
a parody of Puck's. Where Puck can cause love, Theseus
can only introduce the spectre of death, which becomes a
major theme of the play.

The lovers know just a little bit more about the
nature of love than Theseus, but unlike him they suffer
for their ignorance. Out of this suffering and folly comes
wisdom.

Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius belong to
the tradition of courtly love. Their actions, beliefs,
and rhetorical conceits derive from the pages of the trea-
tises on love. Lyly of course first ridiculed the exag-
gerated actions of young lovers in his plays, and Shakespeare

had exposed their follies in Two Gentlemen. Once again he

 

transforms a false conception of love into an experience of

true love. A quotation from The Courtier helps to explain

 

the situation of these young lovers:

 

4oCody, pp. 128—9.

201

If, then, the beauties which every day with these
clouded eyes of ours we see in corruptible bodies
(but which are nothing but dreams and the thinnest
shadows of beauty) seem to us so fair and full of
grace that they often kindle in us a most ardent fire
and one of such delight that we judge no felicity able
to equal what we sometimes feel when a single glance
from a woman's beloved eyes reaches us. . . .4
The emphasis on clouds, dreams, and imaginings forces one
to realize that the lovers flounder in the corruptible world
of the body and that their love can only be sensual. Entry
into the pastoral world forces them to turn inward and
discover whom they really love. The discovery of self-
knowledge which leads to reconciliation and union is only
possible in the pastoral world because its simplicity strips
away all fraud, and its quiet contentment heals the dis-
traught spirit. The deaths and rebirths are an integral
7 part of this discovery and healing process.

At first glance it would seem that Hermia and Lysander
could hardly improve the truth and sincerity of their love.
She readily defies the King and risks death for it, and he
gladly leaves Athens and faces the unknown hazards of a
strange land. Their brief discussion of love, however,
discloses that they really know very little about this noble
passion. Lysander says:

Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,

The course of true love never did run smooth;
(I, i, 132-4)

 

41Trans. Singleton, p. 354.

202

Unfortunately the nature of true love can't be discovered
in books. It only exists beyond words, which is why those
who try to hint at it use the esoteric poetic theology.
Hermia agrees with him, and both list a series of hurdles
true love must leap. The parallel constructions, uniting
contraries recalls Lyly, and the mundane obstructions in
the path of true love could only have come from the love
treatises. True love, that aspect of the divine in man is
not as short as lightning, as Lysander thinks, nor is it
responsible for dreams and sufferings, as Hermia thinks:

As due to love as thoughts and dreams and sighs,

Wishes and tears, poor Fancy's followers.

(I, i, 154-5)

They have mistaken the love of one body for another for the
divine love, which is the union of souls. Because of this
confusion, Lysander's description of their union rings
pathetically hollow:

I mean, that my heart unto yours is knit.

So that but one heart we can make of it;

(II, ii, 47-8)

As they are about to go to sleep in the woods, Hermia makes
an equally egregious demand. She insists upon their separa-
tion in order to preserve their virtue and chastity (II,
ii, 55-60). Divine love cannot be immoral; she has mistaken
the nature of true love and brought the laws of Athens into
the woods. When Tristan and Isolde put the sword, the

symbol of the courtly world, between them, their love, their

joy, and their happiness came to an end. The same thing

203

happens briefly to Hermia and Lysander after they wake up.
Oberon describes the sleep that Lysander and Demetrius
fall into as death-counterfeiting:

Till o'er their brows death-counterfeiting sleep

With leaden legs and batty wings doth creep.
And Helena, when she happens upon Hermia and Lysander a few
minutes later exclaims:

But who is here? Lysander! on the ground!

Dead? or asleep? I see no blood, no wound.

Lysander, if you live, good sir, awake.
What knight hasn't fallen in love with the lady who has
awakened him from his death-like trance? Of course,
Lysander immediately pursues Helena. When Hermia awakes,
she finds herself without her true love. She soon discovers
how sensual love destroyed the happiness of her friendship,
and since Lysander's love for Helena is the mirror image of
her own love, she learns just how foolish these mortals
in love can be. After witnessing the turmoil they have

created, she exclaims:

I am amaz'd, and know not what to say.
(III, ii, 344)

Then wandering in confusion, she is purged enough to be
reunited with her lover:

My legs can keep no pace with my desires.
(IV, 1, 445)

And she falls asleep next to Lysander, who also has wandered

in confusion and let love make an ass out of him.

204

Helena and Demetrius require the same kind of treat-
ment. Demetrius' inconstancy obviously needs to be ridiculed
and the foolishness of his actions revealed to the others.
The reversal caused by his death-like sleep and revival and
his confused wanderings prepare this Proteus to be reborn
into a new life of constancy.

Helena appears to be similar to Julia in Two Gentlemen,

 

a faithful maiden who follows the man she loves to the ends
of the earth, even though he has rejected her. In her first
speech, however, we see that her love is as sensual as the
others. She envies Hermia's physical attributes, and sums
it all up with the conceit:

Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,

The rest I'd give to be to you translated.

(I, i, 190-1)

Her wish to give everything except the one she loves con-
trasts sharply with Valentine's decision to give the one
he loves away. Her love is still too material. She gets
her wish in the woods and immediately discovers that she
doesn't want to be Hermia. Her conceit turns out to be
just the "sweet smoke of rhetoric‘(L:£:L., III, i, 64)."
She also hopes to ingratiate herself with Demetrius by
telling him of Hermia's plans. Her sensual desires even
come between her and her friend, destroying the friendship
which she herself valued so highly; consequently her

purgation is that much more severe. At the end of her

trials, she begins to see her behavior for what it is:

205

But he hath chid me hence and threatened me

To strike me, spurn me, nay, to kill me too.

And now, so you will let me quiet go,

To Athens will I bear my folly back

And follow you no further. Let me go.

You see how simple and how fond I am.

(III, ii)

Her awareness of her past follies means that she too is
ready for a rebirth, and her last words before she falls
asleep are prophetic of the experience of all four of the
lovers while they sleep:

And sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow's eye,

Steal me awhile from mine own company.

(III, ii, 435-6)

All four have fallen asleep next to one another, but the
anger, frustration, and dissention in their souls have
isolated them from contact with any of the others. When
they awake, however, their anger and strife will have
disappeared; they will once again be full of love and
friendship, but this time with a difference. If the scene
with the lovers asleep at the feet of Titania and Bottom

(IV, i) is looked at in terms of poetic theology, it

appears to be a representation of Castitas—Amor—Voluptas,

 

amounting to Shakespeare's version of Titian's Sacred and

 

Profane Love. The young lovers, their profane love purified

 

and chaste, are transformed by divine Amer into the harmony
of Voluptas. Their final death-counterfeiting sleep and
rebirth points beyond itself to a Neoplatonic mystery.

This mystery is actualized in the union of Bottom and

Titania, the perfect concordia discors.

 

206

Bottom and Titania also must be transformed before
they can participate in the rite of this divine mystery.
Bottom first appears as the Renaissance whole man, self-
confident and capable of playing all and every part in the

play.42 And Cody very ingeniously makes a case for him

representing Bacchus-Apollo in the poetic theology.43 Just
as important is the contradictory symbolism of the ass's
head itself. On the one hand, it symbolizes the folly and
foolishness that the humanists believed to be caused by
man's animal nature. On the other, it indicates the
humility necessary to perform sacred mysteries. As Cody
summarizes:
Encomia of the ass as 'both absurd in essence and the
carrier of divine mysteries' were too well known by
the 1590's to escape implication in such scenes as
these of Bottom and the Fairy Queen. And like every
other figure in the play, Bottom translated means
reverence as well as laughter, mystery as well as
humour, wisdom as well as folly. 4
The forest has again revealed the true nature of man; this

time he appears as the union of the two contraries, folly

and wisdom.

 

42Cody, p. 132. "Pyramus or Thisbe, Bacchic lion or
Venus' doves, all is one to Bottom, the pan-erotic man wise
enough to play his part over the full range between 'most
obscenely, and courageously' (I, ii, 100)."

43Ibid,,pp. 132-6. His interpretation is based upon
a reference to the myth of Midas who also had asses ears.

The myth which was looked at as hiding an Orphic mystery.

44Ibid.,p. 138. The quotation comes from K. W.

Scoular, Natural Magic (Oxford, 1965), p. 112.

 

207

Titania's sleep and revival indicates that she has
ceased to represent the terrestrial Venus and has now
become the celestial Venus, whose function is to lead the
soul to divine beauty. Her long description of the effects
of hers and Oberon's bickering upon the earth (II, i, 88-117)
coupled with her description of her young votress make it
difficult not to identify her with the earth and its
fertility:

When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she with pretty and with swimming gait
Following, her womb then rich with my young squire,
Would imitate, and sail upon the land
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
(II, i, 127-134)
When Titania awakes, she leads the soul of man, part animal

and part divine, to its union with divine beauty, which she

represents. A comparison of a quote from The Courtier with

 

a few lines of the play shows how exactly Shakespeare
followed this description of the path to divine beauty:

Thus, when it has grown blind to earthly things, the
soul acquires a very keen perception of heavenly things;
and sometimes when the motive forces of the body are
rendered inoperative by assiduous contemplation, or are
bound by sleep, then, being no longer fettered by them,
the soul senses a certain hidden savor of true angelic
beauty, and, ravished by the splendor of that light,
begins to kindle and to pursue it so eagerly that it

is almost drunk and beside itself in its desire to
unite itself to that beauty, . . . . Hence, the soul,
aflame with the most holy fire of true divine love,
flies to unite itself with the angelic nature; and not
only completely abandons the senses, but has no longer
any need of reason's discourse; for, transformed into
an angel, it understands all things intelligible, and
without any veil or cloud views the wide sea of pure

208

divine beauty, and receives it into itself, enjoying

that supreme happiness of which the senses are

incapable.45
When Bottom is left alone in the forest by his friends, he
begins to sing of birds and awakens Titania, who calls him
an angel and tells him that she loves him. Bottom satiri-
cally replies:

. . . and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep

little company together now-a-days;

(III, i, 146-8)

He is wiser than he thinks because at this point in his
adventure his soul has to leave his reason behind. The
celestial Venus assumes the role of reason in the life of
the soul, guiding it toward the purifying divine union:

I am a spirit of no common rate;

The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee; therefore go with me.
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.
(III, ii, 157-64)

The union itself is beyond the realm of reason and discourse,
so Titania fittingly has her sprites bind his tongue:

Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower.

The moon methinks looks with a wat'ry eye;

And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,

Lamenting some enforced chastity.

Tie up my [love's] tongue, bring him silently.

(III, ii, 202-6)

In Titania's bower the human soul, properly purified,

unites with divine beauty in the epiphany of raptio. This

union, which unites the divine with the mortal, the

 

45Trans. Singleton, pp. 353-4.

209

beautiful with the ugly, the heavenly with the sensual,

and wisdom with folly, points to the divine concordia

 

discors which is the major Neoplatonic mystery of love
enacted here.

The next appearance of Bottom and Titania (IV, i)
demonstrates this unity. Shakespeare's use of the pastoral
here parallels Tasso's use of it in Amigta, There Aminta
became one with the pastoral world which symbolized an_
emotional realm beyond reason where everything was permitted.
Bottom revels in the same luxury during his union with
nature. The small benign sprites hasten to satisfy every
whim. He is, indeed, the king of his world. This supreme
felicity can only last for a few moments-—like the appearance
of lightning that Lysander mentions. Bottom and Titania
again fall asleep and awaken in their customary roles.

The magic of the last few hours remains only as an unbe-
lievable and incomprehensible memory. But Bottom's and
Titania's union effected the union in the lovers sleeping
below them by purging all the strife and rancor from their
hearts. When the young lovers awaken they join Theseus
and his bride in the marriage rites of sacred and holy
love.

But all these sacred truths are not presented in a
serious manner. Bottom and Titania have their comic as
‘well as their serious side. The informed know how to read

the action, while the humor disguises the truths from the

210

ignorant. In the last act, the remeatio, Shakespeare
travesties the significance of the motif of death and

revival in the play within the play, Pyramus and Thisbe.

 

This story of two lovers, separated from each other, who

die for the love of the other and are reborn united in
heaven, adumbrates the central experience of the play. It
is presented so poorly by the "rude mechanicals" that the
audience must join in the good natured mockery of the
actors. At the same time, Shakespeare interposes Theseus,
Hippolyta, and the lovers between the play and the audience.46
He borrows this framing technique from the pastoral eclogue,
where it isolated and objectified the emotions of the poem
from the reader. Here the frame does the same thing. It
makes the audience aware of the play as a work of art and
forces them to become self-conscious of their own role in
what they are observing. In the end, the audience should
realize that the play has become the subject of itself.
The ambiguities produced by this awareness puzzle and
bewilder the audience as much as Bottom was when he tried
to recount his vision. The audience enters into the self—
conscious rite of the play when it assumes the same view
point as Bottom. Perhaps the folly presented on the stage
will induce some wisdom into the members of the audience
who have become both participants in the action and

observers of its results.

 

46Cody elaborates on this point on pp. 144—6 of his book.

211

As You Like It (1599) tries to accomplish essentially
the same end without any of the magic of the midsummer night.
The intrusion of realistic elements into an essentially
symbolic landscape destroys the unity of the play by
obscuring and confusing its anagogical purpose. Although
the play fails artistically, it does foreshadow the way in
which the motif of death and revival occurs in the later
plays.

All the elements of the earlier works reappear in this
play. The young hero is separated from his love by being
banished to the woods. His love follows him there, dis-
guised as a young man. Her own revelation of her true
nature reconciles the difficulties of the plot and produces
a much needed harmony and order in the world of the court.
The plot also recreates the three part movement of court-
woods-return to court, which corresponds to the Neoplatonic

rhythm of emanatio-raptio-remeatio and to the pastoral

 

eclogue rhythm of sadness-despair-joy. The pastoral woods
is still a place where the troubled and distraught souls
are healed. Oliver and Sir Frederick undergo drastic
conversions here, and Orlando experiences divine beauty.

In the previous plays the revelation of divine beauty
was accomplished by means of a death and rebirth. In this
play Shakespeare tries to make the revelation more probable
by having the disguised Rosalind leave the stage and

reappear in a few minutes in her own beauty (V, iv). Her

212

exit and entrance are intended to suggest the death and
rebirth. But the revelation of divine beauty is an epiphany,
an intrusion of the supernatural into the natural, and some
theatrical device is necessary to make this fact evident to
the audience. Usually the death and rebirth suffices to
indicate the epiphany; the exit and entrance, however, is
too natural to suggest the supernatural. Accordingly
Shakespeare adds dramatic techniques to impress the char-
acters and the audience with this appearence of divine
beauty. Hymen "from heaven brought her" (V, iv, 118) and
presents her to her father, the banished Duke; her appear-
ance sets in motion the series of promises which she had
carefully requested before she left the stage. She unites
the lovers and establishes concord in the world. Her union
with Orlando symbolizes the union of the celestial Venus
with the soul aspiring to divine beauty. Orlando's natural
goodness and faithful love have survived the tests (the
wrestler, the privations of the woods) and the temptation
to revenge (allowing the snake to kill his brother).
Rosalind purged the Petrarchan follies from his soul, so

he is ready to become the complete and perfect man, which
his union with divine beauty in part symbolizes. He is

now ready to enter into society.47

 

47Vyvyan in his chapter on As You Like It develops
this interpretation at great length (pp. 92-130). For his
discussion of the meaning of Oliver's near-death see p. 116.

 

213

Shakespeare, in trying to make the play realistic and
at the same time keep its anagogical meaning, has abandoned
decorum and created a mixture that cannot even be called a
concordia discors. His pastoral world becomes a mixture of
all the pastorals familiar to the Renaissance. He mentions
the Golden Age of contentment and contrasts its virtues
with the vices of the court, and trying to be realistic,
he reverses the complaints, balancing one kind of satire
against another. Rustic England appears occasionally to
remind everyone that there are uncouth farmers, smelly
animals, and bellies that need filling. It becomes
Sannazaro's Arcadia when Orlando nails his verses on the
tree and Silvius tries to woo Phebe, the shepherdess who
scorns him for the disguised Rosalind. To add to the con-
fusion, he also wants the woods to symbolize the inner life
of the soul. The presence of other modes of pastoral,
however, prevents this symbolism from being as successful
as it was in his earlier plays. He has also learned from
this play that the presentation of divine beauty must be
accompanied with a death and revival to make an impact upon
the audience. Furthermore, he discovers that the pastoral
is not really necessary, although it can always be used to
suggest the inner life of the mind and to make the audience
aware of the anagogical nature of the action.

Samuel Daniel (1563-1619) completely ignores the

anagogical purpose of the motif of death and reVival in his

214

two pastoral tragicomedies,The Queenes Arcadia.(l606) and

Hymen's Triumph (1615). In these two plays the motif

 

assumes a truly didactic role, which is not found in any
other pastoral tragicomedy. The mystery and ambiguity
surrounding the epiphany that the motif symbolizes in Tasso
and Shakespeare have disappeared. Daniel has little use
for metaphysics, he is solely concerned with public and
private ethics. He feels that if his older humanistic
wisdom, based on the use of reason, is to be listened to,
it must be presented in fashionable clothes. Since the
pastoral tragicomedy is increasingly popular at court, he
dresses his moral concerns in shepherd's weeds and places
them in Arcadia. There is not the slightest trace of an
awareness that he might have misunderstood an art form;
Tasso, Lyly, and Shakespeare did not exist for him. Daniel
by-passes them completely and joins Edwards and Sidney,

two other writers who use the motif of death and revival
for didactic purposes.

All three writers use the motif to reveal public
truths about the nature of the state. We have discussed
above how Edwards uses it to cause a change of policy in
the tyrant, Dionysius, thus making a case for the use of
friendship and love in the running of a state. In Sidney's
Arcadia (1580) Basilius, the king thought to be dead,
awakens from his bier to resolve the conflict between

sacred justice, represented by Euarchus, and equity and

215

mercy, represented by Musidorous and Pyrocles, who are about
to be killed for ravishing two princesses. The king sus-
pends the law, allowing the two young men to marry the
princesses. The king's rebirth signals a triumph of equity
over law and the accommodation of justice to the weakness

48

of human flesh. Daniel, in The Queenes Arcadia, continues

 

the humanists' lessons on the nature of public virtue.
Miss Rees generalizes the theme for us:
The Queenes Arcadia has, then, a serious theme, the
contrast between the demoralising effects of sophis-
tication and the wholesome goodness of simpler, less
pretentious ways.49
The swirling turbulence of contemporary life distresses
Daniel, and he believes the ideals of a former age will
restore the semblance of order. His serious concern with
the moral ideals of a previous age injects a moral earnest-
ness into the pastoral tragicomedy that is completely
foreign to its nature. The self-conscious mockery of its
own attitudes completely disappears, and humor and folly
give way to a sober moral exemplum. The vices of con-
temporary society destroy true love and bring Amyntas close

to death, so the motif of death and revival exemplifies a

moral instead of figuring a mystery.

 

48Rose, pp. 71-2.

49Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel (Liverpool University Press,
1964) I p0 1140

 

216

Daniel's conception of Arcadia is in accord with his
didacticism. As the curtain rises, Arcadia has already
degenerated, and what it was is in many ways more important
than its present condition. He envisions Arcadia as the
land of innocence, ease, and simplicity. Ergastus, in the.
opening speech defines its essential qualities:

The gentle region of plaine honesty,

The modest seat of undisguised truth,

Inhabited with simple innocence:

(I, i, 6-8)

Much later in the poem Daniel has one of the villains,
Lincus, compare Arcadia to the Golden Age:

This peace of theirs is not like others peace;

Where craft laies traps t'inrich himself with wiles,

And men make prey of men, and rise by spoiles.

This rather seems a quiet then a peace:

For this poore corner of Arcadia here,

This little angle of the world you see,

Which hath shut out of doore, all th'earth beside,

And is bard up with mountaines, and with rocks;

Have had no intertrading with the rest

Of men, nor yet will have, but here alone,

Quite out of fortunes way, and underneath

Ambition, or desire, that weighes them not,

They live as if still in the golden age,

When as the world was in his pupillage.

(III, i, 1019—32)

Arcadia also possessed otium, the contentment which is the
opposite of ambitious striving. Daniel has conceived of
otium as one of those ideals that the poet feigns in order
to communicate a higher moral truth to his audience. But
the Arcadia of the play is in very grave danger. Forces
are trying to extripate the virtues of the land and replace

them with modern sophisticated vices commonly found in

more barbarous countries. Arcadia must be saved, and it

217

is an indication of how insensitive Daniel is to the motif
of death and revival that he does not use it to restore
Arcadia; rather he has two wise and honored shepherds save
the country from modernity.

These two shepherds interpose themselves between the
audience and the play, becoming a frame that constantly
reminds them of the purpose of the action. They keep the
audience at a distance, so that they don't get emotionally
involved and lose the perspective necessary to make moral
judgments upon the action. Also like the good teachers
that they are, they point out to the audience the moral
value of each act as soon as it ends. Finally they enter
into the stage action at the most desperate moment and
reveal the causes of all the suffering in Arcadia to its
inhabitants. When the evil characters are expelled, all
the lovers are united and the land once again lives up to
its reputation.

Five characters represent these sophisticated vices,
but only one of them has any direct contact with the plot.
Techne introduces the nymphs of Arcadia to the joys of
fine clothes cut in the latest fashion. Alcon, in order
to sell his medicines, convinces the Arcadians that they
are sick, thus putting them at odds with nature. He also
has the dubious distinction of introducing tobacco into
Arcadia. Lincus, a small time lawyer, manages to get the

Arcadians to seek titles and property so that they will

218

bring litigation against one another. Pistophanax tries to
subvert the traditional worship of Pan. The two ancient
Arcadians expose these four and expel them from the state.

The most important of these disturbers of the peace
is Colax, a rustic Don Juan. His flattery and his lies
bring a great deal of suffering to the shepherdesses and
swains of Arcadia. His polished courtier's mein disguises
his nature from all the nymphs except Cloris, who can
immediately see through his lies to the truth beneath.
Poor Daphne is not so fortunate; he seduces her and then
abandons her for more difficult game.

Silvia and Palaemon, a pair of true lovers, are
taught by him to distrust each other. Their love story
prior to Colax's interference foreshadows the major event
in the plot. Although Silvia loved Palaemon, she will not
acknowledge any of his sincere avowals of love. Finally
in the deepest melancholy, he climbs a hill and walks over
to the edge. Before he can kill himself, Silvia saves
him. She leads him back down to the plain, and they sit
under a tree where their tears reveal their mutual love
(II, 1, 408-480). Daniel transforms the symbols of the
Neoplatonic mystery into a sweetly sentimental tale that
ornaments his verse and causes tears to flow from the eyes
of the audience. Emotional release rather than enlighten-
ment that fuses the emotions and the intellect is the aim

of this use of the motif. Soon after these lovers are

219

united, Colax manages to separate them. He tells each that
the other has been seeing another secretly, and they believe
him. It takes the two wise old shepherds to force the truth
out of Colax and unite the lovers again.

By far the greatest mischief that he stirs up is
between Amyntas and Cloris. Amyntas, completely possessed
by love, tries desperately to get some sign from his
beloved, Cloris. Her many rebuffs produce a deep melan-
choly that borders on despair. But Amyntas' love produces
neither poetry nor ecstacy; it only points to a moral.
Colax wants to ravish Cloris just for the thrill of ruining
a virgin and enlists Techne's help. Techne persuades
Cloris to meet her in a cave to try on some new clothes.
When Cloris arrives at the cave, she finds Colax waiting
for her. Immediately discerning his intentions, she runs
out of the cave with Colax close behind her. Amyntas, by
chance observing their exit, thinks that she has been
meeting him inside. This notion pushes his melancholy to
the brink of despair, and he resolves to kill himself.

His friends find him senseless at the base of a cliff,
surrounded by the symbols of his profession. His dog,
his sheep hook, his pipe, and his farewell elegy carved
on the near by beech tree remind us that a shepherd—poet-
1over is dying here. The poison he has taken is having
its intended effect, and his friends can't arouse him.

Only Cloris' ministrations awaken him from death. Daniel

220

does not realize that the love of Cloris' pure heart is
enough to revive the dying lover, and so he has Uranias,

a woman of the woods familiar with herbs, aid in his cure.
The purpose of Amyntas' death and revival is to show the
"horrible effects/of Colax, and of Technes practices

(11. 2307-8)." After Colax and Techne and the others have
been banished and all the lovers reunited, the old shepherd
Melibaeus draws the obvious moral:

Be as we finde our selves, not as we are,

As if we had no other touch of truth

And reason, then the nations of the times,

And place wherein we live; and being our selves

Corrupted, and abastardized thus,

Thinke all lookes ill, that doth not look like us

And therefore let us recollect our selves

Dispersed into these strange confused ills,

And be againe Arcadians, as we were

In manners, and inihabits as we were . . . .
(V, iv, 2570-80)

 

The Neoplatonists regarded the motif as a symbol of the
most sacred union of the soul with the divine; Daniel only
looks at it as another example of the corruptions of society.

In Hymen's Triumph the motif illustrates the horrible

 

effects of personal rather than public corruptions. The
prologue introduces the forces opposed to one another in
the play. Hymen wants to make "Arcadia a world of glory
(1.9)" by telling the world the story of its two most
constant lovers, Thirsis and Silvia. Avarice, Jealousy
and Envy promise to spoil Hymen's fun, and as the play

progresses, they almost succeed.

221

Thirsis is constant to Silvia even though he thinks
that she has been dead the past two years. Really, however,
she fled to avoid the marriage that her father was forcing
upon her and was captured by pirates. Recently she has
returned disguised as a page and awaits the marriage of
her betrothed to another nymph. Her father, in the course
of the play, confesses his reason for forcing her to marry
Alexis:

But ah my greedy eye, viewing the large

And spacious sheep-walkes joyning unto mine,

Whereof Alexis was possest, made me,

As worldings doe, desire to marry grounde,

And not affections, which have other bounds.

(III, ii, 1109-13)

So much for Avarice. The other two, Envy and Jealousy,
bring Silvia much closer to death.

Phillis, a nymph loved by Montanus the rude forester,
has fallen in love with the disguised Silvia. One day
Montanus believes that he sees Phillis confessing her love
to the young page. The sight of the two together enrages
him, and he accuses Phillis of inconstancy. She denies
his accusation. Believing the denial, he asks her to
forgive his boorish behavior. As a sign of his good faith,
he promises to do what she asks of him. Phillis wishes to
get revenge upon the young page for refusing her offer of
love, so she tells Montanus to frighten the page enough to
stop him from spreading false rumors about her. When he

sees the young man again, his rage gets the better of him

and he stabs the disguised Silvia. Her wound leads to

222

the immediate discovery of her identity and to the eventual
reunion of the two lovers. Yet Envy and Jealousy almost
win, and the audience have been taught a good lesson in
how dangerous these passions may be.

The motif does not have any real connection with the
eventual reunion of the lovers, and all the marriage
indicates is that the forces of strife were defeated. This
becomes more evident from an inspection of the rebirth and
the discovery of Silvia. Thirsis' true and constant love
has absolutely no power to save her. He quickly calls for
Lamia to bring her herbs and restore her to life (IV, iv).
True love no longer has any of the divine about it; it is
completely human. Before Silvia was wounded she had been
trying to think of some way to tell Thirsis that it was
she disguised as a page. After a few subtle hints fail,
she tells him a tale which parallels her adventures. He
sees the parallel but still fails to make the identification.
After all this preparation, he still faints when he dis-
covers who is wounded. If the maiden is to symbolize divine
beauty, her revelation must be sudden and theatrical as in

As You Like It. Here it has been the subject of so much

 

conversation that, when it does happen, it hardly makes
much difference.

John Fletcher's (1579-1625) well known The Faithful

 

Shepherdess (1608) also takes itself more seriously than

 

any of Lyly's or of Shakespeare's plays. The serious moral

223

points, however, come wrapped in a much more delightful
and entertaining package than does Daniel's ethics. The
critics repeatedly stress the Italian influence on this
play.50 The songs, the dances, the pastoral creatures and
the variety of verse forms indicate that Fletcher was

equally aware of the native examples of the pastoral. .A

Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faithful Shepherdess share

 

a three part movement, but in the latter the movement is
much less sharply defined, possibly because it has no
symbolic significance. Fletcher's shepherds travel from
the pastoral fields, to the dark and mysterious woods,
and back to the safety and society of the sheepcotes. He
does not use this movement to contrast the ways of the
country with those of the court or the ways of the past
with those of the future as Daniel and so many other
humanists do. Instead, he invents a new theme for the
pastoral tragicomedy.

Fletcher adapts the image of the liege-lady awakening
her courtly lover to the theme of chastity--with devastating
results for the significance of the motif. Chastity had
been one of the three members of the Neoplatonic triad that

revealed the rhythm of love in the world and which hinted

 

50See Herrick, pp. 161-2 and Greg, pp. 266-7 for
discussions of Guarini's influence on the play. See V. M.
Jeffery, "Italian Influence in Fletcher's Faithful
Shepherdess" Modern Language Review, XXI (1926 , pp. 147-58
for a discussion of lesser known Italian works as possible
influence.

 

 

224

at the mystery of creation with its harmony of opposites.
Fletcher secularizes this quality by turning it into a
moral concept opposed to lust and sin. True love descends
from the celestial into the natural world and becomes
subject to the moral precepts and strictures of society.
Love no longer transcends the world of reason; Fletcher
believes it is a vital part of our normal life. After
curing all the lovers, Clorin gives them a great deal of
free advice, which illustrates perfectly the practical
moralistic nature of chastity:

Young shepherdess now ye are brought again

To virgin state, be so, and so remain

To thy last day, unless the faithful love

Of some good shepherd force thee to remove;

Then labour to be true to him, and live

As such a one, that ever strives to give

A blessed memory to after time.

Be famous for your good, not for your crime.
(V, i)

51

He rarely mentions love at all in this play, whose
genre is devoted to the exploration of the subject. When
we do glimpse fragments of his thoughts they turn out to
be the traditionally popular humanist beliefs. Noticeably
absent is any mention of love as a divine madness beyond
reason which has the power to make fools of us. For
example, Clorin is picking and describing the virtues of

the herbs and flowers:

 

SlAll quotes of Fletcher's come from: The Works of

Francis Beaumont and John Fletgher, ed. A. Glover & A. R.
Waller, 10 Vols., ("Cambridge English Cassics" Cambridge
University Press, 1906). They do not include line numbers.

 

225

Therefore foul Standergrass,from me and mine

I banish thee, with lustful turpentine,

You that intice the veins and stir the heat

To civil mutiny, scaling the seat

Our reason moves in, and deluding it

With dreams and wanton fancies, till the fit

Of burning lust be quenched; by appetite,

Robbing the soul of blessedness and light:

(II, 1)
Love, Fletcher believes, which is the opposite of lust,
must be the union of two souls and not the satisfaction of
the sexual appetite. Love proceeds according to reason,
while lust must be controlled because, if it breaks its
bonds, it will disturb the harmony of the soul and cause
widespread harm and suffering. This diluted Neoplatonism52
struck a sympathetic chord in the Protestants, who believed
in the sanctity of marriage which was supported by love.
The purity of the bride and groom must certainly be demanded
by those seeking to purify the established Christian
churches. Chastity and its companion, constancy, become
the moral qualities most desired in woman. This is
especially true in the court and the town, where the two
are in very short supply.
Fletcher's realistic bent, which whittled the already

splintered Neoplatonism to fit the Protestant morality,

also alters the pastoral world. No longer is it a symbolic

landscape suggesting the inner life. Now it is just a

 

52The ethics of Ficio's Neoplatonism is entirely
different. It had to do with choosing the contemplative
life and all that that entailed. Fletcher's position is
in many ways very different from Ficino's position.

226

beautiful and natural woods partly derived from the English
countryside and partly from classical Roman literature.
With the obvious exception of Sannazaro, the pastoral land-
scapes from Theocritus to Spenser, Tasso, and Shakespeare
had always been abstract, simple and peaceful. The woods
established a mood or symbolized a mystery. Fletcher breaks
with this tradition, joining the ranks of those following
Guarini and Sannazaro. He copies the ornamental variety
found in Sannazaro's works by including among the char-
acters, worshipers and priests of Pan, an old river god,
and a friendly and gentle satyr. Other gods and their
adventures, derived from Ovid, are alluded to throughout
the play. In addition to these literary references,
Fletcher includes many of the pastoral conventions found
in the traditional pastoral literature in the rhetoric of
the play, often elaborating them far beyond their accustomed
length. For example, when Perigot, the young lover, tries
to convince Amoret that he loves her, he uses the metaphor
of the flocks, the lamb, and the wolves commonly used in
the pastoral eclogue, but this is what happens to it:

By Pan I swear, and if I falsely swear,

Let him not guard my flocks, let Foxes tear

My earliest lambs, and wolves whilst I do sleep

Fall on the rest, a Rot among my sheep.

I love thee better than the careful Ewe

The new-yean'd lamb that is of her own hew;

I dote upon thee more than that young lamb

Doth on the bag that feeds him from his Dam.
(III, i)

227

He continues on for several more lines in the same manner.
Throughout the play other characters frequently expand and
ornament their thoughts in a similar manner with images,
metaphors, and similes constructed from rural life.

His lists of flowers, animals, and reptiles commonly
found in an English garden or meadow are his own additions
to the imagery of the woods. The gentle satyr, representing
this natural aspect of the woods, weaves these realistic
details through all of his speeches:

Here be grapes whose lusty bloud

Is the learned Poets good,

Sweeter yet did never crown

The head of Bacchus, Nuts more brown

Than the squirrels teeth that crack them;
(I, i)

. . . nor creeps

That hardy worm with pointed tail,
In some hollow tree or bed

Of seeded Nettles: not a hare
Can be started from his fare,

(IV, 1)

Shall I dive into the sea,

And bring thee coral, making way
Through the rising waves that fall
In snowie fleeces; dearest, shall

I catch the wanton fawns, or flyes,
Whose woven wings the summer dyes
Of many colours? . . .

(IV, i)
The lists of nature's creatures beautify and adorn the
imagery of the play, but they do not contribute to any
symbolic meaning. They make the woods seem more natural

and more real than any found in classical or Renaissance

literature. Fletcher's sensuous and beautiful pastoral

228

background has only one purpose: its variety and music
display the author's artistic skill.
In the story Fletcher uses the same basic image of

death and rebirth found in Tristan, Vita Nuova, and Aminta.

 

 

Only he separates the image into several distinct parts in
order to illustrate his theme. Naturally this emasculates
any anagogical powers that the image possesses. Clorin
has some of the properties of the liege-lady who in the
Neoplatonic theory leads the awakened soul to union with
divine beauty. Like the elder Isolde and the Virgin Mary
she knows the virtues of the herbs of the forest and only
chooses those which will benefit man. She also immediately
tames and controls the natural forces of the woods; The
representative of these forces, the Satyr, falls in love
with her at first sight and describes her as a goddess:

But behold a fairer sight!

By that heavenly form of thine,

Brightest fair thou art divine,

Spring from great immortal race

Of the gods, for in thy face

Shines more awful Majesty,

Than dull weak mortalitie

Dare with misty eyes behold,

And live:

(I, i)

Because she is a goddess, she reconciles opposites, and
when she first appears, she is honoring her true love who
died some time before. She remains in love and a virgin;

both Diana and Venus blend into one form. Fletcher,

however, is not interested in the possibilities of the

229

concordia discors. He has only reversed the traditional

 

relationship to illustrate her perfect chastity and her
unwavering constancy. Strangely enough, even though she
is a goddess, she has very limited powers. Her medicines
only work if the soul is already pure. She cannot heal
wounds infected with lust:
With spotless hand, on spotless brest
I put these herbs to give thee rest:
Which till it heal thee, will abide,
If both be pure, if not, off slide.
See it falls off from the wounds,
Shepherdess thou art not sound,
Full of lust.
(V, i)
And so may Pan bless this my cure,
As all my thoughts are just and pure;
Some uncleanness nigh doth lurk,
That will not let my Medicines work.
Satyr search if thou canst find it.
(v, i)

Her treatment of Thenot is equally curious. He has
fallen in love with her because of her constancy to her
dead lover. After he decides to live near her bower and
worship from afar, she resolves to cure him of his disease.
Instead of leading him towards divine beauty, she turns
him back to the world of sensual love. Her offer to make
love to him disillusions him so much that he will now fall

in love, knowing that all women are inconstant. The same

witty cynicism that produced Donne's Songs and Sonnets

 

produced this episode. Clorin also lacks the power to
bring peace and harmony into the world. She cures the

wounds of the lovers caused by lust, and she corrects

230

Perigot's mistaken notion of Amoret, but she does not
preside over the marriage of any of the lovers. After
passing through the confusions of the night, the lovers
do not get married; they only return to their sheep cotes.
Clorin does not share Titania's power because Fletcher
does not understand the mystery behind the image.

The same witty cynicism that delights in talking
about sensual love in terms of divine love destroys the
anagogical and the didactic significance of the motif of
death and revival; the motif comes to exist as a witty
addition to the other holy and miraculous elements in the
play and does not refer to any thing beyond itself. The
first instance is completely theatrical. After Perigot
wounds Amoret, the sullen shepherd, who is the personifica-
tion of lust, throws her into the well. Immediately the
god of the river appears with her in his arms and restores
her to life. Her virginity and her purity have impressed
the god so much that he wanted to save her life. He asks
her to live with him, but she refuses, saying that she
already has a lover. The wounding was probably suggested
by Guarini's minor plot, but the well was pure Fletcher.
He took advantage of the trap door in the Elizabethan stage
to make a delightful miracle happen before the audience.
In all previous instances of the motif, the death and
revival significantly changed the lives of the characters.

This is the first instance where nothing of any consequence

231

follows the rebirth. It only surprises and two villains,
Amarillis and the sullen shepherd, to see her alive, and
Perigot wounds her again. The river god did little more
than entertain the audience.

The other near deaths and rebirths are not nearly so
dramatic and are intended to show the necessity of the
purity of intention. The sullen shepherd wounds Alexis
as he and Cloe are about to satisfy their lust. Perigot
wounds Amoret again, but this time the blood won't wash
off his hands. All of them finally arrive at Clorin's
bower where their lustful thoughts are purified and their
wounds are healed.

If the theme weren't so trite and if it were presented
with integrity, it would be easy to say that the motif had
a didactic purpose in this play. In fact, however, the
motif is there solely for the pleasure of the audience. To
use Guarini's terms, it is there to purge the melancholy

from the audience. It shares with 11 Pastor Fido all of

 

the aesthetic qualities of the Italian culture which pro-
duced the style called Mannerism. The variety in the
pastoral style is complemented by the variety in the motif.
Unfortunately Fletcher does not subordinate his variety to
a unity of purpose as well as Guarini. Also Fletcher does
not use the harmony of opposites for stylistic purposes as

well as Guarini. The oxymoron, either visual or rhetorical,

232

does not appear in the play, which is another indication
that the meaning of this device was lost on Fletcher.
Although all of this variety calls attention to
Fletcher's artistic skill, and a great deal of our pleasure
in this play derives from appreciating this skillful and
ingenious use of the pastoral and the motif of death and
revival, yet the didactic and anagogical purposes found in
Lyly, Daniel, and Shakespeare disappear from the motif in

this play. In The Faithful Shepherdess the motif appears

 

as an ingenious piece of theater that does not need to
refer to anything beyond itself. In both Italy and
England, the humanists and the Neoplatonists have been
superseded by the self-conscious artist who has no nobler
ends in view than the display of his own talent and the

pleasure of the audience.

CHAPTER V

THE USE OF THE MOTIF IN SHAKESPEARE'S

ROMANCES

In 1608, the same year that The Faithful Shepherdess

 

was being performed, Shakespeare appears to have written

Pericles, the first of the romances which compose the

 

subject of this chapter. In the following year it is

thought that he wrote Cymbeline, then in 1610, The Winter's

 

 

Tale, and finally The Tempest in 1611. The world depicted

 

in these four plays differs so noticeably from the dark
vision of murder, frustrated ambition, and intense suffering
found in his mature tragedies that one generation of critics
felt that a deep psychic experience, perhaps even a trauma
or a religious conversion, could only account for the
disparity. Whether some kind of ecstatic personal experi-
ence accounts for the change or not, we will never know for
certain, but the fact remains that he stopped portraying

the destruction of fragmented and tortured souls and began
to present the complete man, who, through his own severe
suffering, has become spiritually whole and is now capable
of confidently guiding his own life and the lives of his
subjects. In these later dramas of completeness the motif

of death and revival has a central role.

233

234

The new visions of the ideal man and king presented
in these four plays rely heavily upon the conventions of
the older traditions of the drama. As R. G. Hunter in his

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness notes, one of the

 

oldest of these traditions is the romance of the wandering

knight.l Pericles features the same kind of hero who is

 

tested by fortune and then finally rewarded for his efforts
and sufferings. In fact, since this same pattern appears
in the other three plays in the persons of Posthumus,
Leontes, and Alonso, we can say that it is part of the
essential structure of the last plays.

Another tradition resurrected in these romances comes
from the didactic tragicomedies of the early humanists,

such as Damon and Pythias, Promos and Cassandra, and Altile.

 

In these earlier plays a king's mercy and forgiveness
dissolve all the conflicts in the plot, and in Shakespeare's
romances the power of forgiveness reconciles a distraught
king with the estranged members of his family. In each of
the plays, the king's forgiveness is caused by his increased
self-knowledge and his deeper understanding of the nature

of the world. A death and rebirth induces this increased
insight, and, in turn, the "rebirth" heralds the universal
harmony that now reigns. Like the sixteenth century plays

cited above, these last works can also be considered

 

lHunter, p. 133.

235

didactic but only in the sense that the old humanist
virtues of wisdon, loyalty, temperance, and justice are
once again brought before the audience. All four plays
go far beyond the simple promulgation of ideal virtues;
they inquire into the basis of virtue itself and present
their findings in dramas that culminate in enlightenment,
peace, and inner harmony.

The romances also bear certain resemblances to
Shakespeare's own earlier romantic comedies, and in par-
ticular to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Songs, dances, and
music were always part of Shakespeare's comedy, but now
these effects, together with the conventions of the masque
which call for the introduction of divine forces, enter
into the very structure of the play, so that these now
contribute to the anagogic function of the action. They
still are entertaining, but they have the more important
purpose of helping to arouse the audience to apprehend the
truths beyond the world of the play. Furthermore each
play has a pair of lovers, who, like Hermia and Lysander,
Silvia and Valentine, or Rosalind and Orlando, speak to
each other within the traditions of courtly love. With the

exception of Lysimachus and Marina in Pericles, the lovers

 

are severely tested, and in all four, the young lovers hold
the key to the restoration of harmony in the kingdom. The

pastoral landscape appears in the three plays after Pericles,

 

and, with the exception of The Winter's Tale, has the same

 

236

symbolic meaning that it had in the earlier works. The
lovers still follow the same pattern that was established

in Two Gentlemen; one is forced into the woods where he

 

meets the other, and both then return to society to
effectuate the reconciliation with the king. Only in $22.
‘Tempest is the pastoral landscape the actual place of union
and reconciliation with the figures of the court; in the
others the lovers return to the court to heal the distraught
souls of those leading the active life. Again only in THE.
Tempest does the pastoral landscape symbolize the ideal of
completely satisfied desires. Bottom and Titania would
definitely be out of place in the more realistic woods

found in Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. In fact, in the

 

 

latter play Autolycus and the other rustics, participating
in the sheep shearing festival, have more in common with
rural England than they do with Shakespeare's earlier
romantic comedies.

The motif of death and revival appears at least once

in each play, but its meaning has changed since Love's Labour's

 

Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. As we shall reveal in

 

greater detail below, the motif now points to the nature
of the created world; it no longer points to the central
mystery of Neoplatonism. Behind all of the events in these
plays is the belief that nature is both a creator and a
destroyer, a source Of both life and death, and hence both

good and evil. Furthermore the same polarity is found in

237

the diverse creatures who find the source of their being in
nature. If man wishes to acquire perfection, he must him-
self experience the contradictory aspects of his nature.
Once he manages to reconcile the opposites struggling within
his breast, he will become part of the rhythms of nature,
and his soul will have transcended the conflicts of these
forces. In the new world into which his transcendence has
delivered him, he will be master of his passions and of
his destiny. This is the ultimate vision of the world
which the king in each play only gradually comprehends
after the most desperate battles with his own emotions.
Shakespeare also uses the motif to impress these
truths upon the characters in the plays. Our playwright
returns all the way to Boccaccio and Dante for his examples
of the loved one returning from the dead to lead the
confused and lonely sufferer to happiness and fulfillment.
Marina, in Pericles, functions as Olympia did in Boccaccio's
Olympia, bringing her father back to life with a vision of
truth. The other plays make additional modifications to

this image until in The Tempest it is completely reversed.

 

Enlightenment, reconciliation and finally a purifying
divine harmony, which humans call peace, characterize the
new world into which the suffering and struggling humans
are born. This beautiful vision of the unity of man,
nature, and cosmos towards which the paradox of death and

revival points goes far beyond the conventional Christian

238

dualism and really amounts to a more profound re-evaluation
of Shakespeare's youthful Neoplatonic enthusiasms. Since
Pericles introduces these new themes, we will now examine
closely the role of death and revival in this play.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre recounts the young prince's

 

quest for perfection. As the play begins, he thinks that
he has discovered such perfection in the daughter of
.Antiochus. Antiochus, hawking his daughter as if she were
a piece of silk, says:

The senate-house of planets all did sit,

To knit in her their best perfections.

(I, 1, 10-11)

And Pericles himself tells how he longs:

To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree

Or die in the adventure . . . .

(I, ii, 21-2)

But as he discovers when he solves the riddle, his fount of
perfection has been committing incest with her father for a
number of years. Her beautiful face hides a corrupted soul,
which he immediately shies away from. Pericles has made
two errors here which can be attributed to his callow youth.
He has thought that perfection is to be found in the flesh;'
it will take years of hard suffering to make him realize
that true perfection is of a pure, immaterial nature.
Secondly, he has refused the test of combat. When he
solved the riddle and discovered the evil in the world,

he should have made a heroic effort to expunge it from the

earth. No knight runs from the challenge of the dragon;

239

yet the youthful Pericles refuses to fight Antiochus.

Most critics are at a loss to explain the sin which causes
so much suffering.2 Actually his flight is his sin; he
has been frightened by the evil Antiochus into fleeing for
his life which amounts to cowardice and a loss of honor,
one of Pericles' most treasured possessions. Only the
knowledge of true perfection will transform him from one
who is buffeted by the treacherous blasts of Fortune into
a self-confident and knowledgeable person who acts upon
the world.

The motif of death and revival plays a dual role in
the revelation of true perfection; it is both the symbol
of divine perfection and the means which awakens the
moribund soul to knowledge of the nature of the world.
Since spiritual perfection consists in the conjunction of
opposites, the motif in the guise of the oxymoron is the
perfect symbol to use to hint at this transcendent reality.
Only a few times, however, does it appear in the rhetoric
of the play; more frequently it occurs in the imagery and
in the parallel and contrasting events of the story.

The sea, as the symbol of the substance that contains

all the pairs of opposites, dominates the imagery and the

 

2Howard Felperin, "Shakespeare's Miracle Play"
Shakespeare Quarterly, XVIII, Autumn, 1967, pp. 363-374:
"Cataracts of ink have been spilled in the effort to find
in Pericles' experience up to this point at least one
specific sin which will explain his self-imposed penance.
Needless to say, there is none, and that is the very
point" (p. 369).

 

240

action of the play. It comes close to resembling the
traditional pastoral landscape, but it encompasses much
more because this sea both heals and destroys. The closest
approximation appears in the pastoral landscape of g.
Midsummer Night's Dream, where the lovers are both sundered
and united within the same woods by the same local spirits.
Derek Traversi has observed the sea performing in the same
way in Pericles and has vaguely connected it with the higher
wisdom of the theme:

This deliberately poetical recalling of the body's

consignment to the sea, destroyer and preserver,

aims at giving the idea of death a transforming quality

of remoteness, at making it, in the words of Ariel in

The Tempest, 'suffer a sea-change' to which the sup-

porting indication of expanding moral understanding
will give the necessary substance.

 

The sea does in fact nourish and destroy the same life, and
Shakespeare relies upon this fact when he uses it to sym-
bolize the basic substance underlying the diverse phenomena
of nature.

After Pericles has saved the starving people of
Tharsus with his shipload of grain, he encounters both
aspects of the sea. A terrible storm splinters his ship
and drowns his entire crew. Only he remains alive and
then not by any of his own doing but by being thrown naked
upon a strange shore. The sea shows her beneficent aspect

again a few moments later when she washes his father's

 

3Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (Stanford
University Press, 1955, reprinted 1965), p. 28.

 

241

rusty armor ashore. Pericles is cognizant of her double
nature, but its full significance hasn't registered in his
mind yet:

It [the armor] kept where I kept, I so dearly loved it;

Till the rough seas, that spares not any man,

Took it in rage, though, calmed, have given't again;

I thank thee for't.

(II, ix, 136-9)

The armor is not the only precious treasure of his
that the sea washes ashore. The next time that he returns
to the sea, his wife dies while giving birth to their
daughter during a severe storm. The sea storm destroys
his love, but it also preserves her, for, after Pericles
buries her at sea, it carries the body to land where the
skilled magician Cerimon can revive her. Pericles however,
won't discover this for many years; all he knows is that
the sea in its raging fury has taken away his wife. His
daughter, who was born at sea in the storm, further
illustrates the beneficent nature of the same substance
that produced such deep sorrow in Pericles. In the last
analysis the sea causes both his sorrow and his joy, and
the appearance of these opposites together suggests the.
perfection of divine reality.

Other images and actions scattered throughout the
play also suggest the coincidence of opposites. Those
images, which portray an outer surface contrasting with a

hidden inner substance, can be construed as blending the

opposites together into a whole. Antiochus' daughter has

242

a beautiful and seductive appearance and a corrupt and evil
soul. Marina just reverses this image in the brothel. The
place and its denizens have an evil appearance, while
Marina retains her pure and chaste inner nature. When
Pericles courts Thaisa, he appears in rusty armor which
belies the beautiful and manly prince within. On his shield
is painted a "withered branch that's only green at top"
(II, ii, 43), suggesting again the conjunction of death and
life. When he approaches Tharsus with the grain that will
save them, the king and queen, Cleon and Dionyza, think
that he is an enemy come to destroy them, and later Pericles
thinks that they can be trusted to raise his daughter for
him. Finally Pericles himself combines sorrow and joy,
life and death, and love and hate within his soul; moreover
only when he does is he ready to assume the throne of
Pentapolis.

Pericles' quest for moral perfection, the suffering
that it entails, and its final triumphant realization unify
the diverse elements in the play. His adventures share the
motif of death and revival with many of the heroes of the
courtly love tradition. But in none of these earlier
appearances, not even in Dante or Tasso, does the rhythm
of the motif play such a distinctive role in the structure
of the play. This pattern is the keel of the ship to which
the other incidents are attached as supporting ribs. His

death and rebirth symbolize an initiation into the knowledge

of the truths of the celestial sphere, and this new knowledge

243

of divine truths equips him to rule in place of his father-
in-law at Pentapolis.4 As mentioned above, Pericles
refuses the challenge to fight evil. This refusal of the
king to extirpate a gross violation of law causes his later
suffering. After saving Cleon and Dionyza with his
charitable gift of grain--which, by the way, is completely
negated because he has to kill them 1ater--he marries
Thaisa. Like many a king before him, he did not earn the
right to marry his queen. Her father, who admired Pericles,
forced the marriage upon them (II, iii). The two lovers
wanted to wait a year, but Thaisa's father insisted that
they wed immediately. Whatever is so easily acquired is
just as easily lost, and it should be no great surprise
when Pericles soon loses the symbol of all the perfections
that he has sought. Thaisa's death begins the long process
of isolation and withdrawal that only ends with his rebirth.

He separates himself from his wife by throwing her body

 

4The pentangle, or five pointed star, has always been
a symbol of perfection in the near east. Brian Stone, who
discusses its significance in Appendix Six of his transla-
tion of Gawain and the Green Knight says: "The Pythagoreans
used it, probably because five is the perfect number, being
the marriage of the first masculine number, three, with the
first feminine number, two (unity not being a true number).
In one of the Gnostic systems it was the passport to the
Kingdom of light: the Virgin Sophia would admit to her
realm only bearers of the seal of the Pentangle." In this
context, then, the word, Pentapolis, acquires the con-
notation, perfect city, and when Pericles decides to rule
there rather than in his native Tyre, he displays his own
perfection. Thaisa is also a symbol of this perfection.

 

244

into the sea and from his daughter by giving her to Cleon
and Dionyza to rear. When he returns to Cleon and Dionyza
for Marina and learns of her death, his estrangement is
complete. He has no longer anything of value in the world;
despair and darkness have choked out the joy and brightness
of his life.

Shakespeare dramatically symbolizes Pericles' com-
plete alienation from the world at the beginning of the
fifth act. As the curtain rises, the audience discovers
Pericles lying on a couch behind a curtain. For more than
three months he has refused to eat and drink anything that
was not necessary to keep him alive. He won't speak to
anyone, and he is not interested in what others have to
say to him. Since his will is paralyzed, his appetite
gone, and his honor diminished, he can be considered dead.
Dante, Boccaccio's Silvius, and Tasso's Aminta have all
reached similar depths of depression; in each case they
were rescued from this horrible state by a young woman,
and Pericles is no exception.

Once Marina begins to talk to him, he slowly opens
up like the bud of a flower in the warmth of the sun.
Lysimachus, who also has felt her charms, describes them
in this way:

She, questionless, with her sweet harmony
And other chosen attractions, would allure,
And make a batt'ry through his deafen'd parts,

Which now are midway stopp'd.
(V, if 45-8)

245

Her sweet harmony begins to take effect immediately, and
Pericles decides to listen to the story of her life because
she does not look as if she would lie and because there is
something familiar about her. Joy completely overwhelms
him as he recognizes who she is. As soon as he receives
his daughter with welcome arms, he hears heavenly music
which puts him into a sleep, during which time he has a
vision of the goddess Diana. He obeys her instructions,
and proceeds to her temple to tell the assembled people
how he lost his wife. As he speaks, one of the priestesses
faints. Upon inquiry, he finds her to be his lost wife,
Thaisa. When he finally realizes that it is his wife, he
exclaims:

This, this. No more, you gods! Your

Present kindness
Makes my past miseries sports. You shall do well

That on the touching of her lips I may
Melt and no more be seen. 0, come, be buried
A second time within these arms.
(V, iii, 39-44)
Thaisa, a priestess of Diana, is something divine, holy,
and chaste, and Pericles' desire to be dissolved in her
recalls the purpose of the rebirth of the soul in Pico's
version of Neoplatonism. The end of the soul's journey
is its extinction in celestial beauty, the source of all
life, goodness, and perfection.
Because he has directly experienced divine beauty

which is the ultimate reality behind the appearance of

things, his soul has been suffused with divine harmony and

246

wisdom. Only now can he return back into the world and
govern his kingdom according to divine truth. Easily and
skillfully he works his will in the world. As a new man,
he has gained control of his destiny. Pericles' words, as
he beholds Antiochus' daughter are again apposite:

That have inflamed desire in my breast

To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree

Or die in the adventure.

(I, i, 20-2)

Little did he realize when he uttered these words
that in order to taste the fruit of the celestial tree of
divine beauty, he would first have to die, i.e., he would
have to purge himself of his inflamed fleshly desires.

Once these have been purged through suffering, he experi-
ences the unity and harmony of the coincidence of opposites
and realizes that these elements conjoined constitute the
very nature of the world. Both joy and sorrow, both life
and death, both good and evil make up the contraries con-
trolled by the divine harmony. In his own life he realizes
that his suffering was necessary if he wants to experience
divine beauty.

The death and rebirth of his wife and daughter help
to illustrate this point. Thaisa, the daughter of king
Simonides, the ruler of Pentapolis, has all the perfections
that a young prince could ask for. He falls in love with
her, but as with Antiochus' daughter, his love belongs
completely to this world. Ficino called this the love

belonging to the natural world, and its aim is to produce

247

children. Pericles soon does get Thaisa with child.
Unfortunately he is not aware of the existence of the realm
of celestial love. Thaisa's death and rebirth mark the
transition from the natural to the celestial world. Accord-
ingly, her resurrection is the same as Titania's. Shake-
speare wants his terrestrial Venus to change her nature
into the celestial Venus, and there is no more interesting
way than with a death and rebirth. When Cerimon revives
Thaisa, she goes straight to the temple of Diana where she
remains until Pericles appears. He apprehends her in the
guise of divinity and realizes that her rebirth indicates
her altered nature. His reconciliation with her produces
the longed for harmony and peace in his soul.

Marina's adventures contrast with Pericles' and under-
line the power and divinity of rigorous chastity. She also
represents the divine perfections of celestial love.
Actually since she marries Lysimachus, she could be looked
at as a combination of Venus and Diana. Her perfection and
goodness arouse the jealousy of her foster mother who
decides to have her killed. Before she can be killed,
pirates capture her and she eventually ends up in a brothel,
where her real powers finally begin to shine. All the
lecherous youths who come in contact with her renounce
whoring. Her powers allow others to get control of their

lusts and restore the lost harmony to their souls.

248

This is exactly what she does for her father. To
show this working, Shakespeare uses the ancient image of
the fair damsel awakening the dying knight. She also
heals his wound, which in this case is completely internal.
In the Neoplatonic metaphysics Marina has the same role as
her mother. She leads the soul on to the divine beauty
after it has torn itself away from its body.5 For Ficino
the celestial Venus is both the ends and the means of the
soul's ascent into the celestial world. In this play
Shakespeare has separated these two functions into two
distinct characters to increase the power of the drama.
The deaths and rebirth of both women help Pericles to be
born anew, as a man worthy of the responsibility of
kingship, and as one capable of governing Pentapolis.

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare dramatizes the nature of

 

the heroic virtues needed to restore a degenerate and
rebellious kingdom to its accustomed honor and glory. Since
these virtues belong to nature, his inquiry retains some

of the characteristics associated with the more metaphysical
revelations in Pericles. These supernatural activities,
i.e., deaths and revivals, visions, and appearances of the

gods, share their aim of enlightenment and recognition with

 

5I can't help thinking that her emphasis on the fact
that she was born at sea is intended to recall the birth of
Venus. For the Neoplatonists, the celestial Venus had no
mother; she only had a father, Uranus. See Panofsky,

p. 142. Botticelli's painting, Birth of Venus, depicts the
same myth.

 

249

the earlier didactic romances. Knowledge and identifica-
tion of the disguised characters causes a complete reversal
in the king, allowing the play to end harmoniously with joy
and peace. Although King Cymbeline, the man whose vision
should be clearest, is the blindest of all the characters,
until the end of the play no one character knows all the
facts; each only possesses his own particular fragment of
the truth.

As in Whetstone's, Edwards' and Greene's didactic
romances, the motif of death and revival causes the enlight-
enment of the king and the restoration of peace to his
kingdom. Shakespeare confines the action of the motif to
the second and third parts of the three part movement of
this tragicomedy. The first part shows the court corrupted
by the unbridled ambition of the Queen, who seeks the crown
for her son. Her devious machinations remain undetected
because of the king's moral blindness. His moral failure
has also caused him to destroy the marriage of Imogen, his
daughter, and Posthumus, a young man raised in his house-
hold, by banishing the young man to Italy and confining
Imogen to her rooms. The king's heated exchange in the
first act with his daughter over the true worth of Posthumus
uncovers the nature of his flaw:

EXT: Thou took'st a beggar; wouldst have made
My throne

A seat for baseness.
£223 ' No; I rather added

A lustre to it.
(I, i, 141-3)

250

Without wealth, Posthumus can only degrade the royal
family. Cymbeline makes the rather common error of judging
nobility and worth by those characteristics associated with
the visible exterior of a person: his family, his wealth,
his clothes, and his status. Since he assumes that the
surface trappings indicate the mettle and virtues of the
spirit within, he can't observe the hidden inward motives
and qualities that determine the nobility and loyalty of

a prince or courtier; hence his court reeks of flattery

and a hidden contempt for his stupidity. Cloten, the
king's stepson, for instance is an inept swordsman and a
coward, but his bluster, his status, and his worth hide

his weak nature from the king. Because of his lack of
vision the king has become merely a tool of the unscrupulous
Queen and her son, who prefer war and strife to peace and
harmony.

All the youths of the royal household leave this
degenerate court and travel to the Welsh woods where, by
means of a process of death and revival, they are made
into people capable of restoring the lost honor and peace
of Britain. This place of refuge, healing, and rebirth
is very similar to the pastoral landscapes of earlier plays.
Honesty, simplicity, piety, and a hearty, robust manliness
characterize the inhabitants of the woods. But unlike the
pastoral of the woods outside Athens or Arden this one

does not reflect the mind of the shepherd-poet; indeed,

251

there are only two shepherd-poets to be found in the Welsh
highlands--and then only for a moment. Shakespeare stresses
the virtues of the active life rather than the contemplative

in this play. Cymbeline, like 11 Pastor Fido, blends the

 

 

pastoral and the heroic together. Where once the courtly
lover suffered, almost died, and was reborn through the
love of his liege-lady, now the heroic man of princely
virtue passes through a similar process.

The first youths to enter the woods were Guiderius
and Arviragus, the sons of Cymbeline, who were stolen by
Belarius in revenge for his banishment. Tended by Belarius,
they have lived in a cave since they were two and three
years old, completely ignorant of their parents and their
status in life. Their father, Cymbeline, thinks that they
have died long ago.

When the boys first appear, Belarius describes their
innate nobility and love of honor. Their piety is simple
and unaffected, but their instinctive ambition is beginning
to chafe against the peace and quiet of the forest life.
Eagerly thirsting for adventure and martial deeds, they look
upon the woods as a prison rather than as the earthly
paradise that Belarius keeps telling them it is:

Our valour is to chase what flies. Our cage
We make a choir, as doth the prison'd bird,

And sing our bondage freely.
(III, iii, 43-5.)

252

When Belarius recounts his own youthful glories, both boys
intensely hang on every word. Guiderius reveals a sanquinary
temperament:

The princely blood flows in his cheek, he sweats

Strains his young nerves, and puts himself in posture

That acts my words.

(III, iii, 93-4)
And Arviragus follows these same adventures with his own
fierce interpretation, acted out in pantomime. They
definitely have the spirit necessary to perform deeds of
valour and to acquire honor, but so far they have remained
close to home, completely untested and without experience.
Their rebirth, which amounts to their passage from

childhood into manhood and which completes their princely
natures, involves three distinct phases. First they
discover the exhausted Imogen disguised as a boy in their
cave. Their mentor, old Belarius, first points her out to
them by exclaiming:

By Jupiter, an angel! or, if not,

An earthly paragon! Behold divineness

No elder than a boy!

(III, Vi, 43-5)

These words suggest the women, such as Silvia, the Princess,
and even Thaisa, who were described in such terms and who
also represented divine beauty and truth. Imogen carries
on this tradition in this play. She elicits from them a
reverence and love for divine beauty and truth, which until

now had lain dorment within their souls. The naturally

chivalrous Guiderius offers to be her servant:

253

Were you a woman, youth,
I should woo hard but be your groom.
(III, Vi, 68-9)
Arviragus follows with:
I'll love him as my brother;
And such a welcome as I'ld give to him.
After long absence, such is yours.
(III, vi, 71-3)
Once they have recognized and honored the divine beauty
which lies beneath the disguise, they should have no trouble
defeating falsehood. Valentine, after he had beheld
Silvia, easily saw through Proteus. Now another Proteus,
Cloten, appears hiding his cowardly spirit within the
clothes of a noble and valiant knight.

The killing of Cloten is the second phase of the
rebirth of the two boys into manhood. When Cloten enters
the woods, one could say that he is returning home because
he has more in common with the satyrs of the pastoral
tragicomedy than with the courtiers of the court he has
just left. Like Fletcher's Sullen Shepherd his base
passions and ignoble visions encourage him to try to rape
Imogen and to kill Posthumus, his rival. But before he
finds an opportunity to satisfy his lust, he encounters
Guiderius. Cloten's crude pride and barbarous bluster
immediately arouse the spirit of Guiderius. He, however,
has_the advantage over Cloten because he can see his real

character beneath the outward fierceness. Cloten tells

him that he is the son of the Queen, hoping that his

status will gain his respect, but Guiderius only says:

254

Emi. I am sorry for't; not seeming
So worthy as thy birth.

Clo. Art not afeard?

Gui. Those that I reverence, those I fear--the wise;
At fools I laugh, not fear them.

 

His words incense Cloten, and they begin to fight.

Guiderius easily passes his test by lopping off
Cloten's head. His fierce spirit keeps the unruly and
insensible lower passions,which Cloten represents when
he entered the woods, in order. They cannot successfully
rebel against him.

Interestingly there is a ritualistic atmosphere
surrounding his death which reinforces the theme of death
and rebirth. Both leave the stage fighting; shortly
afterwards Guiderius returns with Cloten's head as evidence
of his prowess. When Belarius learns what happened, he
is horrified and fears some retribution. He thinks that
only absolute madness would have brought Cloten out into
the woods alone; so there must be friends of his lurking
in the woods. Belarius and Arviragus finally accept the
deed and whatever consequences it might entail. Then
Guiderius announces what he will do with the head:

I'll throw't into the creek
Behind our rock; and let it to the sea,
And tell the fishes he's the Queen's son, Cloten.
(IV, ii, 151-3)
This announcement parallels the death of Orpheus, the

inspired poet, inventor of the Orphic mysteries and the

Neoplatonists' symbol of the complete man. Here, according

255

to Ovid in the Golding translation, is what happened to
his head after his death:
His members lay in sundrie steds. His head and harp
both Cam

To Hebrus, and (a woondrous thing) as downe the streame
they swam,

At length adowne theyr country streame to open sea they
Andaljghted on Methymnye Shore in Lesbos Land.6
(XI, 53-60)

Since Orpheus was the ideal shepherd-poet who best symbol-
ized the virtues of the contemplative pastoral life, Shake-
speare uses him to suggest the union of the active and
contemplative lives within the souls of the two boys.
They blend the opposites together within themselves; thus
they complete their characters and become worthy of their
rank and titles.

The third phase of their entrance into manhood con-
tinues their association with the contemplative life.
Arviragus carries in the seemingly dead body of Imogen,
who has taken the potion which puts her in this death-like
sleep. All three men begin to mourn for her, and soon
their melancholy knows no bounds. They transform themselves
into pastoral shepherd-poets, lamenting the deaths of their
beloved liege-ladies. Arviragus promises:

With fairest flowers,
Whilst summer lasts and I live here, Fidele,

I'll sweeten thy sad grave.
(IV, ii, 218-20)

 

6Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation
1567, ed. J. F. Nims (London, 1965), p. 275.

256

Although their voices have cracked, they decide to sing

over Fidele's grave. And like quiet and peaceful shepherds,
they spread flowers over her body after they have finished
singing. The quiet pastoral virtues of reverence, tender-
ness, love, and mourning become them just as naturally as
the martial vigor that they displayed before. The death

of the queen's brutish son has caused two valiant and worthy
sons of the king to be reborn in the womb of nature.

Their rebirth and return to the court saves the king
from capture and the kingdom from defeat. After they
rescue the king, they restore order to the ungoverned
British tr00ps and stand at the bridge shoulder to shoulder
against the entire Roman army. Their courage and quick
thinking save the day for the British. Their blood did
indeed:

. . . fly out and show them princes born.
(IV, v, 55)

As Cymbeline is about to reward them for his victory, he
inadvertently discovers who they are. Gladly welcoming
them back into his arms, he makes them heirs to his realm.
The return of his sons, whose strength, courage, and
virtue have been amply proven, contributes order and
controlled strength to the vision of peace and harmony

at the end of the play. The motif of death and revival
has pointed to those contradictory qualities which Shake-

speare feels are necessary in the perfect prince and has

257

helped to demonstrate how he must first be tested before
he can actually assume the throne. .

Imogen and Posthumus, the last pair to enter the
woods, require the same kind of enlightenment as Shake-
speare's other young lovers. They have mistaken their
infatuation with exterior appearances for true inward love,
which can only happen between two souls. Each must be
enlightened, which means that each must undergo the process
of death and rebirth. Posthumus displays the shallowness
of his love when he believes Iachimo's slanderous report
of Imogen, and Imogen, when she mistakes Cloten for her
love, Posthumus, and buries him with reverence. Posthumus
immediately feels the despair caused by a guilty conscience
when he hears of her death. He begins to realize how
foolish he was to listen to Iachimo; hence he thinks that
only his own death will atone for hers. He goes "under-
ground" by changing into the clothes of a common Englishman
and fighting against the Romans. When the British win, he
again changes clothes and manages to get thrown into a
British prison as a Roman soldier. In prison he repents
his crime, asks for mercy, and offers his life as punish-
ment for his crime. Jupiter, appearing to him in a vision,
promises to be merciful. Now, after his own repentance,
he is ready to behold the divine beauty of his wife, Imogen.
She for her part has also been suffering as the page of
the Roman, Lucius. Both are ready to be enlightened and

united again.

258

The long recognition scene assembles all the fragments
of the story, the totality of which contributes to the
knowledge of each character, who also contributes his share
to the story. Posthumus contributes to Cymbeline's
enlightenment because he fought so bravely and wore such
poor clothes. As Belarius says:

I never saw

Such noble fury in so poor a thing;

Such precious deeds in one that promis'd naught

But beggary and poor looks.

(V, v, 7-10)

Cymbeline now learns that there does not necessarily have
to be a relation between the exterior and the interior of
the person. As soon as he learns that mean apparel can
disguise noble actions, he discovers that magnificent
apparel can hide ignoble spirits. His wife and her son
had both evil hearts and limitless ambitions. When he
hears this, the king realizes that their flattery and his
wife's beauty led him astray. Then Posthumus confesses
his crime to the king, but before he can react, Imogen,
disguised as a page speaks out, and Posthumus angrily
knocks her down. Then Pisanio comes forward to say that
this page is Imogen. The two lovers unite with the sin-
cerity that only true love inspires. Posthumus, filled
with ecstasy, shouts:

Hang there like fruit, my soul,

Till the tree die!
(V, V, 263-4)

259

The return of his daughter brings tears to Cymbeline's
eyes, and the two lovers, much wiser, enter into the peace
and harmony of the realm. The many deaths and revivals
have caused a complete reversal in the king.' It can even
be said that he has been reborn.

The deaths and rebirths continue to point to the same

general truths in The Winter's Tale. In‘gymbeline, both

 

 

the world-destroying and the creative, life-producing
aspects of nature are juxtaposed in the scenes before
Belarius' cave; but in the following scenes Shakespeare
glorifies the life producing elements of the heroic spirits
of the boys at the expense of the more sinister destructive

powers. In The Winter's Tale Shakespeare concentrates upon

 

the two contradictory processes of nature herself instead
of the heroic spirits she produces.

This play divides into the familiar three parts of
court-woods-court, which, as we have seen, owes its origin
to the rhythm of love in the Neoplatonic universe. Here,
however, we can see more clearly just how the pastoral
world heals the dissensions and turmoils of the court. As

in A Midsummer Night's Dream the pastoral world reveals the

 

harmony of opposites which the king must also experience

before he can again be at peace with himself and his family.
Leontes' blindness, which causes all of the grief in

Sicilia, differs from that of Cymbeline. Cymbeline's stems

from a defect in judgment, while Leontes, from a defect in

260

his will and his emotions. His love for Hermione is a
shallow, possessive uncertain thing. It cannot withstand
the most innocent conversations with an old friend. With-
out the trust and certainty in his wife's love that she
has in his, his mind begins to brood upon her actions and
his jealousy demands revenge. Revenge and hate transform
this benevolent and just ruler into an unpredictable and
raging tyrant, a veritable agent of death. He orders the
murder of his childhood friend and companion, Polixenes,
and manages to destroy his own entire family. He has his
daughter, whom Hermione bore in prison, while awaiting her
trial, exposed on some deserted and distant shore. His
son, the virtuous and noble heir to the throne, sickens
and dies because of what Leontes takes to be the boy's
shame at his mother's adultery. When Hermione realizes
that he has already convicted her in his mind, she finds
little to live for, and Paulina soon reports to him that
she has died in prison. These two deaths, following hard
on the heels of the Delphic Oracle's pronouncement of her
innocence, awaken him to the enormity of his crimes. Alone
and saddened, he sincerely begs forgiveness for his past
crimes and begins twenty years of penitent suffering. His
own contrition and penance do not suffice; he still needs
the healing powers of divine love to repair his soul and

to restore harmony and peace to his life.

261

Perdita and Florizel share just such a divine love,
and the celebration surrounding the plighting of their
troth presents nature as a coincidence of opposites with
Perdita as the heavenly Venus, who possesses these con-
traries. Even twenty years before, when Antigonus landed
on the coast of Bohemia with Perdita, both aspects of
nature were operating. Bohemia is famous for its creatures
that prey on man. Nevertheless Antigonus, obeying the harsh
commands of Hermione, whom Apollo sent to him in a vision,
deposits the babe on the hostile shore. As he leaves, he
notices the sky and mutters:

The day frowns more and more; thou'rt like to have

A lullaby too rough. I never saw

The heavens so dim by day.

(III, iii, 54-6)

Immediately afterwards under this foreboding sky, he is
chased and eaten by a bear; furthermore the ship and all
hands perish in the storm. Apollo, working through nature,
punishes those with death who helped carry out Leontes'
command.

But life still thrives in the midst of all this death
and destruction. A shepherd, looking for two lost sheep
discovers Perdita and the bundle of effects left by Antigonus.
He says to his son, also a shepherd:

Now bless thyself; thou met'st
With things dying, I with things

new-born.
(III, iii, 116-7)

262

They inspect the bundle and find some gold, which turns
them into joyous rustics. While they congratulate them-
selves on their good fortune, they don't forget to do good
deeds for the dead, and the clown hurries off to bury the
remains of Antigonus. Their simple charity and goodness
provide Perdita with a home and a decent up-bringing.
Shakespeare juxtaposes both the destructiveness and the
goodness of nature, both the bear and the shepherd, in this
scene to show how nature is cruel and kind, death-dealing
and life-preserving, at the same moment. At the sheep

shearing festival twenty years later this same concordia

 

discors is celebrated and in effect presented to the
audience.

Shakespeare's earlier pastoral lovers provide the
clues to understanding the nature of Perdita's and Florezel's
love, which is at the center of the festival and which
plays an important part in Leontes' own rebirth. Valentine
had called Silvia divine, Berowne thought that the princess
was a goddess, and Lysander praised the divinity of Hermia.
When Florizel's opening speech identifies Perdita with
Flora and makes her queen of the festival, we should
realize that we are deep in the Neoplatonic traditions of
love. Furthermore, their love does not require the purga-
tion and purification which the earlier couples' love had
to undergo. Florizel could be speaking of those lovers in

The Faithful Shepherdess when he proclaims that even the

 

263

gods never transformed themselves into animals for a purer
love than he has:
Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer,
Nor in a way so chaste, since my desires
Run not before mine honour, nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.
Perdita fears that the king may not approve of their love,
and Florizel sounds like Tristan when he boldly replies
that he would unhesitatingly defy the king because:
I cannot be,
Mine own, nor anything to any, if
I be not thine. To this I am most constant,
Though destiny say no.
(IV, iv, 43-6)
After the songs and dances Florizel demonstrates that
his love penetrates much deeper into his soul than the

nobles' love did in Love's Labour's Lost. The disguised

 

Polixenes mentions that when he was young he gave trinkets
and "knacks" to his love and wonders if Florizel has done
the same thing. The lover replies that Perdita does not
think much of such gifts because:

The gifts she likes from me are packed and lock'd

Up in my heart; which I have given already,

But not deliver'd. (IV, iv, 368-70)
He has already reached the vision of true love, which the
nobles could reach only after a year's trial in a hermitage.
Shortly after his declaration of sincere, true love, they
each pledge their love to one another, which, while not a

complete and legally binding betrothal, does provide a

fitting close to the festival.

264

The object of Florizel's love, Perdita, combines both
the opposites of life and death within herself and in so
doing points to the divinity behind all the phenomena of
nature. Florizel had called her Flora, and the old shepherd
made her mistress of the feast, to which she is supposed
to welcome all the guests and make them feel at home.
Nevertheless she prefers to give them flowers of winter
because there are none that belong to the season which is
"not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth/Of trembling
winter (IV, iv, 80)." In her next long speech she mentions
Proserpina, the maiden who was captured by Pluto and who
now spends half of the year above ground with her mother
and the other half in Hades with Pluto, her husband. After
mentioning the primroses which "die unmarried," she weaves
these two themes of death and life into the image of a
passionate embrace, which in the context, suggests the
Neoplatonic paradox of the sacred love-death that the
celestial Venus welcomes the aspiring soul into:

0, these I lack,
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o'er and o'er!
F12, What, like a corse?
Per. No, like a bank for love to lie and play on;
Not like a corse; or if, not to be buried,
But quick and in mine arms.
(IV, iv, 177-32)
Perdita, as the symbol of "great creating Nature," (IV,

iv, 87) has the power to destroy and to revive; still,

since she possesses both opposites, she also represents

265

the celestial Venus, that symbol of divine beauty and love
that quickens all the living things of this world. Her
death, or absence from Leontes' court, has helped to destroy
his world, and now when she and Florizel return there, she
causes Leontes' own rebirth into peace and harmony.
Shakespeare sets off the Feast of Shearing, which
displays the sacred mystery of true love, from the rest of
the play by clothing it with conventions derived from the
masque. This scene has an even greater ceremonial air

about it than the cave scene in Cymbeline. Florizel

 

presents her to the audience; the shepherds quickly sur-
round her, and after she speaks, they dance and sing in

a circle around her. She joins in, and the whole scene
ends with the joyous harmony of the betrothal. All the
formal activity reinforces the fact, which is made clear

in the imagery, that she represents the sacred center of
the play and that she and Florizel symbolize the mystery

of the world that will change despair into hope, melancholy
into joy, and suffering into happiness.

The mystery of Leontes' rebirth, which takes the
entire last act to unfold, begins when he promises Paulina
that he will not marry anyone unless it is Hermione. In
other words, he will be faithful to her the rest of his
life. Shortly after that, the two lovers appear in court,
seeking refuge. His eager acceptance of them indicates

that his soul is ready to receive the intuition of divine

266

love. This comes only after he has been reunited with his

childhood friend and has discovered his heir to the throne:
Our king, being ready to leap out of himself for joy
of his found daughter, as if that joy were more
become a loss, cries, "Oh, thy mother, thy mother";
then asks Bohemia forgiveness, then embraces his
son-in-law; then again worries he his daughter with
clipping her . . .

The rebirth of his daughter increases his longing for the

union with divine beauty, and until that happens he can

only feel incomplete.

Of course the revelation of divine beauty occurs in
Paulina's art gallery when the statue of Hermione turns
into the living queen. Leontes witnesses the mystery of
dead marble being transformed into living flesh; this is
the same mystery that he himself is now passing through
and the same process that his daughter has just recently
completed. His vision of the coincidence of opposites
points beyond itself to the divine beauty, transforming
Leontes into the complete man who now is capable of ruling
his kingdom with authority and wisdom. The divine know-
ledge revealed to him through these actions attunes his

soul to the rhythm of the universe.

The Tempest presents these themes of divine love,

 

forgiveness, reconciliation, rebirth, and enlightenment
in a completely different form. This play expands the
middle part of the familiar three-part movement into the

entire play; it begins and ends on the mysterious island

267

far removed from the ambitious denizens of the court. No
court ever appears on stage, but both the survivors of the
wreck and Prospero mention the courts that they have left
and to which they wish to return, often enough to supply
to the audience the sense of movement away from and back
to the world of the court. Prospero and his daughter were
banished to this wilderness years before, and the plot
focuses upon his successful attempts to regain his dukedom
and return to Milan. The motif of death and revival, as
in earlier romances, dominates the action. It has the
central role in Prospero's machinations because he desires
to gain back his property by altering the soul of the man
who took it from him in the first place. As the spectacle
of Damon and Pythias' near death and revival changed the
tyrant Dionysius' hatred into friendship, so the near death
of the entire population of the ship turns the hatred of
his enemy, Alonso, into the friendship and love that is
usually hoped for between equals. The motif also con-
tributes to the general enlightenment of Miranda and the
nobles in Alonso's company. Shakespeare handles these
various revelations of truth and rebirth by adopting the
structure of the masque to the romance. Prospero has the
role of the presenter who reveals to the audience the
important nature of divine love; surrounding and in a way
complementing the true love of Miranda and Ferdinand are
many lesser revelations, all staged by Prospero for the

benefit of the suffering souls on the island.

268

This island, as befits the place of action away from
the court, has all the qualities of the traditional pastoral

landscape. Unlike Bohemia in The Winter's Tale, which

 

represented the fecundity of nature, this pastoral repre-
sents the sacred place of healing, and since the pastoral
world heals and revives the distempered soul, the action

in the pastoral world becomes a metaphor of the mind.
Prospero has the powers to control and to heal the distraught
souls instead of a maiden or goddess, such as Boccaccio's
Olympia, Shakespeare's Silvia, or Fletcher's Clorin. He
acquired his knowledge that controls the powers of nature

by diligently studying his books. The women, on the other
hand, such as the elder Isolde, just seem to know how to
control nature; they never have to study. Nevertheless the
years of studying have repaid Prospero because his knowledge
becomes the means to his own rebirth.

His knowledge, the fruit of his long contemplative
life, creates the other characteristics which this island
shares with the earlier pastoral worlds. He arranges the
ideal love between his innocent daughter and the virtuous
prince, which is the cement that binds the other souls
together in the play. His skill also allows him to control
Caliban, the natural force of instinct and bestiality.
Caliban corresponds to the satyr of the traditional pas-
toral drama, and his attempted rape of Miranda only con-

vinces us of his brutish nature. The attempted rape having

269

been unsuccessful, now Caliban is Prospero's slave, a
condition which, when transposed into the metaphor of the
mind, means that in the ideal man enlightened reason and
will control the brutish instincts. Other purer spirits
also obey Prospero's will and assist in presenting the
marvels that he reveals to the stranded nobles. Further-
more, because he completely controls all the forces and
the peOple on the island, he has converted the island into
a realm where all desires are realized. Tasso's Arcadia
and the woods in Bottom's dream have again appeared on
this remote island. The emotions reign here, and all
desires of the man of reason and knowledge are fulfilled.
The motif of death and revival, the means to the fulfill-
ment of his desires, finds a home here among the other
pastoral marvels, wonders, and miracles produced by the
imagination of this Renaissance magus.

As in Pericles, the sea is both destroyer and
preserver, and as it surrounds and supports the island, so
the truth which it symbolizes supports and surrounds the
diverse phenomena on the island. Shakespeare invents what
might be called a multiple perspective to show us both
aspects of the sea at once. As the play opens, we observe
the storm from Miranda's perspective. She watches its
unmitigated fury split the helpless, floundering ship into
numerous pieces. The suffering of those caught in the

storm forces her to ask her father to eaSe the force of

270

the blast. Their misfortune brings forth all of her

compassion:
O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer! . . .

O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish'd!

Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallow'd and
The fraughting souls within her.
(1, ii, 5-13)

From Prospero's 'viewpoint, which we assume when
Miranda falls asleep, the sea is a preserver and not a
destroyer. Ariel, one of Prospero's servants, created the
appearance of a storm, frightened all the passengers into
the sea, and brought them safely to shore on the island
along with the ship and its crew, which he hid in a quiet
bay out of sight. Shakespeare does not want us to judge
between these two views of nature, but to see that both
are aspects of the same force called nature. The two
types of magic practiced on the island are additional
evidence that this is Shakespeare's view of nature. Prospero
and Ariel practice a white or beneficent kind of magic, which
will ultimately benefit those it touches. Sycorax, on the
other hand, practiced the art of black magic; she only
wished to cause harm and to destroy, as her treatment of
Ariel proves. Her son, Caliban, who resists all attempts
to educate him, illustrates the degenerate nature of these

forces. But Caliban, Ariel, and Prospero and Sycorax are

all products of nature and thus derive from the same "great

271

creating nature." The double aspect of nature has its
reflection in human culture as well; accordingly Shakespeare
stresses the necessity of suffering in the complete life.
The moral point that Shakespeare makes, which is solidly
grounded in the natural world, is that a man has to experi-
ence both suffering and joy before he can consider himself
perfect and morally wise. This moral point has been one

of the threads running through all of the romances, and in
this play it receives its most complete presentation
because not only one or two of the characters experience
sorrow and joy but all of them without exception undergo
some form of death and rebirth, which signifies the puri-
fication through suffering and the happiness of fulfilled
desire that the suffering made possible.

Suffering alone, however, will not bind the souls of
long-standing enemies together; only the vision of divine
love can heal these severe wounds. Consequently the
rebirths are attended by the revelation of love and joy
which is really a pale reflection of divinity. Miranda
and Ferdinand share such a true love; like Perdita's and
Florizel's their love is divine from its inception and

does not need the corrections of the lovers in A Midsummer

 

Night's Dream. These lovers repeat the by-now familiar

 

pattern of sudden discovery and profession of true love

which culminates in the ceremony of their betrothal.

272

When they first behold each other, each thinks that
the other must be divine, and each is completely satisfied
just to look upon the other. While piling wood, Ferdinand
thinks of himself as the knight whose work is brought to
life by his liege-lady:

This my mean task

Would be as heavy to me as odious, but

The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead

And makes my labours pleasures.

(III, 1, 4-7)

Moreover both prove to be worthy of this divine love.
Miranda, whose compassion was already elicited by the
floundering ship, weeps at the sight of Ferdinand laboring
with the wood. Her tears are analogous to Silvia's tears
that fall on the body of Aminta; in both instances they
signify a heart whose love is true. To his credit,
Ferdinand reveals the proper control of his lower passions.
Just before the betrothal ceremony, he tells Prospero:

As I hope

For quiet days, fair issue, and long life,

With such love as' tis now, the murkiest den,

The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion

Our worser genius can, shall never melt

Mine honour into lust . . . .

(IV, 1, 23—8)

Because Ferdinand is the son of the King of Naples, his
love for Miranda helps to reconcile Prospero with his old
enemy; Ferdinand's new life with Miranda helps Prospero
to accomplish his own rebirth.

Prospero, with the aid of his magic, arranges several

other rebirths as well. Alonso, the king of Naples, is

273

the most interesting of those reborn, and his rebirth,
which occupies the fifth act, follows the pattern of death
and revival found in Aminta. Prospero plays the role of
Aminta, while Alonso enacts a part roughly equivalent to
Silvia.‘ After suffering through the terrors of the storm,
after being condemned by Ariel in the shape of a harpy to
starvation on a haunted island wilderness and to a madness
"worse than any death/Can be at once" (III, iii, 77-8),

and finally after being forcefully reminded that they are
responsible for the death of Prospero and his daughter, the
nobles are led into a charmed circle from whence they will
emerge as new men in a new world. While their heads are
clearing, Prospero presents himself to them, confronts

them with their crimes, and magnanimously forgives them
their past transgressions. The sudden rebirth of the long
thought dead Prospero and the dissipation of his own madness
shocks Alonso into resigning his dukedom and begging for-
giveness from Prospero for his sins. Prospero also forgives
his brother's sins and asks for his dukedom back, which

his brother gives him. These quilty nobles have been led

by Prospero's magic through death and the sufferings of
purgatory, and now they are ready to emerge, after confessing
their forgiveness, in a new world of life and happiness.
Their own death and revival on this island foreshadows the
journey their souls would have made if they would not have

repented.

274

At this point Alonso laments the loss of his son,

Ferdinand, rolling all his grief into a wish:

. . . I wish

Myself were mudded in that oozy bed

Where my son lies.

(v, 1, 150-2)

Like the nymph Silvia, he has confessed his past errors
and wished that he himself were dead. While the king
despairs, Prospero reveals to him his son and Miranda
playing chess, and again like Silvia when Aminta awoke,
he is overjoyed. When the crew of the ship awakens from
its sleep in the hold of the ship and joins the nobles,
the rebirths, reconciliation, and rejoicing become uni-
versal. Even Caliban repents his past actions and promises
to be a loyal servant. These deaths and revivals have
restored the unity, the harmony, and the joy which were
absent for so long for the hearts of the nobles. Prospero
can now return to Milan with his property, his title and
his honor restored. Perhaps the greatest wonder wrought
by his art was his own rebirth and triumph after years of
suffering and isolation.

The island which Prospero is leaving has also been
transformed by his art into a pastoral landscape where
emotion rules. In this play the emotions usually associated
with true love, although present, have been subordinated
to those belonging to Christian ethics. Sorrow, forgive-

ness, charity, contrition, pity, remorse, grace, wonder

and joy influence the events in this world and help to

275

determine the success of Prospero's plan. These emotions
and the deaths and revivals that accompany them always
point back to the basic truth upon which they rest and
which is symbolized by the sea. Nature destroys and
preserves; consequently it is both good and bad, both sad
and joyous. Furthermore the experience of both aspects of
the world is necessary for one who wants to experience

the world the way it is. This is the central truth that
Prospero, the master of the motif of death and revival,

presents to the audience of this play.

CHAPTER VI

THE DEGENERATION OF THE MOTIF IN THE

TRAGICOMEDIES OF JOHN FLETCHER

While Shakespeare was developing the ethical impli-
cations of the motif in his last romances, John Fletcher
(1579-1625) began to mold it into the final shape that it
assumed in the tragicomedies written in the second quarter
of the seventeenth century. Inspired by the popular
success of Guarini, Fletcher transformed the motif into
one of the many entertaining and pleasing elements in this
increasingly popular genre. The motif appears in all
twelve plays labeled tragicomedy by the editors of the
folio edition, and when these are closely examined, they
reveal many dramatic conventions in common with plays in
the pastoral tradition.l

Although the four plays studied in this chapter
depend upon different dramatic conventions and two were

written with the help of different collaborators, they

 

lThe twelve plays are: The Faithful Shepherdess (1608),
Philaster (1609); A King and NSiKing (1611); The'Mad Lover
(1617); The Queen of Corinth‘716l7); The Lgyal Subject (1618)
The Knight of Malta (1618); Eme_Humor0us Lieutenant (1619);
The Laws 0f7Candy (1619); The Island Princess (1621); A Wife
for a Month (1624); The Fair Maid of the Inn (1626).

 

 

 

 

‘0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

276

277

still share a remarkably similar style. This style has a

great many affinities with Guarini's in 11 Pastor Fido--

 

even though Fletcher's later plays are not strictly pas-
torals. Guarini combines in the same play the two opposing
worlds of love and heroic action by transforming the
shepherd-lover into the heroic man of honor. Fletcher,

who also combines the two‘worlds, does so by transforming
the heroic man into the courtly lover. Guarini's Arcadian
pastoral background emphasizes the inner emotions of the
lovers; while in Fletcher's plays the heroic background

of war and conquest stresses the honor of the protagonists.
In each of the four plays studied here, i.e., The Mad

Lover (1617); The Queen of Corinth (1617); The Loyal

 

 

Subject (1618); The Laws of Candy (1619), the domestic

 

problems of a great general or prince, usually, but not
always, centering around the emotions of love and loyalty,
are the dramatic center of the conflict. We could say
that these plays are nothing but the old pastoral tragi-
comedy transposed into the heroic key. Inevitably, of
course, they retain much of the pastoral tragicomedy.
Guarini's and Daniel's Arcadias were threatened from
without by hostile forces, and the same threat of total
destruction lurks in the very distant background of
Fletcher's plays. The threat casts a tragic shade over
the emotional problems of the characters and gives them

the small importance that they have in the audience's

278

eyes. The central character must solve his emotional
problems before he can devote his energies to saving his
country; so in this tenuous way at least the fate of the
country is bound up with the fate of the hero. But very
few commoners appear in Fletcher's plays; hence there is
no strongly developed sense of impending doom to the whole
country, only to the class of aristocrats who rule it.
Guarini's pastoral tragicomedy is also concerned only with
the aristocracy of Arcadia; his shepherds trace their
descent from the gods and not from the peasants of Arcadia.
In Arcadia and Fletcher's heroic kingdoms little action
transpires before the audience. In fact, Fletcher, by
adapting the inactivity of the pastoral world to the
ambitious and restless world of the court, imposes Politian's
and Tasso's atmosphere of quiet harmony and outward calm
upon the usually boistrous and active heroic man. No
fights, no murders, and no on stage conquests mar the
inner emotional conflicts which unfold in the various
courts. Thus, Fletcher's practice differs greatly from
that of his English predecessors, especially Marlowe and
Shakespeare, who excel in showing martial activities upon
the stage. As in the pastoral world, the lack of action
forces the dramatist to rely upon the speeches of the
characters for emotional movement and dramatic interest.
Consequently, the rhetoric and the poetry of the speeches

carry a greater dramatic burden than in other species of

279

drama and become that much more conspicuous in the total

production. The audience quickly realizes that an accom-

plished artist has written the dialogue and the set speeches

of the play. Finally, of course, both Guarini and Fletcher

use the motif of death and revival as an element in the

structure of the plot that is only meant to please and to

entertain the audience. Its meaning no longer matters;

the new and always ingenious uses which continually sur-

prise the audience and make it enjoy the ending absorb

the dramatist's total attention and artistic effort.

Accordingly this chapter will examine the various ingenious

appearances of the motif of death and revival in the four

plays listed above. We have already seen in Chapter IV

how Fletcher reduces the significance of the motif in the

pastoral tragicomedy; now we will see how he does it in

the other species, which I have called heroic tragicomedy.
Clifford Leech has noted that one of the major

characteristics of Fletcher's style is the development

of an unusual situation and the characters' response to

it.2 The improbable situation in The Mad Lover concerns

 

Memnon's impassioned love for the young sister of the king,
Calis. Memnon, Paphos' most puissant and illustrious
general, returns home after a life of successful battles

to spend the rest of his days in quiet retirement. Instead,

 

2 . H..LH._.H. ............ 1 w
Clifford Leech, The John Fletcher Plays (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 40.

280

he is smitten by the beauty of the king's sister. Because
Calis will have nothing to do with him, he sinks gradually
into a melancholic despondency which threatens his sanity.
His friends and his brother are worried lest he become
completely demented. Without him to direct the army,
Paphos' soldiers would not be able to defeat her enemies.
Consequently much of the plot deals with their attempts

to help him regain his sanity.

Because this main plot is developed fairly straight-
forwardly, Memnon's madness could have become a matter of
serious concern to the audience. Two elements in the
design of the play prevent this from happening. The motif
of death and revival ensures that all the conflicts will
be resolved satisfactorily for the characters and for the
audience, and the two subplots, which are devastating
travesties of courtly love, ensure that no one will take
the actions of the courtly lovers seriously. Since
debunking of the courtly love conventions extends to some
of the actions of Memnon's friends, the entire play becomes
a mixture of the serious and the ridiculous. These two
opposites, however, really don't blend as easily as others
do. Seriousness must always give way before the onslaught
of ridicule; hence the ideals of courtly love and the
beliefs of the Neoplatonists lose all truth and significance
in the hands of a dramatist such as Fletcher, who mocks in

one plot what he presents seriously in another.

281

Memnon himself is a vestige of the courtly love

tradition, but the motif of death and revival now helps
him to escape from the tyranny of love instead of indicating
that he has passed from the love of sensuous to the love of
divine beauty. Memnon knows the difference between the two
and, while berating Siphax for refusing to kill him,
explains it thus:

. . . ; for the loves we now know

Are but the heats of half an hour; and hated

Desires stir'd up by nature to encrease her;

Licking of one another to a lust;

Course and base appetites, earths meer inheritours

And heirs of Idleness and blood; Pure love,

That, that the soul affects, and cannot purchase

While she is loaden with our flesh, that love, Sir,

Which is the price of honour, dwells not here,

Your Ladies eyes are lampless to that Vertue,

That beauty smiles not on a cheek washt over,

Nor scents the sweet of Ambers; . . .

(II, 1)
Curiously enough this is the only direct reference to the
doctrines of divine love, and if we are to judge by the
rest of the actions, both serious and satirical in the three
plots of the play, Fletcher does not think that the beliefs
of the courtly lover can be literally true nor does he
believe that they point to truths beyond themselves. They
are just the expensive and beautiful trappings that clothe
the common, bestial desires of men.
However, Memnon's madness is the inspired frenzy of

the courtly lover, which ultimately derives from Plato via

the Neoplatonists. We have encounted this phenomenon on

the hillsides of Arcadia several times before. In Arcadia,

282

where the poet-shepherd lamented the cruelty of his mistress'
heart, he was always thought to have justice on his side.
There the claims of love took precedence over all other
matters, and the woman always reversed herself. In Paphos,
however, the woman who doesn't love the courtly lover is
right. Memnon has to change his behavior, giving up love
and returning to the wars of conquest.

Memnon passes through all three of the traditional
phases in the career of the courtly lover. In the first
phase the lover beholds the absolute beauty of his mistress
and suddenly falls deeply in love with her. It will be
recalled that Dante fainted as he observed Beatrice at
his friend's dinner party and, upon awakening, was completely
committed to the new life of love. Accordingly, Memnon is
struck dumb when he first sees Calis and, after he recovers
from his fit, is similarly committed to love. But Calis--
hardly a symbol of divine beauty--is only interested in
displaying her wit at Memnon's expense. Her jests strip
his sudden passion of all its intense seriousness and force
everyone to view it as a regrettable piece of senile
foolishness. His rebirth into love is now just an absurd
derangement of the heroic character.

Fletcher, who knows that something unusual becomes
humorous if it is repeated enough, likes to use a motif
such as this more than once. Siphax, a friend of Memnon,

also falls desperately in love with Calis when he sees

283

her. Then, just to show that there is nothing to be taken
seriously in this motif, Fletcher has Calis fall in love
with Polydor, the general's brother, when he first appears
before her to plead on behalf of Memnon.

The second phase in the career of the courtly lover
represents this submergence in melancholy and his eventual
death and rebirth. Fletcher expends most of his powers
of ridicule on these aspects of the tradition of the
courtly lover. Memnon makes the mistake of taking the
courtly lover's traditional Petrarchan hyperbole quite
literally. The blunt old general, who disparaged the use
of rhetoric before he fell in love, emits great golden
clouds of it after he recovers from his trance. He tells
Calis that he wishes that she had his heart in her hand so
that she could see just how full of love it is. The women,
intending to ridicule him, agree that that is exactly what
he should give her and even suggest the proper vessel to
carry it in when he presents it to her. Much of his
melancholy comes from pondering the consequences of this
action. Determined to offer his heart to his lady, he
tries to convince Siphax that honor lies in obeying his
order to kill him. When Siphax refuses, he resorts to a
doctor, who also can't bring himself to do Memnon's
bidding. Finally his brother Polydor appears and, after
reminding Memnon how foolish a soldier, a conqueror, and

even a law-giver is in the throes of the debilitating

284

passions of love, suggests a plan that will get the
results that he wants without the sacrifice of his life.
His plan is simply to make Calis believe that Memnon
is dead and that he has sent his heart to her. According
to the tradition, this should be enough to make her realize
that he truly loved her and,jJ1fact, open her own heart
to his love; but Calis is no Silvia and Memnon, no Aminta.
Polydor enters the court surrounded by funeral accouterments
and confronts Calis with Memnon's heart. As he reproaches
her for her cruelty, she falls in love with him instead of
with the dead Memnon. Only when Polydor reads to her the
Petrarchan complaint does she begin to cry, and then
because she is aware that she has violated the courtly
love tradition. Her guilt irritates her so much that,
obeying her confidente's advice, she goes to the temple
of Venus where she repents her violation of the customs
of courtly love. Venus descends from on high, accepts
her repentance, and forecasts the startling fact that she
will someday enjoy a dead love. Nothing has come of Memnon's
death; so his revival has no significance at all. When he
appears on stage again, he is still the same Memnon, who
now is beginning to feel his age. His realization that
Calis does not love him only serves to increase his
depression and adds an urgency to his associates' efforts

to revive him.

285

The two devices that Polydor hopes will cure Memnon
ridicule two other aspects of the Neoplatonic tradition.
Polydor feels that music will soothe his brother's perturbed
spirits. Accordingly he orders Stremon, who has a good
voice, to try to drive away his melancholy. Disguising
himself as Orpheus, Stremnon sings and dances before Memnon
and presents a masque of beasts for his edification. For
the Neoplatonists, Orpheus was the symbol of the complete
man who combined all four kinds of divine madnesses;
consequently he hardly seems the one to cure Memnon of
his ailment. From Orpheus' point of View, the madness
caused by love is not a disease that one would wish to
cure. Orpheus tries to frighten Memnon into sanity by
telling him in an imagined dialogue with Charon that only
the lovers who are beloved themselves pass into Elysium.
Those whose love is unrequited cannot enter his boat.
Orpheus then asks if time will relieve the sufferings of
this unfortunate soul, and Charon replies:

No, no, no, no.

Nor time nor death can alter us, nor prayer;

My boat is destine, and who then dare

But those appointed come aboard? live still,

And love by reason, Mortal, not by will.

(IV, 1)

When Charon tells Memnon to love by reason and not by will,
Fletcher is reversing the tradition begun with Politian's
9££§23 A love controlled by reason was always dear to

the humanists' hearts, and Fletcher in this play definitely

sides with them on this issue. He expresses the same

286

belief that Sidney, Greville, and Lyly did before him; only
he does not share their deep commitment to this ideal. His
attitude is more a pose than a reasoned position. Further-
more, having Orpheus destroy his own beliefs demonstrates
that Fletcher did not have a deep understanding of Neopla-
tonism. He picked up all the surface characteristics, but
the essential doctrine escaped him.

The second device is intended to have the same effect
as a plunge into icy water. A sudden and brutal glimpse
of reality should produce more permanent results than the
music, and it does. Memnon's associates bring the faithful
camp follower, Cloe, to him, telling him that she is the
princess, Calis. Memnon immediately sets sail on a
Petrarchan sea of rhetoric, but the stench from her body
sinks his ship. The odor from her body is so strong, that
he doubts if she can be the princess. When the whore
finally confesses that she is not the princess, Memnon
wanders away still possessed by the madness. His love-
madness made him look very foolish because he has a dif-
ficult time distinguishing between a whore and his true
love. His friends, however, brought her to him, hoping
that sexual activity would cure his madness. They believed
that all his statements were mere bombast and that beneath
the rhetoric they would find a rake devoted to the pleasures
of the flesh. But Memnon is really devoted to the ideals

of a pure and spiritual love, so his brother and his

287

friends have to resort to more drastic measures to return
him to sanity.

The one example of true love which contradicts this
cynical atmosphere is carefully concealed from the audience
until the last scene of the last act. Only then does the
audience realize that Polydor loves Calis as much as she
loves him. The audience was misled back in the fourth act
when Polydor refused the king's offer of marriage to Calis--
.not because Polydor does not love her, but because he
thought it would only increase his brother's sufferings.

Of course, the audience doesn't know this at the time.

In this same scene Polydor begins his own death and
revival, which will take him through phase two of the
biography of the courtly lover. When Polydor discovers
that the king knows that Memnon is still alive, he suddenly
gets sick and quickly retires to his rooms. Shortly
afterwards Stremnon announces that he has died by his own
hand. Then as the king is trying unsuccessfully to get
Calis to marry Memnon, Polydor's funeral procession inter-
rupts the proceedings. Calis and Memnon discover that he
is dead, and both listen in silence as Eumenides reads
Polydor's last words aloud. He writes that he died so
that Calis and Memnon could be happy together. The
enormity of his sacrifice impresses both of them deeply,
but it does not serve to bring them together. After

delivering a fulsome eulogy, Memnon declares that Polydor's

288

death has made him realize just how foolish his love has
been. He vows to throw all those "idle fancies" (V, i)
aside and follow Polydor to his place of eternal glory.
Calis likewise vows that she will shed tears over his grave
and mourn him forever. Since Polydor is her true love, at
this moment she becomes indistinguishable from Tasso's
Silvia, whose tears revived Aminta, and from Fletcher's
Clorin, whose constancy to her dead lover purified her
heart. Before she actually has to shed tears and before
Memnon has to kill himself, Polydor arises from his
coffin. Again the motif of death and revival does not
accomplish its stated purpose. Calis and Memnon do not
fall in love; they both decide to die. Unintentionally
the motif jolts Memnon out of his madness and thus leads
to the happy ending of the play.

In this tragicomedy the third phase of the biography
of the courtly lover, his reconciliation and union with
his beloved, which precedes his happiness and joy, is

reminiscent of the ending of Two Gentlemen of Verona. In

 

that play Valentine, even though he loves Silvia, in a
magnanimous gesture offers her to the repentant Proteus.
But before Proteus can either accept or refuse her, he is
distracted by the discovery of his own earlier love and
so never confronts the problem of accepting the offer of
his friend's mistress. Fletcher makes the happiness,

which constitutes the third phase in the career of the

289

courtly lover, depend upon the resolution of this same
situation. Usually happiness spontaneously floods the soul
of the reborn courtly lover. Here, however, it is delayed
as Fletcher's ingenuity develops a few unnecessary com-
plications. When Polydor awakens, Calis immediately knows
that the oracle which said that she would enjoy a dead
love has been fulfilled. Instead of participating in the
new joy by embracing him, she calmly says:

The Oracle is ended, noble Sir,

Dispose me now as you please.

(V, 1)

After obtaining the king's consent to marry her, and
exacting further assurances that she will obey his will,
Polydor hands her over to his brother. This gift impresses
the king and astounds Memnon, who asks what he can give in
return. Polydor replies that his love will suffice.
Memnon, not to be outdone, says that he will give his one
and only first love, Calis, to him. Then almost in chorus
they each insist that the other take her. The king leaves
the choice up to Calis, who really can't choose between
two such noble and virtuous men. At this point Memnon
decides that he can serve Calis best in combat against his
country's enemies. He calls for his armor and makes plans
to return to the battlefield, leaving Calis to his courtier
brother. His return to the wars satisfies all concerned;
so the play ends happily with the union of the true lovers

and Memnon's recovery of his sanity.

290

The subplots continue the parody of the Neoplatonic
conventions of true love. Syphax, who has also fallen in
love with Calis, is tricked into marrying the old whore,
Cloe. He thinks that the girl he is marrying is Calis,
but when he removes her veil after the marriage ceremony,
he discovers the truth. The trick had been arranged by
Chilax, an old soldier who occasionally beds with the
wanton priestess of the temple of Venus. Cloe was only
able to persuade Chilax to help her after she spent the
night with him in the temple. Syphax easily accepts the
outcome of the substitution because he has taken Cloe's
maidenhead years before. Thus Cloe and Syphax are happily
married, and his earlier professions of true love for
Calis dissolve into the air. These subplots illustrate
the cynical belief that the Neoplatonic profession of true
spiritual love only masked a deep amoral lust and con-
tradicts Memnon's earlier assertions of the possibility
of a virtuous and pure love. These subplots certainly
did no more than reflect the actual lack of morality at
Jame's court. The love and marriage of Cloe and Siphax,
for example has a close parallel in the relationship of
Venetia Stanley and Sir Kenelme Digby. Venetia was a
very expensive courtesan, whose beauty and fame attracted
many admirers. Aubrey tells us what happened when Digby

saw this divine creature:

291

Among other young sparkes of that time, Sir
Kenelme Digby grew acquainted with her, and fell so
much in love with her that he married her, much
against the good will of his mother; but he would
say that 'a wise man, and lusty, could make an
honest woman out of a brothell-house' . . . Once
a year the earle of Dorset invited her and Sir
Kenelme to dinner, where the earle would bghold
her with passion, and only kisse her hand.
It should be mentioned that she had at least one child by
Dorset before she married Digby. If Sir Kenelme believed
that sexual activity could reform a courtesan, then
perhaps Polydor's belief that the satisfaction of Memnon's
lust would cure his madness is not too far from the
thinking of the courtiers surrounding James. These
doings along with other similar affairs at court undoubtedly
produced the cynicism that could only see the basest
passions and vices behind the sincere avowal of the highest
moral ideals. It should come as no great surprise, then,
that the motif lost its meaning, since the ideals it
expressed were destroyed by the actual behavior of those
very people who often professed the ideals of divine loVe.
Yet all the Neoplatonic conventions were still used
by Fletcher in his plays. The motif of death and revival
appeared in all three phases of the life of the courtly

lover depicted by Fletcher, and he showed more than a

nodding acquaintance with the theory behind the conventions.

 

3A3 quoted in Philippe Erlanger, 'The Age of Courts
apd Kings:’ Manners and Morals, 1558-1715 (New York, 1970),
p. 150. Jack Lindsay wrote the sections on England.

 

 

292

Still the motif had no anagogical function in this play;

it was there merely to entertain the audience, which it

did through its power to surprise and to amuse. Because
two surprises are often better than one Fletcher frequently
repeats the motif within the same play. This only helps

to separate it from its meaning, transforming it into just
a mechanical device that can be plugged into the ending

of a play to reverse the course of the action. As we shall
see in his later tragicomedies, no matter how often he

used the motif it was always with a fresh ingenuity, so
that even if it performed the same function in the play

its appearance was always a novelty for the audience.

The Queen of Corinth (1617), written in the same

 

year as The Mad Lover in collaboration with Massinger and

 

Field,4 returns to the older native species of tragicomedy,

of which Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra is an excellent

 

example. The authors use the motif in three ingenious
ways in the course of the action, and in the final scene
it saves the Queen's son from death and promotes the
marriages which terminate the play.

The plot, which Waith believes derives from Seneca's

Controversiae, those hypothetical and inprobable cases

 

upon which the Roman orators honed their oratorical skills,5

 

4Waith, p. 135.

5Ibid., p. 137. He quotes the case in point on p. 89.

293

has the usual improbable twists and turns, which just

skirt the edges of catastrophe and melodrama. The Queen

of Corinth incurs the enmity of her only son by destroying
his intended marriage and showing more favor to a young
courtier than to him. Instead of confronting her, he
destroys the match by raping Merione, his proposed bride,
on the night before her wedding to Agenor, the man the
queen has chosen to be her husband. The discontented
Theanor tries to place the blame upon Euphanes, the Queen's
most recent favorite. Euphanes' own brother, another
malcontent called Crates, instigated the rape and continues
to help Theanor in his efforts to place the blame on
Euphanes. To add to Euphanes' woes, Theanor mentions to
Crates that he intends to rape Euphanes' intended bride,
the beautiful Beliza. Unbeknownst to Theanor, Crates

tells Euphanes of the impending rape, and he decides to
catch him in the act and bring him before the Queen. When
she learns of Theanor's crimes, she promises to enforce

the laws of Corinth, which require the death of the rapist.
Complications ensue because the two victims cannot agree

on a punishment. Merione wants to marry him, while Beliza
wants to see him dead. The contrite Theanor suggests that
he marry Merione and then be executed. Before this com-
promise can be acted upon, Crates comes forward to say that
Theanor really didn't rape Beliza. Merione took her place

and was raped a second time by Theanor. Thus Theanor does

294

not have to die and is free to marry the often ravished
Merione. Beliza, who all along knew that she wasn't raped,
marries Euphanes, the jewel of the Queen's court.

The whole plot turns upon the motif of death and
revival because it reveals the nature of Theanor's crimes
to Euphanes. The revelation consumes the last half of
the third scene of the fourth act. A loyal friend of
Euphanes, Conor, challenges Crates to a duel to avenge
the insults that Crates has inflicted upon Euphanes. Crates
is wounded in the first exchange of blows. As he lies
bleeding at Conor's feet, Euphanes and three other nobles
enter and notice them. The sight of the wounded Crates
awakens Euphanes' compassion." He asks forgiveness for
the years of neglect and says that from now on he will
help to support him as a good brother should. This offer
of friendship and aid touches Crates deeply, and he begins
to weep (something he hadn't done for thirty years). His
love for his brother revives with his loss of blood:

Most dear Euphanes, in this crimson floud
Wash my unkindness out: you have o'rcome me,
Taught me humanity and brotherhood;
(IV, iii)
Overcome by the joy that this unexpected reunion creates,
he tells Euphanes of Theanor's plot to rape Beliza. His
new-found love for his brother has also saved Beliza and,

because Euphanes is able to substitute Merione once he

has learned of the plan, it has saved Theanor as well.

295

The pattern of the scene comes directly from the
Italian tragicomedy, except that in this instance the
characters are both male. As when Silvia thinks that
Aminta is dead, or when Silvio realizes that he has shot
Dorinda with his arrow, the sight of the hated one dying
releases all the compassion locked in the heart of the other
and makes a reunion based on love possible. In this play
the reunion is more complicated because the brothers have
disliked each other, but when one confesses his love, then
the other's heart also opens to the revivifying force of
compassion and love. Once again Fletcher has given a new
twist to the old motif.

Unlike the earlier uses of the motif, the significance
of Crates' near death is limited to this one scene, which
is not the climax of the play. Prior to this scene the
brothers' arguments had not been mentioned, so there was
no need to present the reconciliation between the two. After
this scene the brother's new found love and respect is not
brought up again. The reconciliation is a needless justi-
fication for Crates' betrayel of Theanor and once it has
rationalized this development in the plot, it disappears
from the audience's awareness. When the motif has no
meaning for the characters involved, it will hardly be
able to do anything more than entertain the audience. This
it does very well if the audience refrains from inquiring

into the relevancy of the scene for the development of the

296

theme or the psychological natures of the characters. Many

of the scenes of The Queen of Corinth, such as this one,

 

have no connection other than plot with each other, and
those in the subplot lack even this rudimentary link with
the main action. Consequently the scenes are written for
the immediate pleasure to be derived from the situation
and intended to be forgotten after they end. The one just
described depicts the novel reconciliation of two brothers
through the near death and revival of one. The rhetoric
is in no way intended to mock the characters, and the
emotion it generates is still sincere even if a little
exaggerated. But once the emotion has been enjoyed, the
play moves on to other scenes, and everything that gave
rise to the emotional interest in this scene is neglected.
The other scenes in this play in which the motif of
death and revival appears are equally self-contained. The
discovery that Merione was raped follows the lines of a
death and revival. As the second act opens, she is bewail-
ing her misfortune. After a long and emotional declamation
on the loss of her virginity, she is put to sleep by a
group of maskers who sprinkle water in her face. They
carry her to her brother's house and leave her outside
on the doorstep. Her prospective bridegroom, Agenor,
and her brother discover the crumpled form on the door-
step and believe that some maid has fallen asleep there.

Other discovery scenes involving women who have fainted,

297

e.g., Pericles' discovery of Thaisa, Posthumus' of Imogen,
and Silvio's of Dorinda, have brought love, reunion, and
happiness to the two people. But in this scene the dis-
covery leads to just the opposite, to the abandonment of
the proposed marriage and to the sorrow that ensues. Just
as Agenor perceives that the sleeping woman is his mistress,
the Queen, her son, and their attendents arrive. The
revelation of Merione's condition becomes a public act.
Gradually with many questions and a great deal of self-
lacerating rhetoric, she tells the others what has happened
to her. Her rebirth on her brothers' doorstep has ended
in disaster rather than happiness. But once the scene
ends, all of her shame and sorrow are forgotten. In fact
in the last act, Theanor strongly suggests that they had
slept together before he raped her, so she was not the
virgin that she was pretending to be in this scene. I
don't think that Fletcher was being witty or cynical here.
It is just that for the dramatic purposes of this scene,
she should be a virgin, whereas in Theanor's scene it is
more convenient for him if she is not. Once the emotions
of the moment have dissipated, so has the purpose of the
motif of death and revival, whose only function is this
scene was to provide suspense and drama for her revelation.
Theanor's near death after his repentance is also
intended only to provide suspense and high drama at the

conclusion of the play. From the moment that his villainy

298

is discovered, Theanor's life begins to change for the
better. Once in jail, he sincerely repents his nefarious
actions and even refuses the guard's offer to free him
from his bonds. He feels that he is a ravisher and must
now suffer like one. His moral stature continues to
increase when, just before his death, he begs forgiveness
from those he has harmed.

His repentence transforms him from the scheming
malcontent characteristic of many Jacobean tragedies into
the honest and noble prince. Fletcher now wants the
audience to sympathize with Theanor. If they don't, then
the threat of his near death will not create any suspense,
and the scene will have failed. Theanor, once he is saved
from death by the disclosure of the substitution, is
allowed to marry Merione, his victim. The play ends
happily for all concerned including the audience, which
has had the pleasure of watching an aristocratic villain
metamorphosed into the noble prince who is worthy of his
birth. The motif of death and revival has indeed been
very entertaining--just as Guarini said that it should be.

The deaths and revivals in The Loyal Subject (1618)

 

are much more theatrical and grandiose than those in
Fletcher's previous tragicomedies, and, as if he wanted

to overwhelm the audience with sheer variety, he includes
all the different types of motif that are found in earlier

plays. The heavy emphasis on these two qualities ensures

299

that the audience will not be tempted to search for
significance in the action; instead they will allow them-
selves to be caught up in the sentiments of the play.
There is, however, the traditional contrast between the
corruption and the materialism of the court (represented
by the Duke and Boroskie) and the simplicity and innocence
of the country gentry (represented by Archas and his sons
and daughters); but Waith, who develops this contrast at
some length in his discussion, decides that Fletcher is
actually more interested in the variety and spectacle of
the presentation of these themes than he is in social
criticism.6 There was a large body of native literature
stemming from Spenser and Sidney which used the pastoral
virtues to criticize the court. Fletcher has just trans-
ferred these values from Arcadia to the country house;
consequently much of the satire belongs to the pastoral
tradition that flourished in an earlier age.

One of the minor uses of the motif also comes from
the pastoral tradition. Olympia, the sister of the Duke,
acquires a beautiful lady-in-waiting, named Alinda, who
is really Archas' (the loyal subject) son in disguise.
The princess is impressed by Alinda's courage and calm
when the Tartars threaten to destroy the court, and she
confesses that if she were a man she would fall in love

with her. Even so, this pure maiden does seem to be

 

6Waith, p. 143f.

300

unconsciously in love with Alinda because she becomes very
jealous when she thinks that Alinda is showing more favor
to her brother, the Duke, than to herself. In a fit of
anger, she sends Alinda away from the court. A few days
later a young man, who looks very much like Alinda and
professes to be her brother, arrives at court and asks
Olympia of Alinda's whereabouts. He begins by telling her
that Alinda has always admired Olympia's virtues and would
not think of being disloyal to her. After hearing this
testimony, Olympia repents her hasty dismissal of Alinda.
Olympia looks upon her as dead, which makes her that much
more sorrowful over her departure:
Alin. Is she dead, lady?
Olym. Dead, Sir, to my service.
She is gone, pray ye ask no further.
Alin. I obey Madam:
Gone? now must I Lament too: said
ye gone Madam?
Olym. Gone, gone for ever.
(v, ii)
Indeed Alinda has died, and when she returns, she appears
as the young Archas. The two lovers marry with the
permission of the Duke. The affair turns out better for
Olympia than she expected; she has lost a beloved servant
but gained a husband.
The "death" of Alinda, at once metaphorical and in
a sense real, forced Olympia to realize how much she
loved her. Her sincere guilt and sorrow, caused by Alinda's

disappearance, permit her to enjoy the happiness of

marriage to young Archas, who was once Alinda. Fletcher

301

borrows the device of the man disguised as a woman from
Sidney's pastoral romance, Arcadia. Of course, he ignores
Sidney's moral point about the effeminacy of the man who
is controlled by his passions. Fletcher's disguised man
is just as heroic as always even though his skirts make
its expression a little awkward. He combines the heroic
with the older tradition found in the pastoral tragicomedy;
again Silvia, Silvio, Mirtillo, or Daphne discover how much
they really love someone when they think that their loved
one has died. In this play all the interest centers on
the variation that Fletcher introduced into the motif
instead of on the plight of the lovers. His flirting with
the possibility of homosexuality adds a naughty touch that
would not be lost on the sophisticated audience.

Archas' much more dramatic near-death is a variation

on the motif found in Damon and Pythias. The conflict

 

between Archas, the loyal general, and the young Duke and
Boroskie, his favorite, constitutes the action of the
main plot. The young Duke has harbored a grudge against
Archas for several years and, guided by the malicious
advice of his favorite, seeks to humiliate him. Archas

is the only man in the kingdom with enough courage and
martial skill to defeat the Tartars, who threaten to
destroy the kingdom. When he retires from the wars, the
Duke refuses to pay him the honors due him for his life of

devoted service and lets him quietly retire to his country

 

 

l I... Illllli

Ill 1" I...Jll.(llll.

 

Ii ‘3‘!

302

house. Only when the Tartars are outside the city gates
and the other nobles have fled, does the Duke again turn
to Archas, who immediately heeds his sovereign's call to
arms. Boroskie fears that he will become too popular and
a threat to the Duke, so again the Duke does not reward
him for his deeds of courage. Under Boroskie's direction,
he begins to add insult to injury. They pay a visit to
his house where they discover the old Duke's wealth, which
he gave to Archas for safe keeping. The Duke appropriates
it for his own use and returns to the court. Before he
leaves, he requests that Archas send his two daughters,
Honora and Viola, to serve at court. Their father immedi-
ately complies even though it means sending his virtuous
daughters into the immoral and degrading atmosphere of

the court.

Once these two nobles return to court, they plan a
final humiliation for him. Inviting him to a banquet held
in his honor, they dramatically inform him that he is to
die by giving him the cloak of death. The Duke and Boroskie
contend that he forgot to purify the holy arms of war after
he used them against the Tartar. For this breach of
custom, he must die. They have finally exhausted Archas'
patience, and this last piece of treachery releases a
torrent of rhetoric, but to no avail; Boroskie still leads

him away.

303

At this point the audience begins to see that the
Duke is not really the villain that he appeared to be
earlier in the play, but it takes Archas' near death to
show just how noble he actually is. Boroskie has had Archas
whipped, which is more than the Duke wanted him to do.
After some gentlemen plead with the Duke to stop the
torture, he orders Boroskie put under guard until he can
think of a death for him. At this same moment Archas'
loyal troops, who have heard about his capture, are threat-
ening to burn down the palace if the Duke does not produce
him alive and well. Archas suddenly appears on a balcony
and commands the troops to desist. He tells them that the
only honorable course for them is to remain loyal to their
Duke. His revival after this final test also has a deep
impression on the Duke:

Forget me in these wrongs, most noble Archas.
(IV, V)

With a show of magnanimity, Archas accepts the Duke's
repentance and proceeds to deliver a long lecture on the
necessity of absolute obedience. This speech elicits
unbounded admiration from the Duke:
Bring him to rest, and let our cares wait on him;
Thou excellent old man, thou top of honour,
Where Justice, and Obedience only build,
Thou stock of Vertue, how am I bound to love thee!
In all thy noble ways to follow thee!
(IV, v)

The Duke has completely reversed himself, ending the scene

on this witty conceit. Archas, by showing that he is the

304

ideal of obedience, is worthy of having his sovereign
follow him.

In this scene Archas resembles Damon and Pythias
and Dorothea, whose near deaths also reversed the emotions
of a tyrant. In each case the willingness to undergo the
trial of death changed hate into love and justice into
mercy. Fletcher's scene is by far the most theatrical.
Archas' bloody appearance, the angry troops brandishing
torches in the courtyard below, and the frightened nobles
huddled against a wall make an impressive scene that
fills the stage with spectacle and noise. The villain is
punished, the honest and righteous general is vindicated,
and the Duke is humbled. On top of this the audience is
treated to a moral on obedience, which is delivered in a
very impressive manner. This is all very nicely done.
But the play is not over; this is only the fourth act.
Fletcher still has a few more variations of the motif that
he would like to display before he ends the action. Also
the moral, which was so nicely developed in the fourth
act, gets lost in the sudden turns of the plot in the fifth
and never does appear again. In the last act we are treated
to variety and spectacle for its own sake.

The trouble in the fifth act starts when Theodore,
Archas' son, refuses to obey his fathers' request for
obedience to the Duke. Still smarting from the humiliation

of his father's whipping, Theodore leads a group of rebel

305

soldiers against the palace. Archas assumes command of
the loyalists and leads them into battle. When the two
armies meet, the rebels surrender to the superior force.
Archas, who had earlier sworn to have his son's head
because of his disobedience, now proceeds to carry out
his threat. In front of all concerned, Archas prepares
to behead his son with his sword. Before he can, Theodore
begs forgiveness and mercy from his father. This plea
touches Archas, but he strengthens his resolve and raises
his sword. Before he can swing his weapon, Archas' brother
appears on stage with his other son (alias Alinda) and
threatens to kill him if he kills Theodore. Faced with
the prospect of losing both his heirs, Archas allows
Theodore to live and welcomes the young Archas with open
arms. Instead of his mistress, or a revelation saving
Theodore from death, Fletcher cleverly invents a situation
where another near death saves him. Young Archas' sudden
appearence amounts to the rebirth of Alinda, which the
Duke calls "a strange metamorphosis" (V, vi). Now Olympia
will be able to wed him, and as a consolation the Duke
gets Honora, and Burris, a loyal follower of Archas, weds
Viola.

But there is still another near death. Boroskie
returns on stage, and the Duke gives him to Archas to do
with him what he wants. Archas quickly decides to decapi-

tate him. Boroskie likewise repents before the sword can

306

strike, saying that death at Archas' hands is a much
nobler fate than he deserves. When Archas hears this, he
tells him to stand up and live; he doesn't want to take
men's lives. Archas, in a complete reversal, says that
he will make an excellent courtier; so he gives him back
to the Duke, who gladly takes him. Thus the play ends
happily for everyone concerned.

In this play Fletcher shows us how the repeated use
of the motif of death and revival can destroy the moral
sense of the work. Loyalty and honor are supposed to be
moral absolutes, and the inflexible old Archas is supposed
to show us how these virtues survive every circumstance
that would justify the appearance of their opposites. But
when he allows his disloyal son and the disloyal courtier
to live just because they have repented, he nullifies the
purpose of his own sufferings. As Guarini mentioned in
his theory of tragicomedy, poetic justice is not as
important as the pleasure of the audience; consequently,
the more the motif is used, the more frequently the
sentiments of the audience will be reached and the more
they will enjoy the play. When the motif is combined with
spectacle and variety, it provides an audience with an
evening of pleasure without the intellectual strain of
reasoning about the moral subtilties of the plot.

The last play to be examined in this chapter, 2mg

Laws of Candy, can attribute its failure to this same

 

307

concern for the pleasure of the audience. By the time
Fletcher and his collaborators (Massinger and Field)7
wrote this play in 1617 they had already begun to tire
of the heroic tragicomedy. The often repeated plot reduced
itself in their minds to the barest mechanical outline,
covered only by an almost threadbare rhetoric and only
momentarily saved from boredom in the last act by the
strained ingenuity of the motif of death and revival.
This play amply demonstrates that the artistic quality
diminishes when the audience's pleasure is the sole pur-
pose for its composition.

This play's larger structure is a combination of
two conventions that have appeared before in tragicomedies.

Guarini's Il Pastor Fido brought the threat of death to

 

the young lovers with the inexorable inforcement of a
bizarre law, the breaking of which resulted in death.
Candy, or Crete, has two laws even more absurd than
Guarini's, which place the spectre of death above the
heads of the characters. The first law says that where
an act of ingratitude has been committed, the offended
can, if he so wishes, require the death of the offender.
The second law states that the worthiest soldier in a
battle, as determined by the approval of the people, may

set the terms of his reward. This second law causes the

 

7Waith, p. 135.

308

friction between the two main characters of the play and
leads to the use of the other law.

The other convention requires that the union of the
young lovers helps to reconcile the conflicts centered
upon the king. All four of Shakespeare's romances make
this convention an essential part of the plot. We have
discussed above just how Florizel and Perdita aid Leontes'
recovery and how Ferdinand and Miranda make Prospero's

desires come true. In The LaWs of Candy also there is a

 

pair of true lovers, but Fletcher has to provide his

usual ingenious variation, which, in this case at least,
destroys the effectiveness of the convention. A proud
princess, named Erota, falls in love with Antinous, the

son of a famous general, Cassilanes. In order to pay

his troops, Cassilanes, has borrowed money from Gonzalo,

an ambitious lord from Venice. Gonzalo uses this hold

over Cassilanes to humiliate and degrade the noble general.
Antinous, testing the depth of Erota's professed love for
him, asks her to pay off the general's debts, which she
does without a complaint. Her passing of the test entitles
her to the love and devotion of Antinous, and at this point
in the fifth act the audience would assume that true love
has again prevented the destruction of a worthy man. But
suddenly Erota refuses the love of Antinous. She thanks
him for humbling her pride with the test, but she does not

think that he would make a good husband. He doesn't

309

worship women enough. She prefers Philander, a prince
from Cyprus. In his only appearance on stage before being
selected by Erota, Philander had proven himself to be a
genuine courtly lover, who looked upon her as his liege-
lady. He had proclaimed his love in a long and fulsome
speech complete with a detailed description, or blazon, of
her divine perfections and a confession of his own unworthi-
ness. The whole speech was capped by his threatened death
if she did not ease his pains of love. In short, he
resembles the mad lover. When he first appeared, the
audience probably laughed at the anachronistic postures
and the trite rhetoric, but now the joke is on them. Erota
prefers this idealistic lover to the more level headed
Antinous because he worships women more. She thinks that
this kind makes the better husband. If Erota had lived
in the late middle ages, she would have chosen him because
he would not make a good husband. True love then could
only be adulterous. Fletcher has reversed the traditional
pattern merely for the sake of variety. This turn of
events, however, happens so quickly that there is no
emotional involvement with the lovers; consequently the
ending does not seem right, and the audience is left with
the distasteful sensation of having been tricked.

The motif of death and revival suffers from the
same egregious manipulation which panders to the audience's

appetite for variety and novelty. No hint of its

310

applicability occurs before the closing scenes of the

last act; but once it is introduced, Fletcher repeats

it so frequently that it threatens to become a parody of
itself. The difficulties of the plot which culminate in
the threatened deaths center on Cassilanes and his son,
Antinous. Both have exercised great valor in the recent
war and the populace has had a difficult time deciding
who was the bravest. It has finally decided that Antinous
was the noblest, and he immediately proclaimes that a
statue be erected to the glory and nobility of his father.
Cassilanes, who is a proud old warrior with many years of
devoted service to his credit, takes this as an insult
from his son and immediately retreats to his country house
to sulk. There he stays, grumbling about his son's dis-
respect, until finally he learns about Erota paying off
his debt. Antinous has intended it as a good deed; his
father, however, is outraged because he feels that he is
now in a woman's debt. This final humiliation is too much
to bear, so he goes before the senate and demands the
death of his son for his lack of gratitude. Antinous
concurs with his father, saying that he is guilty and
deserves to die. The senate then says that he must die.
At this moment Erota speaks up. Angered by Cassilanes'
hatred of his own son, she accuses him of ingratitude and
demands that he die also. Antinous, who doesn't like to

see his father abused, in turn accuses her of the same

311

crime. She also pleads guilty; so it appears that all of
the characters will have to forfeit their lives.

Three threatened deaths would certainly seem to be
enough to excite the audience. Fletcher doesn't think so,
however, and introduces one more variation. Annophel,
the daughter of Cassilanes, enters the scene and accuses
the entire senate of ingratitude. She pleads that they
recognize her father's bravery. The senate asks her for
mercy, saying that she will destroy the country if she
persists in her law suit. The threatened destruction of
Candy opens Cassilanes' eyes to his own folly. He forgives
his son, which removes the sentence of death from his
head. Antinous forgives Erota, who in turn forgives
Cassilanes. Finally Annophel forgives the senate. The
play ends happily for all with the possible exception of
Antinous. He thought that he was going to marry Erota,
but she brushes him aside for Philander. Antinous only
has his father's love and forgiveness to comfort him as
the play ends.

Fletcher can't even justify his excessive use of
the motif by saying that he was ridiculing the convention.
There is no indication that he had anything of the sort
in mind. In fact, the happiness of the courtly lovers
would prove just the opposite, namely, that the convention
was used seriously here. Fletcher has just ceased to be

troubled by any meaning that the motif once had. It is

312

merely a device upon which he can exercise his ingenuity.
From a rich symbol suggestive of esoteric truths it has
degenerated to an almost mechanically applied convention
which brings the characters close to death and yet allows
them to live happily ever after. The importance of the
motif has diminished so much that it cannot even be con-
sidered a parody or burlesque of its appearances in the
earlier humanistic and Neoplatonic plays. These tragi-
comedies of Fletcher signal the end of a tradition that
began in the romances of the High Middle Ages and continued
with many alterations into the late Renaissance, some four

hundred years later.

CONCLUS ION

The great popularity of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays
ensured the survival of the motif of death and revival as
a novelty in the plot until the middle of the eighteenth
century. By this time it had lost all connection with
serious artistic work, becoming instead, in an even more
reduced form, the staple of the sentimental melodrama. Its
origins and ensuing development, however, were not as humble
as its final appearances. Gottfried had used the motif to
symbolize his quasi-mystical doctrine of true love, and
had bequeathed it to the poets of the early Renaissance

known as the Stilnovisti in the image of the liege-lady

 

awakening her dying knight and in his chief stylistic
ornament, the oxymoron. These poets used it to express
their belief that true love was an adventure of the soul
which entailed the death of the senses and a complete
turning away from things of the flesh. At this same time
Boccaccio combined this doctrine with the classical pas-
toral eclogue. The Neoplatonists, who flourished in the
next century, borrowed both the pastoral and the image

and refashioned them to symbolize the essential mystery of
their school, i.e., the upward journey of the soul towards

the source of divine truth, beauty, and goodness and its

313

314

ecstatic union and rebirth in the Celestial Venus. One of
the members of the Academy, Politian, added the Ovidian
mythology to the other two elements and adapted all three
to the stage. Tasso's Aminta perfected the form of the
pastoral tragicomedy which in a rite of art symbolized the
Neoplatonic mystery of the death of the soul in the physi-
cal world and its rebirth into the spiritual realm of
divine love. Finally, Guarini used the conventions
developed by the others to construct a play whose sole
purpose was to entertain the audience.

These three playwrights had a profound influence
upon tragicomedy in England. Prior to John Lyly, the
first playwright to adapt the Italian conventions to the
English stage, the motif was used by the humanists to
reveal the moral lessons of their plays. John Lyly approached
the pastoral tragicomedy from the same humanistic viewpoint
which asserted that the passions should always be controlled
by reason; consequently he ridiculed those who believed
that love was a divine madness superior to reason. Shake-
speare inherited the conventions from Lyly, but he managed
to transcend them altogether. In his early pastoral tragi-
comedies he shows a familiarity with and a sympathy in the
Neoplatonic doctrines that were so popular in Italy. In
his last romances he goes beyond the rite of art depicted
in the earlier pastoral tragicomedies and uses the conven-

tions to make inquiries into the nature of the world.

315

"Great creating nature" contains all the opposites, being
both preserver and destroyer, both good and evil. Man, as
a product of nature, must experience both of the aspects

of nature before he can consider himself perfect, complete,
and worthy of kingship. Shakespeare is the only English
playwright to believe seriously in the Neoplatonic mysteries
symbolized by the motif of death and revival. Those coming
after him used the conventions without regard to their
meaning. Samuel Daniel, in his two pastoral tragicomedies,
invents a didactic purpose for the motif, hoping to educate
the audience in the evils of contemporary society. While
retaining the basic image of the dying knight being
revivified by his liege-lady, he neglects the coincidence
of opposites and the oxymoron, two essential aspects of

the motif. John Fletcher, imitating Guarini, reduces the
motif to a mechanical device that entertained the audience.
The motif appears in all of his tragicomedies, and he

never fails to provide ingenious new variations for the
pleasure of those watching the action. From the symbol

of a Neoplatonic mystery the motif has degenerated to
nothing more than a dramatic convention which first
presents the threat of death and then removes it, so that

the play will end on a note of happiness and joy.

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HIGRN STATE UNIV.

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